Had a go, I liked it! Read you weren't planning on doing too much more on this game, but here's some feedback/questions anyway :

- Framerate drops pretty badly on occasion, especially during sequences where asteroids and rings spawn simultaneously - makes it kinda hard to play. In order to maintain a playable framerate it might be good to limit the amount of things being spawned. Impressive that it works at all though given the lua restriction, it looks great!
- The hitboxes you mention kinda threw me off, especially the boss pyramids I felt like I was hitting constantly but seemed to miss anyway. Glad it's already on your radar
- Might be good to make story lines skippable on return plays - I died to the boss due to the above issue and had to replay through the tutorial bits and story, mildly annoying

- Is there any more to the story after the first boss? I pressed continue after the boss and got into a massive ring/asteroid run, but the characters didn't say anything
- The upgrades appear to be persistent between runs? And not all upgrades list their upgraded level (max shield for instance). Though maybe I missed something?
- Screenshakes and explosion sounds seemed fairly random in terms of intensity, making the difference between hitting things and getting hit hard to tell (aside from the screenflash, but the heavy shakes still made me think I messed up lol). Would be good to have a clear gap in intensity for distinguishing hitting from getting hit I think

Anyway had a good time, you have my ballot for interest in more of this!

Thanks for playing! To address your points:

• Regarding the framerate, the best fix would be to switch the renderer to C. I need to do this with my main in-development game, so I might try it out here first to learn how to do it.

• Yeah my comment was mainly in relation to the boss pyramids. I’ll see if I can figure out what’s throwing them off.

• For the story, if you play Endless mode, the first stage is the exact same as Story mode (minus all the dialogue and waiting around). There is no story after the first boss; it serves as one long tutorial.

• Upgrades are persistent between stages. They reset once you die or quit the game. Full Heal and +MaxShield are infinite, hence why their levels aren’t mentioned.

• For screenshakes, the closer an object is when you destroy it, the larger the shake. It was to signify close calls, but probably doesn’t translate like I intended.

Thank you for this wonderful game. it is superbly realized. The soundtrack, graphics, and gameplay are excellent. I would have liked to have had scoring. Well done!