Closing In

With the help of some playtesters, I’ve identified, tracked down, and fixed a bunch of issues since the last build (despite my assertion that it was almost “bug-free”) and added in a title screen, a pop-up pause-menu, and the ability to save the game and reload from the last checkpoint upon a separate playthrough.  God, it’s getting so close, I can nearly smell it!
I’ve removed all the warp buttons (numerals 0-5), god mode, and tweaked a bunch of numbers as far as weapon range (for both the player and the enemies), speed, and force.  There are only a few more things I’ve got my eyes on before I call the level well and truly finished:
– Upon defeat, the final boss turns towards the player as if attacking for a brief fraction of a second before dying.  Once I have a dying animation this won’t be an issue, but it still bugs me.
– When you load up a game from a checkpoint (or die and reload from a checkpoint) everything from past checkpoints gets deleted and everything in the future checkpoint gets reloaded.  This saves all sorts of memory and processing power, but I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be better to reload the other checkpoint as well.  The other issue is that it runs the same script when you run into the tree that saves your checkpoint, so if there were any bad guys following you to it, they suddenly disappear when you save the checkpoint.  I’m still working on a way to make this look smoother, but I have a few ideas.
– The final fight seems a little too easy; I’m thinking about adding a second knife-throwing guard during phase 2 of the fight.
– The “view controls” screen that comes up from the pause menu doesn’t show the mouse.  Granted, the mouse only does one thing (well, two if you include the right mouse button, but not all computers have mice with two buttons), but I should still include it for the sake of completion.

And that’s it.  That’s all I can think of that needs to be addressed before I call the first level good and move on to the top-down engine for the “awake” portions of the game.

Again, I need you guys to play the crap out of this level; look for everything you can, and please give me as much feedback as possible.  If there are any issues aside from the ones I mentioned above (or if you have any recommendations regarding them) please tell me!

Edit:
Added a feature so that if the window loses focus, it automatically brings up the pause menu, and I changed it so the mouse-aiming thing doesn’t do anything if you’re holding melee weapons (which are all there are in this level).  Now you can use just the keyboard by moving with WASD and using L to attack.  That’ll have to change when ranged weapons come in to play, but hopefully this will help a little bit.