Never played this before, so a lot of this will be stuff you've already heard. Hope some of it is useful at least. Initial impressions below:
- Gamefeel is great. You definitely understand how to juice up your shooting.
- Game's audio is quite low to start, but that's probably better than it immediately blasting your ears.
- When killing the little green dudes, I was spooked by the runes that fly towards you. Would be nice if they were somehow more distinct so people didn't mistake them for enemies.
- Render scale is a weird setting to include in a pixel-art game. Not sure if it's for performance or what.
- Art is great so far. I like the smaller sprite sizes. Not sure about the rixels on the runes etc. but I think only devs get annoyed at those. HUD is a bit of a weak spot for me. Could also use a 'dash' animation.
- Destructible environment is great. I love how you can dig with the shield gun, or blow holes in the wall with the rocket launcher.
- Mowing down enemies is extremely satisfying and surprisingly performant. Well done on the optimization front so far.
- It's hard to tell how much ammo I'm about to use when I reload at a glance.
- Really like the progression so far, being able to move freely around a map and then choose the next map to travel to. It's a massive improvement from vampire survivors, as there's significantly more player agency.
- Is there any reason *not* to level up immediately once you've gotten enough points? If there isn't, you should just auto-level the player. - After seeing the "rune interest rate" power, I can somewhat understand this, but I'm still not sure if it wouldn't just be better to auto-level.
- Music is pretty good, although it doesn't play very often.
Overall: The GAME is GOOD. I think this has a very large market, and even with this early version it's very addictive and enjoyable. Keep on it.