I'd love to hear some more details about the design decisions you made and any performance tradeoffs you ran into.
Otherwise, it's a great start. Some things you might consider:
* Better explosions. You can get pretty good effects with expanding/contracting colored circles, or using an animated sprite. I'm not sure what would be more efficient in html5. For an example check out the explosions in http://mochiland.com/articles/flash-game-friday-death-vs-mon...
* Reduce the size of the player's collision box. Most 'bullet hell' shooters actually use a box much smaller than the player sprite to give the player a bit of leeway as they try to dodge bullets.
* There's a pretty big size mismatch between the player and the enemies, maybe even that out a bit? The small enemies are cool because you can have a lot in a wave, but as a player the small enemies felt frustratingly hard to hit sometimes.
* Bullet image sprites. Guessing there's a performance issue here but I thought I'd suggest it anyways just in case you haven't tried it. A nice bullet sprite will make enemy bullets easier to read and easier for the player to dodge.
I'll write up an article in the future covering my decisions in more detail. And yes I hate it when HTML5 games kill my CPU I was going to make sure this one didn't do that.
Impressive! Was really surprised at how little it taxed my system, usually I see my CPU graph shoot straight up. Would love to know how you optimized it as that's the biggest drawback with most HTML5 games I play.
Otherwise, it's a great start. Some things you might consider:
* Better explosions. You can get pretty good effects with expanding/contracting colored circles, or using an animated sprite. I'm not sure what would be more efficient in html5. For an example check out the explosions in http://mochiland.com/articles/flash-game-friday-death-vs-mon...
* Reduce the size of the player's collision box. Most 'bullet hell' shooters actually use a box much smaller than the player sprite to give the player a bit of leeway as they try to dodge bullets.
* There's a pretty big size mismatch between the player and the enemies, maybe even that out a bit? The small enemies are cool because you can have a lot in a wave, but as a player the small enemies felt frustratingly hard to hit sometimes.
* Bullet image sprites. Guessing there's a performance issue here but I thought I'd suggest it anyways just in case you haven't tried it. A nice bullet sprite will make enemy bullets easier to read and easier for the player to dodge.