Thanks for your comment, glad that you liked my entry :D
yeah the enemies’s i frames when spawning is something of a compromise i had to make, i made so thtat they have some because if not, you could just blast them offscreen as soon as they spawned. But i came across a problem where, since i used multiple cameras for rendering the backdrops, they could trigger their hitbox multiple times or be counted multiple times “escaped” when leaving the screen which caused a whole lot of trouble like not triggering the boss and softlocking the game etc…
So i baked the moment where the hitbox activates into their spawn state to fix it, can’t argue it’s not ideal since this gives them quite long spawn protection but it’s the best i could figure out to avoid shenanigans ^^’
I like the idea of multiple characters to choose from in games even if it’s not necessarily changing the mechanics, so i’ve had character rosters like that in jam games any time i can, cause i feel it gives a bit more personality to see the pilot instead of having the player choose just the ship :p