Thank you for the thorough feedback! Here are my thoughts.
Re: 21 friends. Once you make 21 friends, talking to one of the characters will open up a new scene in the same environment and allow you to make more. We will look into adding an additional hint about this as it is not terribly intuitive at the moment.
Re: Friendship themes, there is a bit of an arc that progresses as you go from scene to scene that kind of touches on what you describe (ie. the reliance on friends). But we have to make sure it's not too hard to reach this and that ties into my comment above.
Re: Black/white transitioning color. There are some additional things we can do with this within the context of the still images (there are more in subsequent scenes). There are also things we can do within the core gameplay as you suggested, but at the moment I am inclined to leave that for a future episode.
Re: Up/Down animation. Others have made this comment too. I've always thought it wouldn't look natural and therefore haven't had the motivation to try. Maybe I am just being stubborn. I will give it shot.
Re: Player falling off the edge and re-spawning. I agree with this 100%. I think the approach I will try is to put ground/wall outside the view of the camera on either end of the level. This way, the player can leave the screen and then re-emerge without running into an imaginary barrier which I think may also be a bit jarring.
Re: Town theme song. We've gone back/forth on this and for a long period of time there was more constant music. My concern has been that it could be an immediate turn-off for some if they don't like the song. A constant song could also conflict with things that occur in later scenes. We'll give it some thought.
Re: Basketball. This is the first comment we've heard about it being tricky. As a basketball player, I am probably biased, but will likely keep it in unless many report similar to you. I will say that we have had positive feedback about the basketball portion too.
Re: Shift key to run. Our goal has been make the controls as simple as possible. This ties into supporting mobile and also general accessibility for non-expert gamers. That said, this suggestion has been made before, so we do not want to completely disregard. We'll give it some thought.
Lastly, I am happy to hear you think releasing on itch was a good choice as we evaluated a bunch of different options and this seemed like the best for what we are trying to accomplish.
Thanks again for the comment. We will stay determined!
Donny