itch.io

I'd say you've got some good core gameplay here with trying to deal with the large number of enemies and weaving through them to get the power-ups. But I do think it would help to have more feedback about when things take damage though, like have some hit particles/hit sound when hitting the ghosts and some sound/on screen effect when the player takes damage as well. Aside from that, I also thought the gun was a bit static, it would be nice if there was some animation for reloading, or a kickback when you fire it. Either way, what you've got here is still good, nicely done.

Feels really good to play on controller. It feels satisfying to hit enemies because of the good visual and audio feedback, and aesthetically I'm a big fan of the look and feel of older games which I think your team have captured rather nicely. Overall I really like it, although I am curious what the function of the crouch was supposed to be as I never figured that out.

Unfortunately I haven't figured out exactly what is causing the bouncing. I will say that behind the scenes the player has a few platformer quality of life things like  variable jump height (tapping jump gives a small hop, holding jump gives a big jump), coyote time (small window of time after you leave the ground where you can still jump), and a jump buffer (pressing jump when you are not on the ground preserves that jump input for a short time and has you jump if you touch the ground while it's preserved). That said, I think the issue has to do with the jump buffer and/or how I'm getting jump press inputs because it is trying to jump whenever it touches the ground.

When it comes to the background images, I knew I wanted them to be big enough that the player would only be able to see a portion of it based on where they were on the stage. So if you were on the far left of the stage, you would only see the far left of the background and as you went right you would start seeing it move with you until you reached the right edge.
Originally, I thought to just take the backgrounds my artist gave and scale them up to fill the entire play area, but scaling them that much made it so big it was difficult tell what you were even looking at. So a much better solution that I ended up using in game was to have the background images scaled to be a little bigger than the lens of the camera, and have them follow the camera with an offset (parallax).

Sorry if it was unclear. When you defeat enemies, they drop "souls" which you spend to open those boxes (you can see how many souls you have in the top left). The boxes give you items that improve your character and make it easier to get around and/or fight enemies. The game was balanced around you getting at least a few items per stage rather than strictly focusing on the ship.

Neat idea and nice artwork. I did have a bug on some of the higher levels though where Pirouette started moving so fast they went out of bounds and it was impossible to lose.

Nicely done! I also went for a "Upgrade and Launch as far as you can" style of game, though I have to admit the art for your game looks a lot nicer. I thought the sounds were pleasant to listen to and it felt satisfying hearing a bunch of pickup sounds as you speed through a lot of collectibles. 

 I will say that the hang glider is a bit too powerful at staying airborne in my opinion. It made the first run where I got it last *way* longer than the previous runs, and I felt like the only reason that run stopped was cause I got tired of using it after a few minutes. 

Aside from that, I enjoyed the game. Good job!