Thanks for taking the time to try the game and give such detailed feedback. I'll try to answer briefly:
- 1.I'm personally not a fan of explicit tutorials or hand-holding in games, but I do think it's important for the player to be able to understand the mechanics fairly quickly, so I'll try to come up with something that strikes a good balance.
- 2 & 3. there's currently an easy mode (accessible in the options menu), but it currently just halves the damage received. As per jump I did consider it before but I'm still unsure if it would ultimately enhance the gameplay or not. The current procedural level generator is fairly basic, and so it leaves those tiny holes which I agree are pretty nasty. I think for the final version I will have handmade levels and I'll either leave those out, or add a checkpoint system to to not make them so frustrating.
- 4. It's all about the sprint kills! currently the formula is: performance = kills + (sprint_kills * 2) - damage * 2, but that's sort of outdated now, as it doesn't take score into consideration so I might change that.
- Funny you should say, I am a massive fan of Kira's work, and actually playing Lunacid was what motivated me finally get serious about game dev. This game was just meant to be a simple experiment before attempting something more ambitious, but just can't seem to put it down, so I definitely want to flesh this out into a full game.
- About the gif background, not sure if it will apply to your case but I converted footage of the game into gofs and then stitched them together in gimp as a larger gif file, just make sure you set the number of repeats to loop forever. Hope that helps!