The game definitely lacks a bit in balancing in my opinion, because you just can create so many different guns.
Your idea of letting the enemies get stupid powerful sounds actually really fun :D
I'm pretty sure my solution to this would have been a dynamic difficulty system (think Mario Kart), that adjusts enemy spawn-rates based on the weapons you have.
The framework is there to dynamically change the weapons the enemies have.
Also regarding the slow-down:
I didn't get to the optimization stage at all sadly, but the best solution would have been to use an ECS system of sorts. AFAIK similar games usually use one, because of the sheer amount of entities.
I tried to combat this a bit as I knew it would be a problem by not using any rigidbodies or colliders for the projectiles. They are actually custom raycast-based, with some clever render tricks.
Thank you for playing, and taking the time to write feedback!
The pausing system is definitely required for a game like this with a lot of "data", that still remains on my to-do list up to this day.
The main reason I didn't get it done in time, was that I wanted to limit the time the game was paused without making you feel like you're "cheating the game" :D.
I originally wanted the game to feel like you made clever weapons to kill different types of enemies, but the priorities shifted a bit, thus making this a fusion between a few genres.
Awesome! The gameplay feels smooth and responsive, and I like the idea of using your projectiles as a light source to navigate around the map. It's clear to me that you have spent your time on the important features like getting the shooting to feel good, while developing this. Bravo!
