Fun game! Loved being able to customize my machine periodically, and the gameplay was fun, albeit easy (but that’s better for a jam game, honestly, since there’s so many games to play and rate…). Ah, the menus were a bit janky sometimes, though, but never to the point of great frustration.
In the second iteration, liked using the gun as a sort of sonar to track down fish, by listening for a hit confirm sound. Thought that was cool. Switching to side scrolling platformer for one level was also very nice! A good change of pace in the middle of the game, which made sense thematically as well. Oh, and the sound effects and such for consuming fish in the ocean levels were very satisfying.
I do think it might’ve been cooler had the machine not undergone slightly less radical design changes each iteration. Because of its radical design shifts, and the fact that your upgrade choices from previous iterations doesn’t seem to affect those later on, it felt a bit like we were simply controlling a new machine each level, rather than building on a machine that’s gradually growing larger. Of course, with the size leaps involved it does make sense for the machine’s design to change radically, but for some of its old self to remain would have been cool, I felt.
Now, this is a bit of a tangent now, but I’m now thinking about how cool it would’ve been if, in its first few iterations, the machine had some key weakness, that in its later iterations would become difficult to exploit, only for it to be the machine’s unexpected downfall right before it was able to wipe out the last of the universe… Sorry, I just had to put that out there.
Anyway, overall great game! Had fun playing. As others have said, great gameplay, and the sound design was also fantastic as well! Good job!