Thank you so much, I really appreciate you taking the time to both play the game and write out such a detailed review!!!
This was my first time attempting to create something complete from start to finish and there's a lot I'd do different if I was working on it now, but I definitely agree with what you're saying!
(the spike pits in particular, instead of removing them I'd probably want to make it clearer that you can look down - something which I think most people never realized. If you hold down the camera scrolls down and you should be able to see the spikes before making a blind jump)
Also, I'm really happy you found the secret path! I was hoping that people would.
Sadly, I've lost access to the project file for this and all my older projects when my SSD died in December, so I'm not able to update it short of starting over from scratch. 😢 I still have the art as I back that up separately, but it hadn't yet occurred to me that I should back up code as well.
Once again, thank you so much for this! It really means a lot to read it.