I really considered doing a western themed metroidvania myself, so its cool to see someone else make one.
- Good choice of music and sfx. Gunshot sound was great. I laughed the first time I heard it because it felt geniune to the nature of westerns.
- 2.5d was a really interesting choice, but I think it also requires a little more attention as a developer to make it feel/play natural. Risky choice, but it does give me a chance to provide feedback that may help if you try something like this again.
- The depth aspect felt off, and it affected a lot of elements from aiming and shooting where you intend to be aiming to jumps. It may have been harder for me too because I'm colorblind which made the levels harder to read.
- Theme-wise, if I hadn't looked at the game page, I wouldn't have been able to tell which themes you used and how they were interpreted. I can easily see this as just a time issue due to being a jam. From your page, it sounds like you knew what you wanted, but there just wasn't enough time.
- I really liked the gun ui, but if you decide to move forward with this entry for SMVM, I would definitely make the these changes to the gun:
- One click reload. I can tell you wanted the player to experience, but as a player I felt spamming the reload button was a little much.
- If you do the above, the UI would look even cooler if it added the bullets and give it an extra couple spins.
- In regards to giving players feedback, you covered your bases well. I knew when actions were occuring automatically. I really think its easy to not think about that and also make assumptions, but it is a very important aspect and one of the best pieces of advice I received when I first started. Its also important not to overwhelm the player with feedback. You didn't do this, but when you start considering giving feedback to a player, I think its easy to fall into this pit-trap.
- I love that you added gamepad support (as a Godot dev, this is a no-brainer due to how simple it is), but its important to remember that not all the gamepads are going to have the same button and labels. So during prompts for a specific button, the buttons weren't exactly the same for me. My entry is the first time I took that into consideration. I think it worked well and also helped keep me from adding "text-walls" that overwhelm the player.
- Due to how easy it is to export to different platforms in Godot and how people tend to play web-builds over downloading, I recommend making that a priority. With your game, I can see where it would be preferred to be downloaded, but its something to consider. And you might as well export for winows, linux, and OSX (i have issue with OSX so I haven't been exporting for it lately).
I feel like I'm forgetting an item or two, and most my feedback is aimed looking foward, but I enjoyed what you were able to submit. As a dev, I think I can tell what you really wanted to create and the experience you want the player to have, even in its current state, which is really good. Overall, I enjoyed your entry and since you're new to Godot and even went with Godot 4, I think you should be really proud of what you accomplished. Congrats!