"leaned on the side of being easy/gentle."
Yeah at one point during the time I first released the game I kind of panic nerfed a lot of health values; I actually went back and rebalanced the values again just now when doing a couple of test playthroughs(the new patch is patch 1.1.3) since really it was just (initially) that big soul edge/crusher guy on the first stage and now obviously the ray/sword attack reactability being divisive
I actually went back and tested dodging the ray and sword on reaction again before the recent patch because I was going to fix it if it was too egregious; I actually did manage to successfuly dodge them from a stand-still purely from zoning out and using visual cues once they showed up, again I don't have the fastest reaction speed so I can only imagine it might be some other factor I'm not catching up on. I might do some tests later on to see if there's any significant input lag in the browser version of the game vs the compiled pc version I'm testing on for example so I can figure this out (I'm assuming you're playing on web)
On the characters hitbox: I feel it's a 50/50 on whether people tend to think that the hitbox is closer to the character's vitals(in the middle of her chest, where the hitbox actually is) or on the center/origin point of the character(near where she's sitting on the broom); I think both make sense just in different ways - obviously the "vitals" one is more logical but a lot of games tend to do the other one too so depending on what they've played it might set the precedence (as is always the case with games)
Thanks for the extended input and feedback btw, you're right on the more data-points and conversation being really helpful for figuring out what's going on. I also noticed you have the highest "karma" value on this game-jam meaning you've voted and engaged with other entries the most out of all the participants, so thank you for that too 😇