I'm back from the dead, sorry to keep you waiting! I've never been too much of a forum person and the past month or so has been so hectic that I've completely forgot to visit. Anyway, let's get to the feedback. One important thing to note though: I didn't make it past level 5, which affects a few of the points I make.
More sounds == goodNice to hear (pun not intended) that you've put more sounds in the game. Always makes it more enjoyable. The countdown right before the next level is especially welcome. Gives you a nice adrenaline boost to fight for those few more seconds.
One thing that struck me as odd though, were the level end/change "jingles". They're all different for every level (as far as I could tell by my testing session), with differing lenghts and tones. Not really much else to say about them, but that they just seemed a bit weird.
General graphics stuff- "Gamma particle" size increase every bounce is good. Really gives you an incentive to take care of them.
- Like I expected, the dark background works really well with the "danger level" bars. Lookin' good.
DifficultyThe first level seemed a bit on the hard side. The amount of "plasma enemies" was greater than any of the latter levels, which I found peculiar. I could have five of them flying around at the same time in the first level, but only one or two in all the later ones.
ControlsI did a more gamepad (Xbox 360 pad to be specific) oriented testing session this time around and noticed two issues. The first one was deadzones. When playing with analogue sticks, especially ones that are a bit worn out, small deadzones often become a problem. My particular pad's both sticks have a bit of leeway to the left, so in many games the player character moves to the left even when the stick should be at rest. Now this isn't a huge problem in 4x0ng, as you spend the majority of your time moving around, which practically eliminates the problem, but you might want to look into it.
The second issue was a bigger one. You remember how I talked about the momentum problem way back when? How I had to "counter-steer" to adjust my direction? The same issue still exists on the gamepad. I think you already know how to handle it.
On the note of controls, there was one "problem" with keyboard controls as well. In particular, if I was moving diagonally I couldn't always shoot, as the keyboard sometimes had problems with three simultaneous key presses. You of course can't really do much about it as it's more of a hardware related issue, but just thought I'd let you know. Changing the Fire-key might help in some cases, but most likely it wouldn't eliminate the problem.
ShootingThis is more of an opinion than anything, so feel free to disregard this. Anyways, I though that shooting (as it is) made the following enemies more of an inconvinience rather than a threat. The moment they came out of the core's protection, I could just shoot them down with rapid fire protons, making them pretty harmless. Now, I'm sure that once the general difficulty ramps up, the situation will be completely different as you'll have your hands full with everything else, but I think you might want to neft the shooting mechanics a bit. Maybe limit the amount of protons you can have on screen? Give the player some sort of ammo pool? Just a few quick ideas.
Level effects/"mutators"A really great addition to the core gameplay. Every level feels more fresh as you it's always different from the one you played last time. I never got to see any others than Plasma and Gravity, but you definitely should add more of them. Maybe even combined ones? Speaking of...
Testing toolsThe ability to set the starting level would be greatly appreciated as a tester. Trying to get to the later levels gets really tiresome after failing the first few for the umpteenth time. I'm sure you'd like some feedback on the latter levels as well.
General usabilityHere's the biggest thing: I think you should start working on the usability/ease-of-use/tutorialisation of the game. As I don't know how far from complete the game actually is, I might be jumping the gun a bit here, but it never hurts to put some effort into usability.
First off, if you want the game to be fully playable with a joystick/gamepad, you should make sure you can restart and quit the game with one as well. It's really inconvenient to keep having to reach to your keyboard every time you die.
When I got to the second level for the first time, I had no idea what the "Plasma" text meant. I noticed the core looked different, but I didn't realize immediately that it was lethal to touch it and the "Plasma" text didn't give me any kind of context towards this. Only later on did I realize that the core had the "plasma enemy" overlaid on top of it, so this was partly because of my own stupidity, but you should think about this.
I also was completely unaware about the ability to "strafe shoot" until I read about it on this thread. I've had similar experiences in the past, where I've had to read about gameplay features from either from this thread or from itch-page. This of course if ok during development, but you really should start working to change this. More people will be more likely to test the game out if they don't have to read a wall of text to understand the mechanics.
---
This was supposed to be just a short and quick reply, but I guess I'm incapable of that. I hope you find all of this helpful again and feel free to hit me up whenever the next version comes out. Hopefully I won't dissapear for two months again