The core mechanic of linking with the enemy and having to keep it alive is a very cool spin on the theme! It is very creative, especially because it comes with a interesting tradeoff rather than being purely or mostly beneficial towards the player unlike other GMTK game jam games I played with similar mechanics. However, the player's jump feels a bit sluggish and weird, and its cooldown inconsistent, even when spamming the space key. Speaking of spamming the space key, I find that to get very far into a run without being very lucky I need to exploit the AI. One way you can do this by propping up yourself against the corner of the map and spam jump while shooting at the enemies. You really can't go far by playing the game "normally" because how the AI acts is very RNG based and if you get hit or not is really dependent more on the AI than your dodging. (Unless you exploit the AI, but even exploiting won't work 100% of the time because the AI is very random). And as far as I can tell the game doesn't really get harder as time goes on. The visuals and sound do what they need to do and communicates information effectively to the player, although the bullets could be a little bit louder, have hitting the enemy make a sound, and make the music longer or more varied because it gets tiring after a few minutes. Overall, this game is a very unique take on the theme and stands out for the core mechanic both that helps and hinders the players rather than just being a straight benefit and gives the player an interesting choice to make every time an enemy reaches critical health, forcing them to think and access the situation on the fly.
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hey! thank you for the thorough feedback! yeah I fully understand what you mean - this was literally my first time making an AI for a 2d platformer and it's by no means perfect. I had to rush/hack a lot of behavior and sprinkle in a fair amount of randomness because of the time constraint.
To be fair though, It's not completely random - it has some basic set behaviors that it cycles through on a periodic basis, only that it does so in some ways that (aim to) don't make it feel too "scripted", for lack of a better term. Though I'd definitely make it very different under normal circumstances - and yeah, we also missed a lot of details like telegraphing, giving some sort of hit feedback and such, but we chose to skip that and go for more general polish instead, we were mostly concerned with the idea and the presentation than pure balance.
And yes you're correct, we didn't add scaling difficulty because we really didn't think it was worth it for the time constraint - the game is hard enough as it is (unless you exploit the AI, which is a thing, but it's a boring way to play anyways, so we didn't bother too much about fixing it), but that's something we're currently looking into adding in the final game.
Though I don't get what you mean by jump cooldown? It doesn't have a cooldown, maybe it's the fact that I didn't add a buffer to it so you can buffer the jump right before landing, or maybe you're just getting stunned by enemy bullets? because that's a thing too (at least for this version)
Anyways, we really appreciate detailed feedback like this - we're gathering as much of it as possible for the next steps. Thank you!