Thank you for the compliments!! I'm thinking about expanding the game somehow, but in full honesty, I'm not totally sure where to take it. At a certain point, stuff would just get too chaotic, and more importantly, the upgrades that provide the controls -- which are the most important ones design-wise -- would get lost amongst any new upgrades I come up with that, most likely, wouldn't provide new controls. I'm honestly still chewing on it, well after release haha.

There's a few super minor QoL changes I have planned (e.g. making it so that the player can't accidentally skip the ending wanted poster if they happen to be pressing Z when they die) but I want to hold off on releasing any updates until the itch version gets its uploads unlocked, to keep the 2 pages in sync. One of the game jams this was submitted to is still having the judges look at the games, so I currently can't upload anything on the itch page.

The gold thing was sort of a mistake/oversight on my part. I wanted to give the character a lot of charm and thought "pirates love gold lol" without once thinking "I literally never give the player gold..." Maybe I could drop a gold coin on the player or something? Not sure yet lol

As for the crow's nest -- yup!! Sort of hard to telegraph though. Basically, every so often, a crow lands on it, and increases your hitbox by a pretty large margin (hence "bad luck"). The original plan was for there to be a few potential debuffs, like speed loss or increased spawn rates, and there'd be a bit of text going "Speed Down" or "Enemies Up" or something like that, but that ended up being too distracting amongst all the chaos on the screen so I cut it. For now, it's just the hitbox increase, I try getting the player's attention with a white flash on the hitbox when the crow lands, but admittedly I know that still isn't enough. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!!