The biggest thing I've heard from people is that the enemies should be bright easy to recognize colors, whereas the background can stay washed out and dark, to allow for easier vision. Originally the dodge wasn't as overpowered as it is, but we ran into issues trying to get it to cancel out shooting, and this was the best solution we could come up with on short notice.
As for the difficulty difference between having powerups and not, that was kind of the idea, although we did want to make it so you could go back and get powerups if you weren't happy with your powerup loadout, or explore different avenues, but uhhh.. Yeah time restraints ahahaha. Right now all you can do if you get a subpar loadout or lose your powerups too soon is die to the boss and restart, which sucks.
Thank you for the criticisms. They're necessary if we want to try to improve the game, my ego loves the words of praise, but the criticisms are what are really important with a project like this.
Viewing post in Bad Day on Majoris VIII jam comments
Yeah they should be bright but that's not the only thing, right now a lot of enemies aren't too much bigger than bullets or random debris, and the colors themselves don't stand out TOO much from the bg. During normal gameplay it's not a big issue but once you get a huge loadout and start seeing bullets ricocheting all over the place, or are focusing your eyes on boss attacks it can be very easy to miss enemies. I'm not sure there's a very clean solution to this besides maybe something sloppy looking like outlines/auras, or redoing enemy designs to make them bulkier so they're more clearly visible in the heat of the action. Nex Machina is probably a good reference since it's a very visually busy game that has no problems with visibility.
Regarding the loadouts, I'm spitballing but maybe make the player lose upgrades one at a time instead of all at once if the time limit runs out, while lowering the extra time gain from picking up extra upgrades? Potentially that could add more pressure & challenge forcing the player to be smarter about timing pickups, without being overly punishing. Being overpowered is cool, but I feel like it's good to make the player work to sustain that OP state a bit