Thanks for playing and the feedback.
We plan to make it a commercial game, but it is very early in development. We only have less than 2 weeks of work on it so far. Maybe we didn't need to include the comments about where it is headed, but it also helps to get early feedback that can help to shape it and make sure we aren't missing anything that might be obvious to others.
We plan to add an option to continue playing with some progress kept, such as gained Tools & Abilities, and probably a save feature. We agree that it is not fun to lose everything and start over, but all of our time working on it so far has gone into getting the core in place.
For now you have to select your Tools on the menu. The default to show it is E. We are thinking about options for changing tools and how best to implement it.
All Tools & Abilities are going to be refined. We will take another look at the whistle duration, and check on the sword damage. We intentionally limited the bomb radius to make sure it wasn't too powerful, though we will continue to evaluate it and maybe it can get a small bump in size.
We don't currently have any story, but do acknowledge that there will need to be something. We want to get a good core gameplay working before we do any story so we don't go down the same feature creep rabbit hole we did with Hungry For Loot and let the game get out of hand. We are taking inspiration from (S)NES Zelda games and similar games from the era. Right now we are using an asset pack, but are likely going to do at least some art of our own, and maybe do fully custom to have a more distinct look, depending on time. We will definitely be doing a lot more polish before we put this up for sale.
Thanks again for giving great feedback to us, and to the other games in our jam!