Oh wow, big team!
Well I was intrigued to come play this because of your JSON leaderboards screenshot. 😅 Sadly it looks like it doesn't even work.
Oh so just read the previous comment about leaderboards being broken right now. Seems like a pretty weird system to only submit the score when you go to credits. Displaying them as raw JSON is pretty funny though.
The dual gameplay having to balance between catching and shooting was interesting and nice. Weirdly unique thing in "genre" like this, usually it's just either or.
Found the controls to be a bit clunky. Didn't have enough time to read the whole intro (on my first plays) so I just had to pretty much guess the controls and what to do. Didn't realize at that point that E/mouse could also swap and was just using ctrl which I found first. Control in combination with arrow keys does something on mac so it's not a great choice for a key and it was 100 times better when I refreshed and found out about using E.
There was this weird (I think visual only) delay when swapping between gun and catching. It really screwed me quite a few times as it didn't look like swap actually did anything so I tried to swap again and then went back to gun and failed to catch. I guess it was when trying to swap right after shooting that triggered it. The swap and catch could also use some more feedback on success, sound at least.
Everything didn't really quite look to the same polish level. The small UFO explosion effect was sweet but and it kinda made everything else look a bit bland in comparison. The player character was also missing walking animation while holding the gun which made it look stiff. The bullets too looked a bit off. Especially how they stopped and remained stationary for a few seconds after hit on the mothership fight at least.
Went for some more tries and looks like the scoring system is kinda busted. The optimal play is to just stay at first mothership and catch dogs infinitely. Going to further waves just increases the spawning speed it seems which in turn adds these impossible to catch moments yet the scoring remains the same.
It's also weird how the "ultimate fight" with big bad mothership is way easier than the small grunt ships. And unlike your descriptions, it looks like only catching cats increases your levels. Well, the upgrades didn't really seem that good anyway.
I did try playing "properly" too instead of just going with the safe scoring route. Obviously this is the intended and way more fun way to play. It's just that the scoring should be adjusted accordingly. Easy solution would be to multiply added score per catch with the wave number.
Anyways, that's about it, good job! 👍
edit: Also now looking at those screenshots, arbitrary number of dogs needed to fail? And the final score isn't fully up to date to what's shown on the top.