Super cool! I love the art style and concept. Also it looks like you have a really nicely working underlying system which is really great. A few small suggestions after playing...
- I was confused why the controls didn't work but I needed to press E. My suggestion, make more buttons move along the dialogue including space, enter, and esc. You don't have to put them in the help menu, players will naturally figure this out.
- I think it would make sense if you could use the mouse to move and control. The way this could work real easy is you click on a place in the world and your character just tries to move to that location. If they are blocked the move is just canceled so you don't need to worry about complex navigation. To interact with something you can just press the mouse button.
- Speed up the walk cycle animation a bit, maybe twice as fast. Maybe try adding a bit of arm movement.
- Some interactions should be easier to exit, like interacting with the tool box, pressing E (or any of the other interact buttons) should also exit. it's kind of weird to need to press esc to exit those interactions. if using the mouse probably just clicking away should exit.
- For the inventory system maybe it would make more sense to just have it contextual. So instead of requiring the user to select an item and use it. It is just automatically used if the player has it and it works.
- You could also simplify the inventory so instead or 4 separate pieces of wood it just says Piece of wood x 4 or whatever. This can help with clutter and maybe even switch to an icon for the inventory items.
- I was not able to solve the toolbox puzzle. I noticed there are the same colors on the roof in the top right but not sure how to use this to get the code. the box has 5 slots but there are more roof tiles. I think maybe you could do something to highlight what the combo is. I eventually looked in the code on GitHub and cheated to get past this part, still have no idea why it was the correct combo.
- For the music box, I didn't realize at first the the button on top would play the song until I read the hint. you need to really entice the player to click on this sort of thing. like make it extra sparkly. The ZZFX note function could work really well here to add some sound to the notes on the keyboard.
Tat may seem like a lot but really you have the most important stuff working great. I managed to finish the game after cheating to get past the toolbox. I am looking forward to seeing the final version, keep up the great work!