I really like this game, I love the crunch and the juice and the feel, good simplicity ... maybe I would like to be able to control when I fire but I do like that it's so rythmic. however as far as I can tell it seems like there is no failure state? I believe our game has a similar issue in that you can just let it run, die, get upgrades, then become really strong and make the game trivial. In hindsight something we did to combat that was even with upgrades the game is challenging, but with the simplicity of what you have that is kind of tricky. Does your game restart over and over? If so I'd suggest that it should end after x deaths you fail entirely and need to restart (so that they actually have a reason to avoid death and thus to avoid upgrades as well/some decision making trade-off strategic thinking). Failure is progress or not, there still needs to be a fail state and a success state :P
I may have just not played the game enough to see that you do die finally in the end if you die too many times though. If so, disregard most of my points haha
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You're right, the closest thing to a failure state is just never being able to reach the victory state, which there is. I thought that this would be a good game jam to experiment with that sort of thing (because of the "let's mess with the concepts of winning and losing" subtheme), but I think my approach was more lazy than it was original. Like you said, there's really nothing stopping the player from intentionally dying until they get to the strongest point and then try to win the game from there, especially because of how hard it would be to win the game the first time around.
Thanks for playing and thanks for your feedback! It means a lot to me :). I loved the voice acting in your game!