Really cool game, it's a nice, challenging, skill-based game.
The difficulty seems to immediately spike after a few levels, making the game extremely hard especially with the tougher enemies spawning in groups. It gets very hard, which is something that I like about this game. It supposed to be difficult, but it is still manageable. It's great to see a game that is difficult while still being somewhat fair to the player, this is hard to do and implement into a game so I think you did a good job on that.
I didn't really encounter any bugs but I did encounter this issue in the game:
- Camera - The camera feels quite clumsy when dashing around and when moving towards and away from the corners, it's very disorienting. Maybe a few adjustments to the way on how the camera moves might help with this.
Some suggestions I have:
- Dash Cooldown - I think that the dash cooldown should be a little bit longer, like around 1 - 2 seconds. That way the player would use the dash to dodge instead of using it to run away (players can easily spam dash to escape to a safe corner). There could also be an option to upgrade it to reduce the cooldown if you want to apply this. Of course this would increase the difficulty of the game.
- More arrows - Maybe there could be more options to get arrows instead of just buying them, like a 10% chance for one arrow to drop from archer enemies. Buying arrows will still be the main source of arrows, but it would be nice for a possible alternate source for arrows. So the player will be slightly rewarded for taking risks and killing archers using melee to conserve arrows.
- Enemy damage - I don't know how much damage shurikens do, I'm guessing it's does around 2 or more damage since it instantly kills me when I have 2 hp. I think this is a feature, so I didn't consider it as a bug. I think there should be a little hint on so much damage certain enemies do, something subtle like markings on their clothing or something similar that would match the aesthetic of the game.
- HP vs Life - These two work very similar to each other, I think there should be a bigger difference between them. I thought that HP upgrades would mean that I would start with 2 hp per wave but apparently that's not the case. So HP and Life works pretty much the same way except that life restarts the wave I think (I could be wrong, also I didn't check if it would restore my HP back to my upgraded amount). I think these mechanics can somehow be combined if they work similarly.
- Journal/Almanac - I think it would be cool to have a page to view information about the enemy like how many hits it takes to kill them, how much damage they do, what weapons they use, and how many the player has killed throughout their playthroughs. This is something that isn't really necessary but would be a nice thing to have.
I really enjoyed this. I was using incognito and reloaded the game a few times so my name seems to appear on the leaderboard multiple times instead of appearing once (whoops, my bad sorry). I might come back to try to beat my score of 122.