This is a very solid first entry. It's got some rough edges, but you've got a lot of fundamentals implemented in here. The next step is to polish them up. In terms of the project, I thought it was super ambitious. I was surprised you had one boss, let alone three. The map was deceptively large and looped back on itself in interesting / unexpected ways (the secret passage after the 2nd boss stood out in this regard). The jump movement was predictable and easy to control for the most part, and there was a good amount of feedback and SFX so that I usually knew what was going on in a combat encounter. The special effects on the third boss were the standout for me.
Some other feedback:
- As has been stated, the movement is pretty slow. Backtracking took a long time, and missing the double jump in the second boss's room was particularly painful. I also think the amount of distance you gain from dashing before the jump is not obvious at all, nor is the speed boost itself.
- I got locked into the shield position while facing away from one of those projectile shooters and took like 2 1/2 hearts worth of damage before fixing my positioning. It wasn't super intuitive how to drop the shield and turn around.
- I'm sure it's been said before, but some explanation text as you get new abilities or in-game control guide would be super useful. I stubbornly smashed on my keyboard until I had all the controls figured out (I didn't see the controls on the web page until after I had finished the game).
Overall though a very impressive start. You've got blocking, double jump, wall jump, these are all not easy to pull off. They're not perfect yet, but now that yuo've done them you can start refining them. Very nicely done, keep it up!
EDIT: Oh, I remembered another thing. Pleeease give a skip option on the opening text crawl if it's going to be that long. I got stuck at some point and had to restart the game and, oof... At the very end I found out holding the attack button sped up the text, but a "Hold X to Skip" or something is always appreciated.