When the player gets hit there's like a 10 frame long hitstop, alongside a huge vignette, a lowpass filter, a decently loud sound effect, screen distortion etc. Not sure how else would I make it more obvious for getting hit.
When the player hits the boss, there's a ~3 frame hitstop, a sound effect, decently visible spark/explosion particles and the UI pulses, indicating you dealt damage. Again, not sure how I would make it EVEN MORE obvious.
For the cluttered screen thing, 3rd person would make aiming hell but ok, top down is not really an option for 3D, and I don't want to make 2D. I raised the FOV to 90 to make the arena more visible and less disorienting, not sure which part you say is cluttered in a bullethell game.
Terraria calls their swords swords even tho they shoot projectiles, so why can't I do it? What name would you give it then?
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Sorry if you took my comment the wrong way, though it sounded mostly negative, there was a lot of good things in the game, I just find it easier to tell people about feedback than other stuff,
I'm not sure how the hit indicators weren't more obvious to us, though my friend who played the game shared my original thoughts on this, though we might just both be stupid.
Wanting to keep the game first person makes sense. I think our main issue was not clearly being able to see if we were a spot that would be attacked without looking down the whole time. This point may be a skill issue, but also seems like something that could be implemented somehow. Not sure exactly how.
Edit: See Risk of Rain 2 for third person aiming, it does work.
Didn't say you can't call it a sword, but it seems like other people have also been confused about it being called a sword. You also see the projectile in Terraria due to the 2Dness of the game, whereas in this it looked more like melee particles to me. If there was somewhere stating it shot a projectile, calling it a sword would be fine. Name ideas I thought of while typing this are: Projectile sword, short ranged attack, something gun. They're not great names, but I also only spent about 15 seconds thinking of them.