Ouch! That stings the soul a little to read, but regardless, this was an immensely useful review.
The good news is, I was aware of some of the issues you mentioned after I submitted the game and have fixed them already. An update to this demo will be made available after the judging process has been completed.
- The double jump has been corrected and is working a lot smoother, I believe.
- I spent a lot of time fixing and tweaking the controls. I too noticed that "Ctrl" was not a comfortable button choice, and it has been changed to "Shift". I also have made it to where players can choose to use "Space" or "Z" to jump, and "Arrow Keys" or "WASD" to move. I figured this would help give players a couple of options based on their preference. I also did it because I learned that a lot of laptop and cheap keyboards have a major bug where if you hold "Up" and "Left" at the same time, the "Space" button does not work. Having the extra controls offers a way around this if someone has this bug in their keyboard.
- The issue with the wall appearing on your character in the last level happened to me in post-testing as well. I hate, hate, hate that I didn't catch this before submitting the game, but it has been rectified. However, it was pretty hilarious to watch the player character float up to the door through this glitch, haha!
- Sadly, on the point of the spikes, this is where it gets a little challenging. So, the ZX81 did NOT have transparent pixels. There was absolutely no way around this. You also could not make any alterations to the character set from which you made your graphics. This meant you could not rotate, scale, or edit what the characters looked like in any way. So, you are correct, there is a section to the left of the spikes that registers on the hitbox. This is because each character is 8x8. A single spike is made up of two 8x8 characters: a checkered square and a square with a smaller, black square in the bottom right. The "invisible" pixels are the white filling the rest of the space. I could make the spikes from three 8x8 solid black characters, but they would be much larger and impractical. So the dilemma is: do I remain faithful, or cheat for more accurate collision detection? That's a tough one. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on that.
- I'm glad you brought up the issues with throwing the key into the ceiling. That is something that needs to be fixed, so I will make that my next mission this weekend when I work on it some more.
- Lastly, you're freaking awesome! I can't believe you made a speed run video of the game. I turned into a giddy, little schoolgirl when I saw that. No one has ever made a video of something I've made before, so it was surreal to see that. It was also extremely helpful to me because I could see all of the issues you mentioned.
- Thank you again for making such a detailed review. My pride got hurt a little, but I needed to see it. This goes a long way in helping me to improve the game, so thanks for that. :)