That's very nice of you to say, we appreciate it. We weren't really aiming for the player to take damage and lose hearts like you do in a game like Shovel Knight, since if you die it's usually due to falling in lava or to the Hellspawn wall. It's more like Celeste in the sense that it's more about making it through the jungle gym we set up for you in one go, with the light punishment of starting the level over. The messages and abilities were just sort of constrained by how much time we had to work on the project. We considered making the character slower with more coins, but decided to make the wall go faster instead. Changing the player's movement speed sounds good on paper, but making the game feel worse to play and hurting movement options was too much of a tradeoff (plus designing levels around different movement speeds would have been a nightmare.) Audio was clearly our greatest shortcoming, and it's something we'll work on. Thank you for the feedback, I hope I was able to explain some of our decisions!
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Yes thanks, very good stuff. I don't disagree with your movement choices. But personally, I didn't see or feel if and how the wall was going faster. Remember some times the wall is off screen so we can't immediately see it change speed. But that's indeed the right idea and a good alternative option if you don't want to alter player's movement. Perhaps with music (that speeds up!) the messaging to the player will be clearer. I hope you make a prototype of this game in the future, good luck with it if so.