First off, a huge thank you to everyone who played the game during GBJAM 9. It was my first ever game jam and the first game I ever completed, so I can't be more happy with the results. I was able to finish 12th on 134 entries. That means a lot to me and that gives me a lot of confidence to pursue this hobby!

In the last few days, I've worked on an updated version to fix some bugs and reprogram a few things. One of the main feedback was that the game was really difficult, so I lowered the difficulty so it's easier for newcomers. Here's a list of everything this update has:

Features

• Fix audio bug where some songs and sfx were only playing on the left side
• Remove unstable pause feature. We can't pause anymore, I'll be working on that in the Update 2. Pausing was causing the game to stop but some timers were still going, so it made enemies spawn in weird ways.
• Added a buffer of 30 frames after entering the Settings to make sure players are not kicked back to the title screen if they hold the button
• Added possibility to play with ASDW controls (and OP for shooting). See Settings for more information.
• Slightly reduced the hitbox of the player ship to only the cockpit (the white part at the front of the ship)
• Timer on the boss on Pacifist Mode decreases more slowly (about 25% more slowly).
• Reduced the difficulty of the level and the boss
  • During the boss fight, the enemies don't spawn next to the boss anymore
  • During the boss fight, the phase where it goes out of bound and blob enemies would appear has been changed to flying dragon moving right and left randomly
  • Reduced health of the boss from 240 HP to 200
  • Reduced speed of some enemies when they appear on screen.
  • Mini-eye enemies shoot 50% of the time (RNG-based) every 1 second.
  • Squid enemies give 2 powerups instead of only 1.
  • Reduced health and fire rate for most of the enemies
• Various clean code and reprogramming on my baseEnemy class to have more options to add enemies, movements and bullet patterns

What's next

I kept the version used for GBJAM 9 so you can download it if you want to see exactly what I submitted. I'm going to work on a 2nd update coming in the following week to patch a few things.
I'm sure I want to continue and improve this game to add more levels and features (like a 2p mode) but right now, I'm not sure if I want to do another game jam, or work on this. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks again!