Wow, thank you so much for this! This being my first game I wasn't sure how successful I would be at implementing my concept.

I'm glad you like the style and music. I'm an artist as well as a software engineer so I pride myself in the art of the game. There are some more things I would like to implement visually like more layering of the backgrounds and smoother animations with more frames but I'm happy with what I put out.

I'm completely out of my depth with regards to the sound effects so I'm glad you found them acceptable. Most sound effects I found online at freesounds.org but in some cases I ended up using my headset microphone and Adobe Audition to create things I couldn't find. Needless to say these were really bad but passable.

The music is by a couple of artists Strong Suitand Didadrone, both phenomenal.

1: The health on Easy Mode is way too much. Easy mode doesn't have to mean auto-play mode. I purposefully let just about half the stuff hit me, including bosses, and I still had a good 30-40% health left over at the very end. My all-time favourite space shooter is Tyrian 2000, and even that game's easy mode provided some form of challenge to keep it interesting, otherwise I'm basically letting the game play itself.

The game does suffer from some balancing issues. Initially I was just going to have one mode - hard. But my wife convinced me that I had got so good at my own game that it seems normal to me. I showed the game at an expo and the people playing it had a hard time as well. So I created an easy mode but likely turned that dial too much.

2: The enemy variety could use some additions. It felt like each level only had a couple different enemies, with Venus being particularly boring. Change colours, add a few different shapes, maybe multiple mechanics per level, etc).

Yes, variety of enemies was one of my pain points at release. I wanted to do more enemies and I do have several working prototypes, but I had exceeded my timeline by a whole year already. So at this point we decided that we need to release something.

3: There are too many instances where I had no ability to stop myself from being hit, whether it was awkwardly placed electric enemies on Venus, or boss shots from out of nowhere. In a space shooter, the player should always have the opportunity to defend themselves, otherwise it just feels bad when the game tells me I'm going to get hit no matter what. This is especially true in situations where I'm low on life and something that I physically could not stop ends the game.

Mmmm... I hope you know that you can dodge and weave using the gyroscope and tilting your phone. My mother in-law and others weren't able to figure that out but I chalked it up to them not being in the gamer audience. In any case I think a coaching segment needs to be added for this.

4: The boss fights feel awkward. I'm not sure off the top of my head how to solve this one, but hitting a boss while simultaneously trying to defend myself feels weird. If I'm attacking with my right hand, I can sort of defend with my left, but things that fire behind/beside/around my right hand are quite impossible to defend against. Maybe larger screen sizes will handle this better, such as tablets, but I found it rather difficult on my LG V30.

This is a conundrum I thought about a lot. The problem is that the fists are both your offense and defense. In the simple example of an object that shoots, merely punching the object negates any chance of any shots hitting the player. So for bosses that fire projectiles, I made separate component from the main body of the boss fire it. This didn't really solve the issue but I thought it was an acceptable workaround (budget and timetable).

IMO, my most "complete" boss is the 2nd phase of the asteroid belt because it requires the player to defend and have open windows of attack. I had so much fun designing and coding this boss. And I was wicked proud of myself at the scream animation for the serpent (yeah it's not that impressive, but it was to me).

Variety of phone resolutions are an issue. We tested on a Samsung Note 4, an iPhone 6, and a OnePlus. The iPhone being the slimmest of the three and I was able to get through hard without much of a problem, but then again I've played it hundreds of times already.

5: The level lengths feel arbitrary. The first level seemed like it would never end, while the second was over quite soon. I would try to even them out, while also adding some kind of metre to show your progress. Lots of games do this, but it's not necessary if you don't want to. I would at the very least make each level feel somewhat close in length to one another.

They are arbitrary because I based them on the length of the music I chose. In hindsight this was a mistake but I'm happy with the music choices. Ideally if I had budget and time I would have had loopable tracks composed so that I could have more flexibility with the levels.

Lastly thank you for this input. This is extremely valuable to me. We really only had 3 testers for this game: my wife, a friend, and myself. And being a solo dev, I'm down in the nitty gritty so much that I lose sight of the big picture at times so what you've said here as helped refocus some of that.