Thanks for playing and the feedback.
I appreciate the feedback looking at it from a commercial viewpoint. It does change how to look at a project. While we are planning it to be commercial, the current project has less than 2 weeks of work in it, so is pretty rough. Still, keeping the goal in mind will help to shape it properly. You have some good points that we need to think on.
I agree with you on the movement. I do not like how it feels right now, and it is high on my list of things to refine, but ran out of time before the jam after fixing bugs.
Glad you like the flute, We wanted to have unique enemies and different ways to defeat them, and are happy with how that turned out.
We will look into better feedback when your weapon in ineffective.
We are trying to balance the bombs more as utility, and less as a main damage dealer. They can get good for groups of enemies, and needed for some, but generally take a bit more timing and effort to use well. We will be refining them further, but don't want them to be too powerful.
We were inspired by classic (S)NES Zelda and similar games, which is where falling in the pits causing damage came from. In the original jam version of this game you lost as soon as you fell in, but we changed it to do damage and respawn at the entry in this version, as the instant loss felt too harsh. I agree that taking damage and respawning does feel a bit unrealistic. We will think on it. Lava will likely be added at some point to give more variety.
We will double check the boss room unlocks. It could be a bug. Which boss was it that you had trouble with?
We are aware that some attacks can go through barriers, especially if you are close. We haven't decided if we want them to be half-height walls that you can attack over or not. Plenty of the classic games we are taking inspiration from do allow attacking through some barriers, so we are debating how it feels and which way to go with it.
I really need to work on an in-game menu for settings in our template. It keeps getting pushed down the road.
We will check the spike traps for any that are not working.
I'm not familiar with Necesse. We will take a look at it.
Right now we are focusing more on making the core game feel good. There isn't any story yet. The jam theme was "Spin to Win", which is where some of the spinning things come from. We are thinking of keeping some of that and adding rooms where the whirlwind is used to spin things as a puzzle mechanic. Beyond that we don't really have anything distinctive to market on. We will need to think on that. This is meant to be a smaller game that we don't want to let ourselves go crazy with scope creep, like we did with our main one, so we need to find a good balance of something fun that will be worth buying, but also not make it too big. If it does well enough we may do a larger game in this style with an overworld and exploring to find different dungeons, and likely other mechanics for outside the dungeons.
Thanks again for the great feedback!