Thank you for such through review.
Regarding the movement. Initially I made a simpler input system where the diagonal movement was normalized, but because I had only animations for four directions, it looked awkward. I decided to just limit the directions and because the map was very vertical, I made the horizontal movement dominant. So the player will most likely always hold up or down and then adjust the movement with left or right. It seems people don't like it XD..
About the design, I did position the houses intentionally, but I hadn't thought much about the starting position relative to that. It was a happy little accident.
Oh and yeah, I'm happy the game was playable at all. I was connecting everything until the last minute. I might go back and fix the bugs, as well as optimize the game. It now creates a gameobject for each step sound and then destroys it. Makes it quite laggy on the web I think.