I enjoyed the gameplay of this sidescroller. The art was great! Loved the parallax, and the buttons and icons look very clean. I liked the pixel grahics in the world and the animation for the character was great too.
I was never able to accrue any ascent points, the green gems, even though I covered a pretty good distance in the game. So I never was able to recompile and improve. Not sure if I missed some aspect of the game?
The idea of the upgrades was good, I'm just not sure it totally panned out in usability. I could tell that the goggles increased how many coins I collected, and the armor increased my hp, but I couldn't tell if the boots actually had any effect, mechanically. Same thing for the weapon. I didn't feel it being any different when enountering enemies.
It would have been nice to have a way to collect healing. I never figured out what the gold coins did besides give a snippet of lore...I wish they could also have provided some healing!
For the most part the jump and duck mechanics were great EXCEPT that it was difficult to jump if I there was an enemy in the way that my character was attacking, so sometimes it was about impossible to avoid the green hovering enemy. That lent a bit of a feeling of frustration, like my keys were locked.
This game has good bones, and I definitely think it could be improved even more. I hope you continue to work on it!