Yeah, I kept the difficulty down just to be safe, (you can get bad ratings if your game is too hard...) but I'm glad you tried the hard mode. If you need more challenges, try to finish the game with no deaths. The death counter is there to entice people that found the game easy ;)
It really feels good when a bullet flies between two ships, right? :P No idea what I could do about it though.
Not sure what I could add to the companion mechanic. At some point during development, I thought of fusing two ships together with some powerup, but then you would have more offensive power with no drawbacks.
My first addition to a post-jam version would be to add some resistant enemies to prevent the game from getting too easy when you have too many ships and enemies just die before entering the screen. Then having too many ships will become a problem, since it would get hard to avoid enemies and bullets with all of them.
Thanks for the feedback! :)