I can’t recall any other games that did that, although Final Fantasy 2(j)’s level mechanic was similar in that it increased your stats based on what skill you used most often and would only upgrade your HP if you got hit. I had my characters beat each other up to raise their max HP, which was probably not part of the original game design. Dynamic difficulty becomes another part of the game that can be played, as Malimar explains.

Thoughts on not dying: Most original Atari and arcade games did not have endings the way modern games do. They simply started over if they ran out of content. The goal was not to beat the game but to go as long as you could on the same set of lives.

Beating a game gives the reward of a sense of accomplishment, but it is less of a reward if the game does not challenge the player. Dying and having to start the game over makes it more challenging, but if the player is forced to repeat large sections of the game and it seems the player is never going to win it, the game ceases to be worth playing. Managing death in video games is a matter of finding the right balance of difficulty without contributing to annoyance. Savepoints alleviate the problem of repetition of parts of the game that the player has already beaten, but as you say, sometimes the savepoints are too far apart. The too-challenging games of the NES become a different experience on an emulator where you can save or restore at any point, but it was not a big accomplishment to beat them on an emulator.

Dying would make this particular game much too hard because there are simply too many missiles flying around the screen to dodge at certain points. The accomplishment here is not to beat the game but to beat it with the worst gun after taking the fewest number of hits. Failure in this game is getting hit more often than you did the last time you played, but this does not prevent you from finishing the game and it is a short enough game that you can start over and be back to the same place in five minutes.

One game which was much better than similar games for the fact that you couldn’t die in it (except as an Easter Egg) was the King’s Quest clone Monkey Island. Dying in the Quest games and having to start over was really annoying, and Monkey Island even joked about this (”Rubber tree.”). The challenge and accomplishment in Monkey Island was in figuring out the puzzles. Puzzle games can also be too hard. An impossible puzzle in a puzzle game can be as bad for a game as dying and having to start over too much, but at least these days you can Google up the answer.

I have sometimes thought that for a little Flash game that is supposed to be fun to play and show off a fun story, but is not intended to be challenging, it might benefit the game for designers to replace the classic “you have X lives” mechanic with infinite lives and a notice that “you died X times” at the end. I believe the Unfair Platformer does this.

In theory, you’re meant to be holding space down to fire. I don’t really deal well with that, though, a lot of people do the same thing you do and get the same issue. Something to think about for next time.

I also need to stop doing text-heavy splash screens.

Minor point: You might want to make it so hitting space doesn’t close whatever the screen was at the end of level 2. I was hitting space repeatedly to fire, so I have no idea what that screen said.

I’m pondering a few ways to make it more rewarding to play “properly” – one idea I have is to not, in fact, provide better guns for getting hit, but rather having less incoming firepower every time you get hit. In this case, the reward for doing well would be a better ending.

Perhaps in a few months I’ll give that one a shot :)

Making the guns more varied in what they do, rather than simply increasing the rate and cone size, would probably indeed improve the experience, but it might also add more incentive for that contrary behaviour. I also craved more levels to use my epic dakka on, which may have the same problem.

But I am probably somewhat abnormal in that I never pay any attention to score for its own sake in any game, so I wasn’t even slightly tempted to play it the proper way more than once. Take that as you will.