Feedback

• The main menu is confusing. It is not clear that you can just click start game to open the game and you don't need to select either speedrun or deathless mode.
  Add some description about what the different modes are.
  While designing the menu, I didn't realize it would be confusing, but after receiving this feedback and seeing all the playtesters be confused by it, I can see it. I had used the same icon for both buttons and toggles, so it wasn't clear that they were different things. Plus, I had put the different options first, and then the Start Game button. So I restructured the menu, putting the start game button on top and below it putting the different difficulty options with the text "Add extra difficulty". I also added a small text explaining what each mode does.
  

• It is unclear that the blue spheres are healing items and it is confusing what the orange spheres do.
  My initial idea was so have popups in the tutorial explain what the healing souls and the progress souls were, but I scrapped that for the sake of not having too much text. I had a popup to heal appear whenever it is needed, but most players missed it, and some thought that the orange spheres were for healing. So I decided to go back to my original idea and have some popups explain what the different spheres are in the tutorial.

• There is too much of a delay before the attack animation plays.
  Removing the first two frames of the attack animation (the drawing of the sword from the sheath) made the attacks far more responsive. It also had the side effect of making the melee fights with the enemies easier, so I don't believe there is need to decrease the attack hit boxes anymore.

• It's hard to get a hit in on the melee enemies without getting hit yourself and the fireballs are too fast.
  The first problem was resolved by making the attack animation faster.  I chose to not modify the speed of the fire

• It would be nice if the player could crouch and it would make attacking some enemies easier.
  The reason I didn't implement crouching was because there were no crouching sprites in the asset pack I used for the player character. I do not have time to edit together crouching sprites, and I believe that defeating all the enemies is possible even without that feature, so I will not implement it.

• Spikes should only hit the player if the player falls on top of them. Getting damaged from spikes when hitting them from the side is annoying.
  This was a very valid piece of feedback that I have implemented.

• Some of the jumps are too difficult.
  I played through the map once more and I made sure that none of the jumps are impossible. I didn't find any platforms too difficult to reach, and I couldn't really put them much closer since I wanted there to be some challenge and for the player to be able to also walk between and under every platform, so I only changed a couple platforms.

• The Pause menu doesn't open.
  The enemies glitch out when they're trying to turn in their patrol behavior.
  I knew about these bugs before the playtest, but I didn't have the chance to fix them in time. They have been resolved now.

• It is hard to press X to attack when navigating with WASD.
  I chose this control scheme because it's the one I've found in other platformer games I've played (namely Hollow Knight). The solution to this problem is to add the ability for the player to remap the keys, but that is outside the scope of this project, so I won't add it in this update.

I also added some features that weren't mentioned in the playtest feedback but I knew I had to add, such as the scoreboard at the end of the speedrun mode, sound effects and music, and a skippable intro cutscene. I also fixed some bugs that I found myself.