I'm almost finished with my game, but I can't help but look at fundamental flaws that are too late to fix.

For one, the game is clearly inspired by Zelda, but I feel like that since it plays somewhat like Zelda then they should also expect shields to work like they do in Zelda, but in my game, the shields just reduce damage (making them act more like the rings in Zelda 1). The truth is that I made the shields reduce damage instead of blocking projectiles because I didn't want to bother writing collision detection for that along with trying to find/create sprites to accommodate. But then I realized that I have Octorok-like enemies that shoot projectiles and there is no way to dodge them outside of moving out of the way.

The other major flaw is something that someone else pointed out, which is that the enemies spawn in random locations. I should have included preset spawners in the room templates, but I never thought of that and including that now also means that I have to make different spawners in each template along with the number of spawners that appear in each difficulty.

I guess these are things to keep in mind for next game.