Thanks for your support.
I'm currently figuring out a way to add more depth to the parries. My thoughts were along the same lines as yours, with sword direction playing a part. We'll see how that goes. It's been awhile since I updated because I got so busy lately, but I've got another small update planned soon and I'll probably try out some tweaks to the parrying.
I'll also go ahead and add support for playing on the same keyboard. It'll be pretty clumsy but as long as everyone is equally disadvantaged then it's a good call.