Great looking stuff! Great art and I love that Zelda style music. This shows a lot of competence, some clever bits of level design in there that I liked as well. In my personal opinion, there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing something this similar to an already existing well-designed game to use as a learning experience. In fact that's probably one of the best ways to learn, by taking notes and understanding what makes a good game a good game.
If I were you I wouldn't really fundamentally change what you have here
yet. I say make this a very short game, polish up the gameplay, programming, level-designing, and everything else that comes with making a game. THEN start over and put your effort towards something that plays on your personal talents and creativity more. If you like your story/characters/art you can bring any of that over from this to a future project.
And credit where it's due, there's already stuff I see that is plenty different from HLD (level design based on the items/abilities you have or don't have, designated save points, a nice moment of environmental puzzle solving with the enemies needing to shoot the boxes for you, stealth enemies). But obviously, the game is very similar to HLD visually, which often times unfortunately makes folks call it a clone immediately. And then the combat/movement design is identical especially with the inclusion of the gun (which again, I think is a fantastic way to learn so you have a side-by-side comparison!). Overall, playing this demo, there are plenty of ideas that separate this from its inspirations, they're just a bit too subtle.
So keep at it, my man. Again, shows competence and a lot of potential!
And here's a couple things I noted from the few minutes I was playing.
- Normal movement is pretty fast! I think the walking speed could stand to be a bit slower, since we have the dash to speed up, it'd be really helpful in combat situations to have a more easily controllable walking speed.
- Very long dash! I noticed the vertical and horizontal dashes have a very far reach, and the diagonal dashes have a significantly shorter reach. I can tell this is for the purposes of level design, and the programming is much easier this way, but like the fast walking speed it makes planning in combat situations a bit harder and more unpredictable. So I would say shorter distance on the dash, and equal distance 360 degrees (so the player has a consistent idea where they'll end up). This will be a bit harder programming wise when it comes to dashing between platforms of different distances, but that would be a rad learning situation.
- Goofy control mapping on the keyboard, but easily changeable. This is also probably a good point to start accounting for a gamepad since you have a lot of your systems in place.
- And lastly a big one is the player's direction when moving. I noticed vertical movement/direction always trumps horizontal direction. If moving up-right or up-left the player's sprite always changes to the upward facing sprite no mater what the previous direction was. Obviously, the issue with this is - if I'm running to the left and an enemy is slightly above/below me and I tap that direction to scoot up and then attack at them, suddenly I'm attacking directly above me instead of to my left where the enemy now is. So a directional system where if I go from running left to running up-left or down-left, I keep facing left. All ARPGs have this so just pay attention to how Link faces in Alttp (or the drifter in HLD) when you start moving diagonal.
Sorry for the long post but I dig what I'm seeing!