Making a professional side-scroller

I post my fla later on, but until then… I just want to discuss what makes a good side-scroller.

I want to make a cute side-scroller, I’m working on the main character aniamtions right now, then I’ll work on the enemies and level design… then the bosses.

I need al the tips and suggestions for making a cool side-scroller…

The basic set-up of the game would be, depending on how many kills you achieve, at the end of the leval you get to choose a new weapon to use… so if you kill alot, you get cooler weapons. You would also be graded, so you’d get a “report card” at the end of each leval telling you how you did… How many times you were hit, how many times you were killed, and how many kills you made and how fast… all that would genorate a grade for you, and decided the new weapons you would be able to choose from for the next leval.