Hi!
Geometry Wars is definitely a huge influence on Amazoom's gameplay (and the planned controller support will mimic that control set).
Gems can be picked up using the shield- but we've received a lot of feedback from people hinting that our pickup range for gems without the magnet is probably too small (it's 3 tiles from ship-center at the moment- a lot of people bonk the nose of their ship on stuff trying to get their center of mass closer to the gems).
The tutorial map is set up to introduce the player to basic navigation, and over the course of the rest of the missions in the first world map you're steadily introduced to different mechanics that help ease the burden of doing everything yourself.
Gunbuddies, autotargeting, autoshielding, and other stuff that unlocks as the game progresses delegate tedium to automation so you can focus on driving, dodging, and exploring- I'm glad that getting a chance to take one of the endgame ships for a spin did a decent job of breaking the ice on that haha
Right now, what we've poured most of our time and effort into as far as levels are concerned are procedurally generated maps for different themed areas. Story missions like the tutorial will have static maps with more areas to explore and lots of incentives to go looking for stuff. One of the big goals for this project is to make sure that there's some replayable elements for players to come back to if they decide to pick the game up again after a break, so we're fine-tuning the procedural bits first and then laying out the story missions. For now, story missions are mostly procgen placeholders with static values for cave length and enemy density.
Thanks for trying out the demo!
We discuss all the comments that show up on the AGDG demos- a lot of optional features like ship highlighting mid-level were added because of feedback. As more stuff gets polished up and finished off with the procedural cave generation and we get more time to focus on the story progression, I'm sure a lot of the stuff you mentioned here will get smoothed out before release.
Cheers ♥