Semi-on-the-fly remarks:
- I love how you hint at a whole story on the game page, it gives food for the imagination. :)
- The title screen says ‘2021’, but surely you meant 2022 — unless you really reused an older game. XD
- Nice retro music; which piece of software did you use?
- Ah, at the beginning, because the background is uniform, I thought I was only moving sideways in a fixed screen, and that I had to shoot the pink discs! Maybe adding some decoration on the ground would help as a visual cue for our relative position.
- I like the varied patterns; in particular, the hidden health bar behind the shield bar came as a good surprise!
- I think that sending you back to the previous pattern rather than the current one when you lose a fight is way too punishing and taxing!! I could not manage the pattern with the vertical holed bar, and had to go through the previous and even second-previous ones for several ones… until I gave up. ._.
Conclusion: the graphics are simple but efficient, although I think adding just some details to the ground would help readability (ie knowing where we are). The playability is fine (including, no evil QWERTY-only controls! XD Thank God for arrow keys), and both the sounds and UI (health/shield bars) make it clear what happens. I really enjoyed the fighting, although you want to reduce some boss health/shield, and in any case punish the player less for losing. I also liked the patterns themselves, although I think the global concept is not that original, as it comes down to a classic boss with a sequence of patterns; nevertheless, the originality may lie in the scenario. One of the aspects of the limitation may be the sending one phase back, but I think retrying the same one would have been fine with this respect too.
Now, I want to know the bottom of the story!! Pretty please? :)
(I am sure I could beat the holed vertical bar phase if I gave it some more tries, but this would (will?) take time and be a bit tiring, so, maybe after testing the other games! And I wonder how many phases there are…)
(By the way, just putting here that my game is pending until I get the submission form.)