Thanks for your kind words, i'm really glad you like the artwork it means a lot to me ^^
Honestly it is still hard and i just barely made it, but since i have done a few jams now and i'm more experienced with blender and gimp i can work a bit faster on things now, though i feel i'm still slow compared to the amount of work people can acheive O_o, what also helped is the fact that not making a game with a character that walks cuts down a lot of time consuming animation stuff :p
Really happy that you like the ships !
For the player, i wanted to have a diverse enough selection available but not too much as i had to have 2 color schemes to distinguish Players 1 and 2, i had a bunch of mixed inspirations for making these ranging from other games like R-type or Wing Commander, to movie references, mostly star wars, as i always like making any of my sci fi stuff in that "used future" blocky retro look :D
For the backgrounds i wanted to have them be as dynamic as i possibly could, so i went all out on the parallax in hopes that it would look good enough XD
the thing i had in mind to convey height and depth was to acheive a similar effect there was in Phalanx on Snes where the first stage has you gradually go down a cloud layer to reveal a huge city at the lowest level all seemlessly.
On the controller support, i always intend to have it whenever possible if my game hasn't any mouse input, and Godot makes that really easy to implement fortunately, while i agree that analog control would be better to navigate more precisely, i didn't put it here cause i wasn't sure how this would translate for people who couldn't play on controller, so i went d pad to keep the same experience for both type of players.
I tend to make games a bit on the easy side but here i might have made it too easy i can't argue with that ^^'
Sfx were hit and miss and i didn't have much time to adjust them, some turned out ok some turned out really bad like the laser, which fun fact, at first had such a low volume compared to the rest that it wasn't audible at all, so i boosted it and the final result was...
Expectations : Cool pewpew star wars ish laser sound,
Reality : sounds like someone is blowing air into an empty bottle XD
And lastly the shield was the result of past jam experiments with deflecting bullets mechanics, and here i decided to put it to use as a main element, inspired by a similar mechanic in Gigawing :)