Short and sweet! It isn't much of a metroidvania (at least not yet) sadly, but what it is already has lots of potential. the graphics and music are also pretty nice imo, altought I think some sound effects are louder than they need to (or maybe I am the one that should start lowering my volume sometimes (Edit: yeah, it was my volume xD)).
I really like this more unique movement you made here, it feels really fun to play, altought I myself am not a big fan of the spacebar so I struggled a bit to get used to it lol. I also have a nitpick with the dash controls, since I can't really do any diagonal dash witouth moving left or right first, and that can kinda screw me up sometimes tbh. I think this moveset would work waayy better with an actual controller, so that's something I'd recommend you checking out.
The energy mechanic is also a really fun twist too, specially because of the combo thing you added to refill it, feels really rewarding to pull it off, specially on the boss.
Honestly this is actually quite the exact kind of game that I like the most so I got a bit of bias in favor to it lol, sad thing I can't actually give any ratings
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thanks for checking it out!
im suprised that you touched on so many of the things i was considering
the sound effects actually arent normalised perfectly. higher pitch sounds are going to seem louder even when its the same volume as a low pitch sound. so thats something that i needed to adjust but didnt have time for.
actually it used to be more of metroidvania. there were more powerups and bosses during development but i cut like three quarters of the content i had made in favour of making this first area presentable. the next area actually had obsticles to get players used to diagonal dashing controls. its something i thought about for the reason you said. theres a chance id go with 4 directions instead of 8 because i wanna make it that you have to dash into orbs (will adjust hitboxes accordingly). so it would depend on whats funner when testing basically... probably 8 still. i also thought about how much better the dashing would be on a controller but aiming is going to really important for this game (already is because of combos) so would have to try it out and see how well that works.