Hmm yeah the movement thing makes sense, just difficult when I'm already trying to stuff so much data via audio that putting in a "Is moving noise" felt unhelpful, but adding in information about your movements based on which quadrant you are in would help give a feeling of movement/speed to player that you feel is missing and give important info. Could also modify the sound of the boss as they move around terrain! So you could quickly figure out "oh I'm on metal, they are on wood, so they are diagonally across from me and moving in pattern (x) because they were on gravel a second ago"
Yeah I wouldn't really be able to do "walls" of bullets if I did that, it'd become pretty solid sound of "There are bullets!" for a bullet hell. Despite how hard it is currently, if you could see the amount of bullets they are putting out you'd think this was a pretty sad bullet hell with how few bullets there are. While I could do "dodge one bullet at a time" that's pretty common for audio games and was hoping to go more bullet hell. "Figure out what pitch means collision/on target" is a game I've played in far too many audio jam games and not always a huge fan of! I've yet to find one with more than 3 enemies/bullets at once not be audio mush with it being really hard to tell which one is actually closest/lined up (But granted, I am no blind gamer, so perhaps its just experience)
I could combine the ideas though! Have it be that a bullet audio is significantly different if it is on direct collision course, but it still be directional, but all bullets could have audio. So that way if a bullet is coming directly at you from the right and is on a collision course, you'll hear it in your right ear (instead of in stereo currently), but if you go down below it it'll get a very different sound, but still audible, but be higher pitched, then lower pitch if you are above it. Same if it's coming directly below you, it'll be lower pitched.
I think I like that as that would actually allow you to be like "Okay, I know a bullet is coming from my right that will collide with me because I hear the alarm in my right ear, and I hear high pitch tones as well from the right, meaning that bullets are above me and to to the right and if I don't move I'll get hit, so I need to go down and to the left"
Thank you for feedback! It's always a struggle to balance audio games for me since I have so much more info than anyone else. So figuring out what is actually fair and feels good is always hard. It's part of why I've moved more into turn based stuff for most of my other accessible projects, but I really wanted to try something new for this jam and try to lab out how a different genre would work.
So I really appreciate not only your initial feedback, but expanding on it when I asked follow up questions! Most folks won't leave a nearly as in depth comment as your first, so elaborating your perspective after I expressed my perspective/goals of those mechanics is super appreciated! I do think I'll make some changes to try and implement these!