Hi merrak,
this is already a lot of fun and i enjoy it a lot.
The enemies especially because they feel "alive". Very good job.
I would adjust the jumping a bit. Right now it feels that she stays at the highest point a bit too long which is a bit unnatural.
I wish i could see the equipped weapon or fist if unequipped in th UI.
I wish i could lure different enemies to another...lets say an animal to an enemy and they start fighting each other.
I can confirm that there are doors which "kill" the main actor (see attached).
Also i was confused that i cant go through the door at the start.
Overall very excited!"
When it's not having issues, I really enjoy working with the enemy AI system. I'm only using a small set of the features I have available. Adding new features, however, can be a real hassle. I think that's the cause of the browser hangup m.e. mentioned above. I have some safeguards in place to prevent the main AI routine from getting stuck in an infinite loop, but that doesn't seem to be working in Flash.
All of these crash issues seem to be Flash related. The desktop build is very stable. The one thing that all these problems popping up have in common is they could be the result of critical functions being called in the wrong order. Anything involving motion--leaving the map, climbing up a ramp, and the "VA04" bug are all managed by the same timing-sensitive routine. I don't know why that would happen in Flash and not desktop, but that does give me something to go off of.
The doorway at the beginning doesn't have its door yet. In fact, there are a few other doorways that should have doors. I'm still thinking about how to implement doors. Since doors will have to move, I can't make them like I do walls. But sprites all have to be the same size, and the doorways are too big. I have a couple of ideas, though. Eventually the doorway at the start will be the game exit.
I didn't think of putting the currently equipped weapon in the UI, but that does sound like a good idea. So does getting enemies to fight each other

I'm not sure if that idea would fit for this particular game, but if I could find a way to make it work that'd make for some interesting strategy. Perhaps you could befriend a guard dog and get it to turn on its former master. I'll have to play with the idea

Very nice!
Although I crashed and even froze my browser I enjoyed it very much up to that point.
The crash occurred while trying to walk up a slope (I guess that it was that) while an enemy was chasing m.e.
I agree with Bombini on the jumping and the feel ' alive ' of the enemies.
Sometimes the game spontaneously lags (don't really know why) and then it ' jumps ' a bit . (for instance I lost her and she was in a doorway)
I really like the inventory system and the interaction with it. You might give a hint on the keys in-game for this?!? The chest for instance. Maybe on the first encounter a hint "[Enter Key]" to unlock it?! You wrote about the keys in the post, but it would be cool to guide the player along in-game.
It is really awesome to play this!!! Hopefully you can trace the crashing/freezing issues?!
The inventory system definitely needs a revision. I haven't gotten around to it yet, so what you're seeing is the original version I threw together back when I was operating under the GBJam time limit. There were exactly 15 items... so with those, plus "Marika", there were 16 cards and just enough space for all of them. Since I have more than 15 items now, I'll need something that scrolls. But then I can design the inventory UI so that it has room for keys, tooltips, or any other usability features.
One thing I got out of reading Bombini's
Space Pirate thread is that I could be doing a much better job designing the first level to teach the player how to play the game. That first map was another one that was quickly designed under the original time limit. I haven't gone back to it since, but it needs some adjustments. For one, there is nowhere you need to jump, so the player isn't introduced to jumping until way later. And, of course, the chest and other items can be introduced at a better pace.
The "hang time" while jumping is a bit of a gravity hack. If I set gravity too high, it's impossible to jump over even small sized gaps. If gravity is too low, jumps are too unrealistically high. The proper fix would be to introduce some forward momentum, but I added the 'hang time' as a simpler solution. I think it can work, but I need to draw the proper animations for it. Right now the walking animation plays when you jump, so a proper animation is on the to do list.
Spontaneous lag is probably garbage collection. It's not noticeable on desktop unless you have a system monitor running, and then you'll see a little CPU usage jump whenever a lot of shadows are redrawn. This usually occurs when you change sectors (rooms), but can also occur if you step into or out of a bright light. It's more noticeable on Flash.
I probably don't need to cast actor's shadows against walls in this particular game. It works--and on desktop, at an acceptable speed. But there are very few rooms where you can even see actor shadows, and even then they're not very noticeable because there are only four colors and the images too small to get good dithering. I'll definitely leave the little circle shadows on the floor, but should probably disable the "real" actor shadows.
Memory usage in general is also terrible. It's one reason why I made a Flash port and not HTML5. You don't see it in the version I uploaded, but if you run the game in "editor mode" (720p resolution with the full command prompt), it reports almost 1GB memory in use before you even get to the main menu. The game flat out refused to run in HTML5 without Chrome complaining about memory. I can definitely fix it--but I just haven't made the time yet to do it.
Also a tiny detail: I am never a huge fan of Z as button becasue some keywords (like my german one) has the Z somewhere completly else. Again, tiny detial.
Ultimately I'd like to have a feature in the "options" menu to let the player completely customize the controls. What would be a good alternative to 'z' on a German keyboard? I don't think it'd be hard to add a few presets to select from along with the 'custom' option. I'd really like to have controller support, too. But that might have to be a desktop version feature.