Journal Entry 4 - Giant leap for the finish

Okay, feedback time:
Levels are too big - I agree, but I don't have time to remake all levels in smaller scale, so I'm gonna increase the speed of the player and enemies, and zoom out camera to compensate
Levels are too hard at the beginning/Enemies attack too fast - Kind of by design, it's not meant to be a casual game you run through without issue, and it is supposed to get progressively easier as you collect power ups through the levels. Getting used to the combat flow is part of the experience. I may adjust the enemy animations for the first level though, to ease the player into it a bit.
Combat is monotonous/repetitive - Yeaaaah, duly noted, but I'm gonna say that's by design for now. When playtesting it myself, it occured to me how similar it is to the old 2D Zelda games, and those do not have particularly amazing combat at the beginning of the game either. If I were to work on this for another few weeks, beyond the scope of Project C, I could give the player some more abilities/attacks to use for sure, though. For the enemy part, I see that a boss that just requires sidestepping between spamming attack button is not great fun, but I think it is sufficient for this gamedev level I am at.
Projectile attacks could be destroyable by player - I thought of that, and I thought that it would trivialize the difficulty of shooting enemies, but given that attacking locks player in position and animation (which was another feedback complaint, but that is very much by design and I will not change it), it might be a fine ability to have.
Roots in the first level take too long to clear - Agreed, will reduce the number of them.
Shooting enemies could predict where the player is going to be based on their movement - phewwww, I mean, yeah, I agree, and I can see how would I implement it, but I am not going to do it for the final submission, sorry.
Jumping ability but can't jump on walls - the jump was mainly intended as a way to skip the roots and enemies, not walls, and while this is a cool suggestion (and in fact, there already is a place in the game where you do kind of that), I don't plan to add it.
Make player stay in an area locked by invincible roots and have them dodge shooting enemies while waiting for jump recharge - really interesting idea that I did not think about. I will not add this in the current levels, but it would appear, if I were to make more.
Add Restart Level button in Pause menu - no. Not because I couldn't, but because dying is the intended way of restarting a level, and when you're not dead, you still have a shot at completing the level.
It is unclear what the icons on the UI mean - I can see that, especially the Speed icon with the lightning is not great. During development, I thought to add story and immersion-friendly guide that would pop up during gameplay to tell the player what they're looking at, but this has been scrapped due to lack of time, and all that remained of it is the Prologue on the game's itch.io page. If there is a parallel universe, where I worked to improve the game on all of this feedback, the in-game explanations of UI would surely be there.

Known bugs
Enemy doesn't aggro when attacked from behind - it is intentional that some enemies can't see behind them, it is not intentional for them to ignore the player if attacked.
Enemy collider still active after death - I found this during my own testing too, didn't think it was that big of a deal, apparently it is, to players. Basically enemy during dying animation is still an active obstacle and prevents player from moving over them.
White flash on damage is playing with a delay - Okay, this is totally my fault, the enemy sprites I used had a "stagger" animation, which already included one frame when the enemy sprite is white, so I didn't have to manually do it. But since the animation is on trigger that happens on damage, and some animations have to be finished before the next starts, and then the white flash is not in the first frame of the "stagger", this can cause noticeable delay between an enemy being hit and visually taking damage. This is merely a visual bug, but quite jarring, and I will change it by not including the "stagger" animation in the Animator, and doing all white flashes manually.
The complicated collider system in Level 5 sometimes breaks - This happened once during the session, and it quite surprised me, and I don't know why it happened. I'm gonna take another look at this system, but I can't promise anything.