Thanks for the very detailed review!
To respond to your criticisms:
- I thought a lot about balancing the difficulty of the boss, and it turns out that some people thought it was too easy and some people thought it was too hard. I think one suggestion I could try to implement is to have the parts of the boss that are about to attack change color/shade so you'll know it's coming.
- The map being empty: Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to do everything I wanted. My ambition was to turn the whole torus map into a closed ecosystem. So the bugs you saw were lining up in front of you because they were collecting plants for their nest (which is further down in the map). I also planned on having some predators that ate the bugs, with the boss being at the top of the food chain. If I was able to do all of that, perhaps the map would've felt more like a loop.
- I will also think about whether there's any features that I can put on a torus map that would yield to different gameplay than a square map.
I will continue to work on this game though (I intend for this to be a long term project). You can consider the jam entry to be a very small teaser :)