Regarding the movement itself, I feel like that little bounce that happens after a high jump is a little unnatural. Because it has the same sound and graphics as an ordinary jump but is lower, it looks like some kind of input buffering bug. Giving it different audio and visuals would do, but personally I'd say with such high gravity it just would be better to ditch it overall and put in some kind of landing animation instead that wouldn't affect player's behavior.

From bugs, textboxes don't seem to pause the walking animation properly and timed textboxes don't react to mashing buttons properly - they just loop around until their staying period is up.

Looks good overall, I really liked the death animation

It's a bit rough around the edges with some flaws like wonky full-screen scaling and extremely limited view along with no invincibility frames after entering new floors, but a pretty fun prototype overall. Gesture detection is neat, cute sprites too. Want to see this further worked on.

- Knockback cancelling mechanic is brilliant.

- Death screen is a nice touch.

- In the (I think) second section of the first (Cave) stage it's not possible to go down the stairs of what seems to be a passable segment - the character just shakes back and forth.

- Mechanics are still very solid overall, but stairs feel too sticky and take too much priority - especially in the tower section of the Hell stage I often found myself trying to duck or use the alt weapon, but instead unintentionally interacting with the stairs and taking damage. Perhaps their sensitivity should be tweaked.

- I feel the section after the Tower in hell stage is a bit of an unfun romp with the same short moving platform passage - enemy pattern repeated a bit too many times.

- Second boss was awesome.

Gameplay-wise it's looking rock-solid, though the boss seems to be on a bit unpredictable side later on. Good work so far.

Good game. Could use some more polish, but very playable as is.

Thanks. It's being developed further.

Thanks. I haven't played that game, these backgrounds do look like something worth investigating though.

When it comes to picking software, it depends on what you're aiming for. For the characters I used GMS' image editor, a program that doesn't surpass MS Paint that much, but the sprites' outlines are softened in the game.