Thank you so much for your thorough review! I'll try to answer/comment from top to bottom.
- Typo is noticed, will be fixed
- The buttons are the only external assets I used for the game (together with some SFX), but I will keep that in mind. What do you suggest instead? Just the regular font or custom icons?
- I listed the controls in the "thank you" screen (I guess you never clicked on it) and it's also in the itch.io screenshots section. I just didn't have the time to implement it like I did with the other controls prompts
- The death loop is unfortunate! I wanted it to feel roguelike which punished missteps, but sadly the health system in this version is broken, maybe because of some last-minute change (I worked on it until the deadline of the jam), plus falling takes way too much health right now. This will all be fixed and balanced in the future, obviously
- There are quite a few songs in the game, but I guess if you can't progress really far into it, it can be a bit stale. Fair point. Audio is also something where the time just ran out (remember, I did all of this solo with no real development experience). There's a whole unique system planned where the intensity of the music increases the more enemies are on the screen and things like that. Obviously that'd be way too advanced for a game jam build. I'm a musician at heart, so this will be much much more exciting in the future
- I like the movement mechanics, too! Although it feels a bit too floaty. Noticed and will be improved on!
- Level design will too get polished to get rid of any weird places you can get stuck (full release will have dozens of levels and chapters more with a much more pleasent difficulty progression and special levels (like bosses))
- I'll tone down the effect a bit - it's just active when you're near the place where the portal will spawn, after the player collects all of the shards in the level (just to hint at it before that)
- Enemy health indicators would be a neat indeed! Added it to my feature list
- That's something I've said before but: "The game will eventually be split into different game modes. A story
mode, with more focus on the characters, dialogue, their personal development, exploration and the ability so save and reload your progress anywhere at any time. And a speedrun mode with no dialogue, fast gameplay, dedicated timers but no save/resume option. I just didn't have time to implement such a system and wanted to make sure that the overall idea of the game gets across in this demo"
I hope this clears up some things and again, I really appreciate your time doing this! I aim for an early access release on steam in a couple of months, depending on when all the main systems I want to have in the game are in the game. So keep an eye out for that if you liked the general idea of it, but thought it needed some more polish. Polished it will be!
Edit: I edited the game's page to also list all the controls in the description. Should help new players. :)