Glad you enjoyed it! I wish I had actually had time to make my space wizard more of a space wizard, but so it goes. As for the vertical enemies, they're actually meant to be annoying until you get the sword so that you feel cooler about killing them after that, but I kind left off enemy placement til the last minute and so they turned out to be just annoying overall (I have thoughts on reworking how the camera frames the player movement so that the vertical enemies would show up on screen early, but that's a next jam problem). Live and learn!

Thanks for the thorough feedback! I'll share a little bit about my thought process for some of your points.

Things you liked:

2. I liked the push back on the gun too, originally it was applied when you were on the ground as well, but it was kind of frustrating in actual play. I like it while in the air though cause it gives you a sense of weightiness and helps maintain airtime. I'd definitely massage all of these values in a real release, but it served its purpose for this project.

3. I waffled back and forth on releasing a map. Ultimately, with the changes I made in the last hours of the gamejam I wish I'd been able to provide a map cause the rooms honestly do link up pretty thematically with some of the player's actions changing surrounding rooms, I ultimately opted for using musical/regional name/color cues to link the rooms together which I think works on a map that's actually only about 20 or so rooms big, but it's starting to push it.

4. I really enjoyed making the boss battle, I hope you enjoyed it. In the original plans, the player was supposed to get the Shield ability from the boss so it served as sort of a tutorial (the shield can regenerate whereas health can't), but this ultimately had to be scrapped. Either way, I like how frenetic the boss battle can get and that it balances out the sword vs. gun gameplay (if you want to get the best ending and not murder the professor).

Suggestions:

1. I am not sold either. This was my first full foray into adding forces to rigid bodies and I am not pleased with the results. I had code in place to measure what was going on with each interaction but ultimately I didn't have the time to figure out what was going on. I figured that in general the only time this really came heavily into play was the final boss battle, and that the checkpoint was close enough that I could let it slide... for now. 

2. Yeah, originally the drop-through platforms were a much bigger factor in the game and each vertical transition used a drop-through platform to cover the door frame (like a manhole cover). In some playtests, players were having trouble figuring out how to go down through doors, so I removed all of the manholes, but I didn't have time to implement a smooth vertical transition so... it ended up like this. Definitely a thing to improve on in the future.

3. This is super accurate. It was on the to-do list and got dropped in favor of other things. A super frustrating sword anecdote is that I had implemented a super fancy VFX Graph sword slash graphic, but at some point in the last few days it just stopped appearing and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. =/ I did specifically lock the player into that very small play-space so that they'd be forced to figure it out, but ultimately it's not idea.

4. Same as above, this is partially a result of me pushing back finding SFX until the last few days and once finding them not fully understanding how to make them audible (the PlayClipAtPoint feature was spotty at best in my experience, but I didn't spend a lot of time trying to really understand it). This was also a learning I had previously and failed to heed, but I should incorporate SFX into initial gameplay lest it get overlooked.

Thanks for all your feedback, I'm looking forward to playing your game sometime this weekend and giving it the  attention it deserves. We've all earned it, a month is a long time, but for me personally it's the ideal time frame.

Finally, in truth I learned a lot from this whole experience. I feel like I made a lot of progress from MVM 14,but at the same time discovered a lot of areas I want to develop. I am pretty sure I want to try 2D for XVI because I just don't want to bother with this whole lighting situation, and that means I get to spend the next two months really looking into 2D artgeneration.