Weird controls but it made the game interesting

Controls were quite confusing, also how can I choose between the shield and the boost once I have both? Apart from that I enjoyed it as I'm a sucker for upgrades ;). Neat parallax effect, too!

I had a bit of difficulty with the controls. Up was right and left was down. It made it a bit hard to play, but what I did see, I liked.

I don't understand why the controls were so strange. It made the game frustrating in a way that didn't seem like it added to the experience.

The menu starts of really cool! It seems the controls are not working properly. When i press right arrow, the ship moves left. When i press down arrow, the ship moves right. No other keys seem to do anything. What should i do?

for those who had control problems I have updated some of the in game text to try and explain it a bit better but the player binds a key of their choice for each control.

The game was pretty cool! I found the bonuses were nice and really served a purpose as the game progressed. While the music was repetitive, it was still pretty good! Nice work!

I tried the control-updated version and had a lot of fun! I DO love the scrolling background!

I found the graphics for the background made it hard to see my laser when I shot it. I also couldn't figure out how to use my shields effectively -- they didn't seem to do anything for me, if I hit something I still died. How do you kill the square enemies?

I only played the original version and I see people people complaining about controls. That's the point, the more you have them the worse it is!!! (I'm right, right?).

About the game:
It seemed strange why do I have to bind controls at runtime, but then it hit me. I really like the idea. As game developers, we try to make controls as simple as possible, but breaking that rule to fit the game theme seems really clever to me. Gameplay wise I like how you figure out progression where you only need movement and only later shooting.

Pros&Cons:
- +really nice theme fitting idea.
- +Good progression system based on what is aviable to the player
- +Overall solid standard space shooter game.
- -Foreground objects (mostly bullets) don't have high contrast with background, making them harder to spot.

Thanks for all the feedback folks.
@csanyk The game is color coded. So if you use a red shield you can block red projectiles or to kill a yellow (square) enemy you would use a yellow weapon. I'll definitely admit that was not well explained though, thanks for pointing that out.

@fancyreckless Thanks for the well thought out feedback. I definitely agree the projectiles don't contrast enough. that was something we planned to get fixed before the jam ended but the last day the pipes in my artists house backed up and overflowed and I was scrambling to finish the code. I do regret not prioritizing it a bit more though.

Cool arcade game, i think the music you choosed really made up for a fitting mood. The approach on the theme was creative. Even though having more still gives you advantage but remembering all the keybinds gets worse over time. And i really liked the idea to choose the keybinds ingame!

Interesting concept of adding the functionality as you go and letting user bind the keys while at it. It might have been a bit too much to require the steering binding each play-through, and I managed to several times bind those in the wrong order. One way to fix the former would be to allow retry to start after steering has been set. The latter could be fixed with needing to hold key pressed for a short while before accepting the binding.

I didn't get really far. My high-score after a couple of retries was 4200. But it was fun.

Some other comments:

* When having dual shields, it was hard to see what shield(s) were active.
* You could easily die several times in a row because collision detection was done before you even got to see your new ship. I would suggest adding a invincibility time after respawn.

I liked the enemies and obstacles and it was nicely done the way it warned where the cheese was coming.