Hi! Finally got to play the game! Beat it in 180 seconds first playthrough (with 30 deaths haha).
Your game gave me some really old-school DOSgame vibes, pretty neat for nostalgia reasons hehe. The gameplay was simple, but as a whole it was still engaging and made me want to keep on going! The short levels make retrying easy and make deaths feel a lot more forgiving so on the level design part that's a good call!
Some pros that I found in your game:
- The controls are very responsive, nothing more to be said there!
- The colour coding of enemies is a smart approach, especially one to keep in mind as you potentially build on this game.
- The difficulty curve in levels was very good!
- The design of the game was made done very straightforward and I'd like to believe not a single player will question what they're meant to do!
Now some things that I think might improve the game:
- A little polish such as a fade out/in screen upon new levels is a great touch that'll increase the perceived quality of a game by loads, without being too hard to implement.
- The hitboxes felt a little bit too tight (I think the hitboxes were exactly the size of the actual sprites?). Generally you'll want hitboxes to be sliiiightly smaller than the actual graphics (reaction time with the brain and whatnot) however, for the theme/style, this might actually be just fine as I believe most games back then had really strict hitboxes on their graphics.
- The level design, while good in difficulty curving, felt a bit random. A rule I tend to stick to, myself, is that I try to have every single block, obstacle, everything have a meaning in the level, in order to make a player do something, to guide them, or to challenge them.
Thank you for your submission and I'm looking forward to see what you come up with in future jams!