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Yeah, if the long jump delay is there to prevent other issues then it's of course a good thing.

And the vaulting animation cancel doesn't happen much during combat, so like you said, it's not a big problem.

Now that you mentioned that golden soul indicator, I remember seeing it after collecting each soul, but at the time I just wanted to keep playing and quickly clicked it away. Then I briefly thought "Hey, did that just say 4/5? Earlier I read that the level has 6 souls." Apparently I just didn't get the hint right, and then assumed I had misread the counter.
Can't wait to check out those changing level layouts, sounds quite interesting!

It's nice to get a bit of insight into these aspects. Smooth sailing to you.

Alright, here goes.

While going through the starting tutorial room, I read the sign saying that you can press jump and crouch at the same time for the long jump. But I still had to hold crouch for a very short moment to "activate" the long jump (0.3 seconds or so). This may not seem like a big deal, and I may only feel that this is strange since I was trying to long jump like in Half Life (where it's instant). But his resulted in me holding crouch for even longer to make sure I wouldn't mess up, and having to slow myself down annoyed me. I think it would be better to make the delay as small as possible, or even take it out completely. But maybe there is another reason for the mini-delay?

Concerning the weapon behaviour I noticed that vaulting over a ledge cancels all other actions/animations, such as reloading and charging a shot. This was strange to me because normally you're not allowed to switch away from the blaster without firing the shot you just charged, or switch away from the over-under shotgun before automatically reloading after firing both shells. It's useful for saving blaster ammo, but it seems unintended.

Now for the level progression. After exploring Windmill Acres i had 5 out of 6 souls, but couldn't get into the caco tower. Searching around for a way in did me no good, so i begrudgingly left the level and found out that I simply had to enter it again to progress, through the last mission option. This was unintuitive to me since I was able to find the first 5 souls without starting another mission. But I understand that it was probably designed like this because the last mission repopulates the level with cacos to fight before getting to the tower.
Something similar happened in Serenity Shrine. I explored the whole level, but still had to re-enter through the specific mission options in order for Wantopus to spawn the soul and open the gate. I get that this is probably a good way to give players some pointers for where to go. But it makes me feel like exploring the level on my own is pointless since I'm forced to let the game lead me to these secrets again anyway before I can collect them. Maybe there could be some sort of way to include Wantopus leading the way in the "first" mission? Or better yet, let the player collect the secrets on their own and have Wantopus as a backup plan if they don't find it by themselves?

Trying to explain these thoughts in written form is probably not ideal, but I hope they are understandable nonetheless. I look forward to your opinion on them, so until then.

I've been playing Demo2-hotfix2, and I had a great time with it.

The weapons are good stuff, I liked the tracers on the automatic rifle shots because they let you know how much spread the gun has. The Trumpet Launcher's projectiles seem to be much faster than in Golden Souls 2, which is a very nice change.
As for visuals and atmosphere, what can i say, it seems to only ever get better in the Golden Souls series. Which means a lot. I noticed loads of really nice looking 3D models. Many of the music tracks are comfy to the point of making me sentimental, and you made Doomguy downright precious.
But the action in your mod gets the adrenaline pumping as well. I had some quite frantic fights in Serenity Shrine's lava castle. The long jump and wall jump make the game more interesting and varied, and getting armour from gibbed enemies is a really cool addition. Non-lethal pits were honestly such a good choice, they let me be much more daring with exploration and I almost never quicksave anymore.
There were a few oddities concerning the progression inside levels, weapon behaviour and movement though. I wonder if it would be possible for me to talk to you about these mechanics in more detail. This is all very interesting to me as I'm trying to get into the game design field in general.

Regardless, I'm really happy that you're making this mod. Thanks, and best of luck to you!

Alright, I just tried to start the game again and it worked. Seems a PC restart fixed whatever was going on.

And actually I was thinking being able to aim straight down could be useful even when standing normally. I found myself trying that when standing on ledges. It could also be used when you're hit by a little bug, so you don't have to run away to shoot them. I know it's just a little thing, but it would be nice to be able to do it.

I do enjoy the "character weight" thing, it makes actions more deliberate. And it really isn't too much. Cheers!

Hi, I just finished the Demo. It took me two hours, and well over half of that was owed to the boss.

What you made so far is looking great, I appreciate the many options such as custom sharpness to the pixels. All the particle effects (I hope that's what they are, I'm not really a dev myself) look really good, such as when you fire and when you vaporize small enemies. The sound effects are quite nice too, especially the enemy sounds. The ambient music is nice, but a bit of a short loop.

What I'm missing is the ability to shoot straight down and up when hanging from a ledge. It seemed to me that using the triggers might be used for that, like when you're in the air. Also, it's weird how you lose a tad of momentum when landing from a jump. Oh, and the screen tearing is unfortunate since V-sync does add a bit of input delay. But good on you that you put that warning on the option, since I would not have noticed it otherwise.

Now, the boss is a real killer. As I died a few times, I felt myself getting better at it and stuff that I thought I was going to complain about seems fine in retroperspective.

There are a couple of things though: I started crawling to avoid the super-quick overhead dive the Slither does, but I found myself getting hit three times by it anyway only when all of its eyes were gone. I might just have crawled a pixel too far to the edge, but I'm unsure so I mention it regardless.

And then there are the flies. Oh man, the flies. The varying distances they come out at sometimes meant that I would miss one because it barely ducked under my shot, and I'd get hit. Also the screen going all grey when you get to low health made me straight up not see them when I was looking out for the bright purple boss, resulting in the flies killing me. It's rough when you get hit by an unlucky fly and get ten energy or nothing at all in return. Or when you then jump in to collect the energy and immediatly get bodyslammed by the boss coming up the middle. By the way, do sometimes more flies spawn than normal? I think I was facing down ten one time.

But what gnawed on me more than the boss or the flies (pun sadly not intended, it was one of my better ones) was the way back to the boss room from the save point. Might there be a possibility for some sort of soft checkpoint outside of the room for when you die to the boss only?

You wrote that you unlocked all doors after the boss, but I found myself unable to go anywhere new except for the charge beam in the adjacent room. All the colorless doors are still locked. I thought I might be able to return to the starting area with the green door, but I couldn't jump up at the point where you get the Geo Suit. Did I miss something newly explorable?

And here's something that just happened as I'm writing this: when I tried to start up the .exe a second time, it didn't work. I opened task manager and found it just running as a background process, loafing around at 0% CPU usage. Killing it and trying again sadly does nothing different. I'm currently playing on Windows 10, if you want to know.

The characterization of our protagonist so far is minimal, and that is quite alright. Not that I'm saying I don't want her to have any character, but in this regard one can overdo it.

I think that's finally everything I wanted to say. I'm stoked to see what further things you'll do with Zordak. And thank you for what you've made and shared with us so far.