I think "experimental" is an interesting way to put it. Not like "artistically experimental" like I'm some kind of performance artist, but literally "this is the second code project I've ever made, and the first time I've ever bothered making art since years ago. Both in terms of what the player sees (the art, the UI, the game concept, etc) and what they don't (the actual code, the inheritance layout, etc), a lot of this is me experimenting with programming and art."

Pretty much everything you saw in this game was a new programming or creating experience for me. The explosions? I had to sit down, watch countless explosion animations over and over to figure out the art-logic, figure out a way to replicate these, figure out a way to get them properly aligned on a sprite sheet, figure out a way to smooth out this process (Draw in art program layer by layer -> export to Flash, arrange on frames -> export SWF -> SWF to PNG conversion). The enemy patterns? Picking up an AS3 bezier program, figuring out the fundamental code (how do I make the pattern stop once the enemy is dead? etc). Even something as basic as adding Kong/Newgrounds Badges and achievements was pretty new (I had achievements in Electrikill, the code system was a nightmare. It was really, really bad. This time? Vastly better.)

So yeah, if you want to know what was going on with this game, it's not "Hey, Victor thought this was a fantastic game - what was he thinking!?" It's more that this was a project that involved me trying to learn a lot of things - success, I've learned them! But by the time I sorted a lot of it out, the development time had taken too long, I felt like I had to wrap this up and call it "done" no matter what just to move on to the next project, etc.

So the good news - for me - is that working on and finishing this got me most of what I wanted: I learned a lot of things I wanted/needed to learn, the game was (in a programming and UI sense) vastly better than my previous, and the skills I learned here have made it vastly easier to produce better games, faster. The bad news is that my cutting development early resulted in a pretty 'meh' game, and I cut a lot of features I absolutely know would have made this game more fun because I just wanted it done.

About the only thing I'll stand by is the end-of-round comments. I thought some of those were fun! I mean, yes, they tend to play off the game's shortcomings, even the genre's shortcomings, but I like a little self-deprecating humor now and then.

Either way, thanks for the playing and the feedback! I mean that, it really is appreciated.