another space invaders game?  hmm.

Really neat game! Unfortunately it's... really hard for me right now. Probably because I'm not sure what is essential to upgrade first, but I'm liking it a lot. I'm starting to think strength is most important for the first few levels, but I keep hitting a point where I can't beat my high score and can't survive long enough to see the boss.

A few suggestions:
1. Instead of announcing when an enemy is about to die, have a high beep or something that accompanies the spaceship. That way you'll know precisely which enemies have low health. Perhaps make this toggleable in settings.

2. When an enemy stops moving, maybe have a quiet ping/beeping accompanying the spaceship to let you know there is a clear opportunity to shoot it. It might sound cheap and handholdy to do that, but dealing with two or more enemies on screen is not fun for me at present; I feel like I can't focus on anything and just have to avoid and shoot like mad and hope I get the upper hand.

3. When you hit a comet, I think the chime sound should stop. Also, when a speed boost is active, there should be a way to revert to normal speed, because bouncing around from side to side of the board without having any control over it has limited benefit imho.

Also, I'm not quite sure what defense is for. All it seems to be is an extra health bar to look after, unless I'm missing something? There's nothing wrong with that per say, it's just a bit redundant-looking.

Ugh. I ended up just cheesing it and waiting for the first ship to sit around long enough so that the boss would appear. Killing him wasn't that hard though, and I was able to upgrade a lot from that. I'm starting to wonder if I'll have to keep doing it that way for a while though. If so, then that's either a really cool mechanic, or a balance issue.

@Musicalman:
Your feedback is appreciated. To answer your question, the defense stat is like your shield. The default starting value is 0. When you increase your defense, damage that would usually be dealt to your ship will land on your shield. If your defense falls to 0, your shield breaks, and all attacks will be directed to your ship normally.
I apologize about the health notifications not working in your favor. I can definitely create an option to alter the announcement of low health values.
Good luck.

It's not really a problem, it just breaks the atmosphere a bit for me.
Right now the problem I'm having is that I can level up once, maybe twice, but the ships get too powerful for me and I have no idea how I'm supposed to beat my high score to get more stars. I've never seen the boss appear unless I've purposefully waited it out. But maybe I just suck lol

I'm getting 3 fatal errors when I run the game:
Fatal error detected  dialog  Failed to execute script sdefender

Fatal error detected  dialog  Error: module 'win32com.gen_py.C866CA3A-32F7-11D2-9602-00C04F8EE628x0x5x4' has no attribute 'CLSIDToClassMap'

Fatal error detected  dialog  Traceback: ['Traceback (most recent call last):\n', '  File "sdefender.py", line 1, in <module>\n', '  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 991, in _find_and_load\n', '  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 975, in _find_and_load_unlocked\n', '  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 671, in _load_unlocked\n', '  File "PyInstaller\\loader\\pyimod03_importers.py", line 531, in exec_module\n', '  File "lucia\\__init__.py", line 38, in <module>\n', '  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 991, in _find_and_load\n', '  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 975, in _find_and_load_unlocked\n', '  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 671, in _load_unlocked\n', '  File "PyInstaller\\loader\\pyimod03_importers.py", line 531, in exec_module\n', '  File "lucia\\output.py", line 21, in <module>\n', '  File "accessible_output2\\outputs\\auto.py", line 13, in __init__\n', '  File "accessible_output2\\outputs\\sapi5.py", line 37, in __init__\n', '  File "libloader\\com.py", line 16, in load_

Am I doing something wrong on my end?
Thanks in advance.

Perhaps you could implement a laser jammer upgrade which reduces the damage enemy ships do to you in general, and that would make things a little more level in harder difficulties in my opinion especially if ships get stronger as gameplay progresses anyway.

Hi there. Well this is sad. I can't download the game. And I can't access your website as well.
Still, nice work.

This game has balancing issues, I need to be able to get more stars even if I don't get more points than my high score because otherwise it is  impossible to beat. Enemires are taking way too much health from me. Btw, this game reminds me a lot of the old nebula iOS game.

I feel like you should be able to earn more stars for higher point scores. Also there needs to be a way for bullets to NOT hit each other. I've discovered I can just sit in the middle of the field and hammer space and never, ever, EVER lose a single point of HP

@21 I don't know if the score you get affects your stars or not. I really can't tell. But indeed you can just hammer the space bar and not get hit, which can build up the points quickly ish. I wouldn't advise it though since then you'l end up with scores which are practicallly impossible ot match if you had a lucky run.

@22 I've never had that problem. I'm not sure if the bullets actually follow the ship. They don't seem to, but I haven't paid it that much attention. Having a sound for the bullets may not be necessary though; I don't think bullets are actual projectiles in this game, they seem to be timers which determine if a fired shot will hit something. I could of course be wrong though.

Here's another barrage of ideas. This is just me musing, I'm not trying to change the game or anything, just throwing stuff out there which I think would balance it and make it more fun.

What I have the most trouble with is that the enemies seem, for lack of a better word, unintelligent. They just fire randomly every few seconds, and randomly decide when to move and when not to move. When there's two or three ships on the screen doing that, I can never tell when to shoot or avoid, or what to focus on, because it's just noise and movement. But if the randomness was tightened and replaced with more persistent behavior, that would help a lot. I dunno, maybe I'm missing the patterns of this game so that's why it seems random to me.

Another idea is that each ship sound could be associated with a different fighting style. One could periodically give chase to take a few shots and then run off for a cooldown period where you could then take it out, others could be stationary but teleport and fire every so often, and others could consistently move from side to side and fire wide shots, not really aiming for anything but still being heavy hitters if you're careless. Individual behaviors from these ships and more could then be combined to make new ship variations and bosses, and these could get increasingly complex as the level increases and that would make the game deep. The idea tohugh is to have more patterns to observe to build a strategy.

Speaking of levels, I thought of an idea where your level increases if you score above a certain point threshold. You could also get a certain number of stars for reaching that threshold. Receiving a reward for beating your high score could be baked into that in various ways too, but tbh I feel like that should be just a nice touch, rather than a necessary thing for progression.
Anyway I'll stop here before people tell me to shut up and make my own game lol