Sorry, let me re-structure that as me telling you about the problems. Solutions in parenthesis. That way it's easier for you to ignore the suggestions and focus on the feedback.
The #1 cause of death is because I didn't realize how much damage I was taking, or when, or why.
(I think the industry-standard fix for this is standard for a reason. Visual and audio indicators on the player character, not on some life bar far away from where you're looking.)
The #2 cause of death/taking damage is because my character would change directions on its own when I left go of the left thumbstick. I'd move forward to the correct distance to attack, stop moving, and press the attack button, only for my character to face the wrong way on their own so the attack would miss and the enemy would hit me and I'd die.
(Again, there is an industry-standard solution for this. Proper thumbstick deadzones (Analogue inputs must be > ~0.2 or ~20% of max possible input in order to "count") would prevent or at least reduce this.)
Wall-climbing is just plain unresponsive in the following situations:
- When trying to wall-jump off the bottom of a floating island you can just barely reach
- When trying to go from a wall you're ascending onto the top of a platform that's just one tile away from the ceiling.
- Both at once is absolute hell.
Are you trying to be Spelunky or Dead Cells? Because right now the wall jumping feels sometimes like sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on subtle differences in the player's timing, rather than the height of the jump being attempted. It feels bad.
(These are legal jumps, well within the range of the max jump height, but sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. If you can detect when the player is likely trying to do these jumps and somehow fudge the rules so the player ends up where they expect to, like some sort of wall jump version of Coyote Time, it will make the game as a whole feel fast, fluid and responsive, but it might be as easy as simply not pushing the player away from the wall when they jump.)
Collecting treasure was annoying. Collecting treasure should be fun! They're both hard to see because of all the slime and grass covering them up, and there's no feedback when you collect them, which would give a quick cheap jolt of "I did it right" dopamine.
(Sound effect & number or spinning coin animation disappearing into the sky upon collection. Draw the important collectible coins on top of the unimportant slime, blood, and grass special effects.)
At the bottom of the dungeon, the GUI sometimes covers up the action. Enemies, chests, and other important gameplay entities are obscured by the HUD, and unlike the rest of the level, the player can't make the action visible by dropping down lower.
(Just add a layer or two of solid dirt to the bottom at level generation to fix this.)