Wonderful start! I feel you have an extremely solid base to build a really fun game on top of.
- I really like the look you've gone for. Feels highly polished, while still being fun and immersive. I'm getting some monument valley vibes. I can see myself going on an adventure in this world. The simplicity seems like it would also allow an efficient content creation pipeline, which is good.
- Character control is smooooth. No critiques there. Well done.
- The attack windup timing might want to be tweaked down a hair, but of course that depends on the speed and pacing of the combat. Post-attack timings feel a bit better in my opinion, because the player gets a highly responsive action, while still being forced to commit to a period of vulnerability.
- The "exhaustion lines" on the guys head is really brilliant. I honestly am pissed that I didn't think of that for my last game. It would have opened a lot of possibilities. I nixed the entire "stamina" system because of how bad it felt to hit the button and have nothing happen. Feels just fine here though.
- I love that the stamina is messaged really well on the character itself, I wonder if it can be extended more? A slight effect when the stamina becomes full, perhaps?
- This was all on keyboard. When I plugged my controller in, the camera began spinning in a clockwise direction. Holding one of the triggers reversed it, but releasing the trigger sent it back spinning the other way. Closing and reopening the game did not fix it. I'd like to mess around with this more on the controller if this gets fixed.
Keep it up, you have the start of a gem here, in my opinion.