interesting game with really nice spritework!
It has a few issues i ran into but all in all its still a good premise!
- The vending machines did more bad than good for me in most cases. If you wanna rush to the ending they do help but you lose on a lot of health since you easily run into enemies most of the time and lose on health rather than on time.
- Speaking about time, currently the time the enemies give might benefit some adjustments. I'm not sure if each enemy give the same amount of time currently, but i think the ones who are harder to kill would benefit in more time giving in exchange? like the grems are pretty tanky i realized, kronies are pretty easy to deal with for the most part while boros it really depends. if they are on the ground they are easy to deal with but while they are flying its more time wasted killing them than just ignoring them. though that might be a good thing in decision making for boros part.
- as david said, a cooldown on the shurikens would help out A LOT. though it is pretty long in most cases i think it can also benefit a cooldown reduction in general. but thats more about balancing it out with the time enemies give in total too.
- i didnt manage to reach the ending in the ~10-20 runs i did, since it really relies on good rng that 3-4 enemies are in 1 spot so you can clear them all at once to gain extra time since killing singled out enemies is mostly a waste of time. but killing no enemies at all makes it impossible to reach the ending i think. the time rebalancing for the enemies might help in that regard
- i think having some kind of visual effect for getting hit and a little more polished hitboxes so its more clear "when" you would get hit might help. ofc as others stated attack animation would also help out a lot but i can understand that the time limit of the jam might lead to cut corners
there are also a few bugs i stumped on
- i jumped and accidently landed onto a grem whch made me stuck on it and i couldnt move away anymore until i got killed
- more visual bug but sometimes the falling animation plays even if im on the ground
- in my 2nd run or so i got killed while no enemy being present at all. im not sure what killed me but it didnt happen afterwards
- might be intentional, but the coffee item only restores the 1st bar of the dash bars and not more. like if you got a dash stored already, you dont get a 2nd dash bar.
i also read that you plan to continue the game! this is just some suggestions which dont lead into my review since theres no way to have them done during jam time but feel free to use these ideas for inspiration if you like!
- having a flying kick animation when using kick during a run would look so good! the current one i think is more for standing still kicks rather than running while also making the sprite "slide" over the street basically.
- talking about animations, enemy walking/flying/jumping/attack/etc animations would look really cool for the different kinds of enemies!
- i think instead of "boosting" the players immediately, the vending machines could give you an extra dash instead which you can use whenever. i mean the coffee kinda already does it even though it currently (intentionally or not) only restores the first bar but vending machines forcing a dash leads to more failed runs than without imo.
hope i didnt jumpscare you with this wall of text xD great job though!