Thank you so much for the lengthy feedback! Really appreciate the effort put into this :) (Btw congrats on the game jam!)
I totally forgot about the floating code, yes pressing up makes you fall slower, wanted to try to give the player more control over the character at the very beginning of creating this game, hence I implemented a "fall faster if you press down" and a "fall slower if you press up" function for the character. But as I rushed to complete the game I completely forgot I put that in. Youre the first to notice this haha!
Apologies for not creating controller support, never tried implementing that before so I didnt think of trying that out (im still really new to game dev), in the long run I do hope to learn how to do this though!
I'll try to see if theres any facing issue for the character, but during my (very limited) playtests, I didnt see any problem. Still will be wary of this though, thanks for highlighting this to me.
My mistake on making the gumballs not destroyable, just thought that making the second boss harder would have been the right move. Now Ive learnt that just because something is hard doesnt make it enjoyable, so will definitely take note of this for future game jams.
I didnt have enough time to make scene transitions but I do agree that the instantaneous switching of scenes does make it looks a little jarring. Will do the same for music transitions in the future (if I have time for the jam haha)
Will read up on how to make the game more "open" in the future for"bigger" games definitely, dont want a full fledged game to feel linear, especially for a metroidvania.
I cant speak for the audio, but you can definitely hit Sulkin Raven up on that :) he did a great job haha
Will definitely make SFX a priority in future jams.
Once again thanks again for the lengthy and well thought out comment!