Thank you very much for the detailed feedback!
If you're curious about the animation and art, it was a combined effort between our artist (@HyperCandyChan) and me. We both played very important roles throughout the development. The drawing tools we used are simply personal preference. What really matters is the animation and motion techniques behind them.
More specifically, our artist created all the sprite artwork and sprite sheets in Clip Studio Paint, building the strong visual foundation. I enhanced the sprite sheets by adding elements like in between frames, squash and stretch, exaggeration, and other animation techniques to make the motion feel more fluid and impactful. I also applied these tricks directly inside Godot using subtle engine based adjustments like rotation and scaling between frames to add bounce and dynamism without redrawing every frame. It is a hybrid approach that blends traditional sprite work with in engine animation.
Most of the animation work is grounded in the 12 Principles of Animation; they are classic and universal techniques that apply to any workflow, especially when working with sprite sheets. It is fairly traditional, but also very flexible since sprite based animation can be imported into nearly any engine without worrying about file type limitations that sometimes come with 3D or bone based animation pipelines.
Thanks again for playing and for the thoughtful review!