Wow, thank you for the super kind words!!
Especially about the AI, since that's what gave us the most heartache during the project, haha. There was a really bad bug on the second to last day that had us up until 4am on a discord call debugging where seemingly randomly, ALL of the letters would freeze in place and start spinning in circles firing in random directions endlessly (it'd even affect newly spawned enemies). A handful of hacks later, and you get the current solution that's in the game, which involves the C letters listlessly staring off into the distance for some reason. But whatever, we were just happy the game was playable :)
As for the map, you're totally right in that it was primarily a template blockout. Myself and the other programmer were more interested in making the shooting/scoring/AI systems the best they could be, so we didn't put that much time into map design. And yeah, the game's connection to the theme is admittedly pretty weak... we latched onto the notion that an echo was a copy of something early on, and figured we could pretty conveniently work that into whatever game we wanted to make, which ended up being a score attack arena shooter :)
Thank you again for the review!