Excellent demo. You've really worked with the constraints of the medium to present a fine product. I seem to remember the Deku Tree dungeon being rather more complcated (with three levels in the entryway)... but perhaps you were held back by the 2D nature of the engine, and had to cut out some minor details?
Caveats: sound effects are much lower in volume than the music. I also don't like the way that the gui is part of the room, instead of an overlay (note how the gui scrolls with the room when you move from place to place - did Link's Awakening also act like this? If so, then never mind.)
And this:
(a) How is it taking up this much memory? You don't have that many graphics/music/sfx in this game to warrant such a huge memory footprint, even if you loaded all the resources when you first start the game...
(b) You're not loading all the resources when you start the game, are you? No wonder the game takes 15 seconds to boot up on my computer! I'm not sure if this is possible in GM, but definitely look into it.
Sure, 100mb of memory isn't
too bad... most people have 256mb of ram these days, and 512mb is common. But if you're taking up 100mb of ram for just the first town and dungeon, good god, the final game might take up 10x what you're using now. That would be a bad thing. =P
I'll end with another positive take, to balance out all the crits I posted above. This is the furthest I've ever seen an OoT 2D demo progress. You've soundly trounced that TRM-fellow. Well done. I look forward to seeing this game develope in the future! =)