Thank you so much for playing and for the meaty feedback.
I do not know whether it is a bug, but in the first boss room, I might have gotten stuck in strafing mode, such that I only exited strafing mode while holding 'space' or 'shift'.
yep it's a known bug I discovered by chance yesterday (I don't wanna bother you with my messy boolians, but in practice if you only use shift or space or pad this bug will not happen. You can only have it by pushing/mashing both shift and space together)
When I first entered the boss room, I had a huge number of charges, maybe 42. [...]. I assume that is a bug.
It's not. The mechanic is from classic castlevania, on death you lose your subWeapon and all energy you gathered. In short, is better to not die.
So I quit the game and tried from the beginning again, since having many charges would make it much easier.
Yes, that's the point. If you don't ever die till the boss you are rewarded with all the resources you gathered along the way. It's retro design, so may be very punishing. Expanded example, I could be a super douche and not give another sword pick up on the checkpoint room etc etc
Ignoring difficulty and when it should be encountered, I like the boss.
Thank you. This is my first attempt at a real boss and it should be the final challenge of the tutorial stage. With the sword, I was surprised to see almost everyone prevail
The controls and movement are atypical, and players need to get used to them first, so I think the boss should be weaker or a different boss should be there or something. Or longer training levels.
Good points, noted.
I finished the 4 challenges, those were fun. There was no way to exit the challenge level selection from what I could tell, so I exited it by quitting the game and starting it again.
This is a problem that I dunno how to solve yet, in latest demo I had an end screen.
It would be nice if you could exit to the main menu instead of only exiting the whole game.
Noted.
I do not know if I would have been able to defeat the first boss using just 10 charges though.
I feel you, I'll see how to better balance it. Thanks again.