Interesting insight, to be blunt this was a rush job for the jam, a lot of code and unused assets were taken from my other project Whilrigig Willies, and I say a lot and not all because I was rebuilding Whirligig Willies back into a cute girl game (it was one before, but 2020 reasons for changing it), so all of the features were rebuilds (not copy pastes) of ones from whirligig willies.
I had just done the movement and action mechanics by the time the jam started. so I started work on the rebuilds of the cutscene and mini-game features, sadly half the jam was finished by the time I got done, I had to port in a few simple features, but some major ones did not make it back because I did not have enough time, like boss fights, the hud (with stamina), and customizable controls.
When you say the characters are ugly you mean the princess girls right? because everything else including the short skirt magical girl is supposed to look strange on purpose, the world's graphics use simple normal mapping created from blender's texture displacement module, it is actually my first time using normal maps outside of vary simple tests, not bad for a first try?
The cutscene feature was a rebuild of the cutscene feature found in my whirligig willies project which was meant to have voice acting so it is still not fully developed, the project would be in it's 2nd alpha stage once all the feature rebuilding is completed, so less then half way. What modes are you getting stuck on though? and what do you mean by drifting? like moving while standing? hmm I thought I had the gameplay mechanics on lock, anyway the movement while standing is a issue I am still addressing.
The depth? which direction? if down, maybe I can add a shadow to help the player, so the controls, if you noticed in the instruction image, there is no single key explained as that key for that feature, instead you have the key map on the upper right corner being explained on what each of the keys does, this is because you were able to customize the controls, but the module was not implemented because time constraints, I apologize for that.
Once again apologies for the windows version, now did you not enter the castle? just walk and try to run into the front door, you will be warped into the castle, the castle's floor is a replica of the president's office floor which you get a hint why if you get the secret ending, I should put a disclaimer that the game's theme is also revealed in the secret ending and not standard.