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Thanks for the response! I respect your vision and your commitment to avoiding scope creep, it's a good decision. It's easy to forget that the old games were built by teams of people too, so they had a lot of resources to throw at problems.

I agree that Elayne does move a bit quicker and more smoothly, and I noticed that in certain situations I could use that to manouevre around enemies and their attacks, so I think your approach works.

One of my big challenges with designing boardgames is getting caught in a trap of adding more features instead of just getting on with building the game. Plus, deliberately limiting features can create a more focused gameplay experience, which is often missing in modern games.  

I'm more familiar with boardgame design so the technical details you mentioned that come from designing a video game were enlightening. Are you working from an existing game engine or are you building your own?

Anyway, looking forward to trying the next demo!

Hey, great little demo! I had a lot of fun zipping through the levels and seeing what surprises there are. It inspired me to pull out Castlevania 2 to see if I could finally get through it!

I have some feedback:

• Elayne - Based on the art and material of her on your other sites, Elayne is a character you've breathed a lot of life into! She has a distinct and unique history, personality, appearance, and goals, and she's weird, likable, and relatable. The strength of that character led me to try the demo! However, due to the size and colour palette of the sprite in the demo, almost none of her distinct features come through (body shape, clothing, hair, eyes, expressions, bite marks, equipment, colour palette, etc have almost all been lost by being squeezed into a tiny, brownish sprite), and it's even harder to see when she moves as she moves quite quickly. I assume it's due to simulating the limitations of early console hardware, but I don't think it works in this case as the character has essentially been lost. Also, she controls essentially identically to other early "vampire hunter with a whip" games, so there's another opportunity here to differentiate the character... for example, she could be more agile but more fragile, and she could have some different abilities to further differentiate her (stealth? running movement? sliding movement? wall jump? sword attack for additional short range damage? vampire mode?).

• Whip - I like that the whip has a bit of a delay. It makes it feel more realistic and it requires you to be more careful about how you use it, which adds depth to the gameplay.

• Stairs - I think Elayne moves too quickly on the stairs. If she has the same horizontal velocity on the ground as on the stairs, it means she is actually moving more quickly on the stairs as there is also a vertical component of velocity added. Having her total velocity being lower on the stairs than on the ground would make more sense to me as people generally move more slowly while ascending and descending stairs than on flat ground. Also, a cool feature might be the ability to jump onto stairs, both from the ground and from stairs.

• Goals - what are your goals for the game and gameplay? What's your vision?  A simple Metroidvania type game? Some RPG, or platformer, or adventure elements?

• Enemies - enemy designs are great! The unique styles and movements are fun.  In the third level, the combination of enemies works to ramp up the challenge.