Ha! Love this idea!

Haha cool idea. I ended up jamming HJKL all the time :D. Also cool timelapse.

I had fun!

I really liked the idea of being a boss in a shmup :D
And, as already been said, just spamming HJKL confuses the AI to go into corners and die

This is a cool but overambitious idea; I hope you had fun with this game!

Good game. The boss there reminds me of troll face. :D

Loved that! And your timelapse too! Good graphics, ascending difficulty, good, good.

Spoiler alert: just get them into corner and shoot like a freak!

Gotta love a shmup, nice :)

I found it easy just to sit out of the line of fire of as many of them as possible and just mash the attack buttons.

Good game for those who want kill a troll face :)
Strange aesthetic, but why not. Neat. Thank you ++

Nice one, graphics could have been more polished. So, it's more monstruous like this ^^

Love the idea and the hand-drawn graphics, but like other commenters have pointed out, the AI could be more robust. Even so, the role reversal works nicely and your character's size makes things challenging as more "enemy" ships appear on the screen.

good idea, troll graphics fits there, but it is too easy and short.

AS has been said, the game does devolve pretty quickly into not touching movement and just tapping hjkl repeatedly. The AI moves into the corners to hide and doesn't damage you.
The graphics seem like placeholder graphics. If you were going for a handdrawn aesthetic, it didn't come across as such.
Overall, solid idea but the gameplay just isn't quite there. Maybe dedicate a bit more time to polish next time? Make sure to avoid any obvious strategies that break the game.

Good submission! I found the game to be a good bit of fun after I got the hang of it.

While I have changes I'd like to see, it's a bit hard to think about improvements for this game because a lot of the tools you could give to the player and challenges you could present to them would just turn it into a top-down bullet hell, which defeats the purpose. Better starting/instructions/closing functionality would be good, but that's all window dressing. It feels like either the player size is too big (which, since they're playing as a boss, is probably part of the point) or the gamespace is too small; it would be cool to be able to move around more. The attack options were great, but some of them weren't very worthwhile because they required you to stand in the way of attackers, which becomes more and more unfeasible at higher levels. It would be cool if there was some recurring way to increase health or restore health (other than beating a level), maybe without making it too powerup-y? The game could be changed so that the player played as all the individual mobs and/or bosses as you try to fight off a powerful group of enemy ships, but that seems less like an improvement and more like an overhaul headed in the direction of Dungeon Keeper.

All in all, I've never actually played a game like this, so I think that's good enough for me. This is one of the relatively few Ludum Dare games I've tested that seems like a complete work by itself -- even though it has flaws, it's an at-least-mostly-full product.

My only other more substantial criticism was regarding the AI. Most of the time, if I could get past the initial enemy blasting by shimmy-ing around, I was able to stand still and hold 'l' while the spaceships twiddled in place in the corners. Is there some weird design to their pathfinding or whatever that prompts them to do this? Because I noticed that they weren't always stuck like this forever, and that when I moved they moved with a variety of responses. I just found it particularly interesting, and was curious as to how it was implemented.