Thanks so much! Yeah, the texture aesthetic originally came from my last personal project. I wanted it to look like objects were made from construction paper. My animations in that game look similar to how season one of South Park looked. I liked how it looked and decided i might iterate on it.
In regards to the tutorial, thanks. This was the first time a tutorial was part of my requirements and I had a few ideas of what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't have the time for those ideas. So i just jokingly slapped static text on the level as a placeholder. After a couple times loading up a room with text, I began to think it didn't actually look half bad lol.
I could go on all day about the conflict i felt working on combat. The idea to use up mana was to nudge the player towards gaining xp. I eventually felt like that was dumb for multiple reasons. One being that having only one weapon which has limiting use is not great, and the other being everyone will want to blast fireballs as often as possible. I opted to have like one or two alternate spells, but couldn't get what i was going for down in the time i allotted for it and so mana was entirely scrapped. Now i had useless mana potions. So I went back to the original idea and gave the player more mana.