Hi! Apologies for the late reply but thank you so much for trying my game and leaving feedback!
I'm glad you enjoy the sprite especially. I'm mainly an illustrator, not a pixel artist, so I was worried about how it would come across but in the end, I guess the worry was just all in my head.
As for incentivize to grind, yes! I want to make my way to turning this into something more like Hades, you can say. That kind of roguelite, so having better runs to get better stuff is definitely something I want to figure out.
And yes, down the road, I want to make sure there's proper boundaries. And you're not wrong that it was ultimately because of the time constraints of the game jam. Higher priorities and all that but in the end, I do agree having proper walls/boundaries would be a good thing to have for the kind of game I want this to become.
And yes! I absolutely want to expand on this game. In fact, this being my first game project for myself as a solo dev, I want to see how far I can push myself and how close I can get to my vision for this game throughout the year. Good idea, I think, to learn a lot but also prevent myself from working on this game indefinitely as I absolutely want to make more games than just this as well. So the span of a year to work on this works, I think.
Anyways, thank you again!