Thank you! This is lovely feedback ^^
If you're genuinely curious how a sidescroller would work for a dream sim game, I'd recommend checking out Strange Telephone, as that's the primary inspiration for this game. It relies on having lots of worlds as opposed to big worlds. It's not everybody's cup of tea, but I like it for the opportunities it gives me to make many many maps
In the final game, the Hub is going to be replaced entirely with a system that's somewhere between Strange Telephone's and the world-finding system from the .hack// games. I'm undecided on how exactly it will work yet, but it will mean that scenes will be buried deeper than they are in this demo. For anything like that, basically just chalk it up to me feeling the need for everything to be accessible in the demo for the purpose of having a game to play - I didn't have much time for many filler maps, and I wanted to show that the story has something to it, so I elected to write it like a normal game for now, and make it more dream sim later down the line
I don't have anywhere I discuss development. I didn't really think it would be something people would be interested in ^^;