 I've got a lot of feedback on my game, so perhaps a mini-retrospective is in order? As some sort of example on how to learn from feedback, I suppose. I'm overall pretty happy with the random generation system (levels are made from a handful of screen-sized objects that create a screen-sized Sequence, which in turn creates all the objects that make up the actual level). It's pretty limited in some ways (like all rooms being forced to have connectors to all neighboring rooms), but with more time I could have separate random tables for every possible connectivity (0-way, vertical-only, and so on). The game being a platformer where the direction you're going can change probably didn't help matters (platforms must be placed so you can reach any edge of a room from any other edge, even with inverted gravity) All the levels use the exact same room layout (mostly because I ran out of time to make more than one room). I figured the randomness would cover that up, but it's probably not good for longevity once you figure it out. Some people didn't even make it through the first level because it's unclear what the goal is, or because their first batch of random modifiers is too mean. I probably should've had the first level be just 0 rooms in a corridor (start, 0 random level room, goal) instead of a full 0x0 maze so it's physically impossible to get lost and miss the goal, teaching the player what the goal looks like because they can't miss it and ensuring they can at least beat ONE level. There were a lot of complaints about some modifier combinations basically make the game impossible. I didn't have a lot of time to test the game, and I probably should've implemented more weird modifiers and fewer difficult modifiers (going in line with the druggy theme). Another idea would be to give modifiers a score factor based on how they change difficulty, and then force a reroll if the score is too bad in early levels (where the game is supposed to be easy) or too good in later levels (when the difficulty is supposed to pick up). There were some complaints about the shop guns being useless (since everything drops guns) and there being no reliable way to refill health. Pretty valid complaints since the health upgrades just are in the random rotation of shop items, it probably would've been a good idea to have one item be guaranteed to be a health upgrade so players can heal themselves tactically (the price goes up exponentially every time you upgrade your health so you might want to wait with doing it until you're at low health) I think a lot of feedback about the difficulty could be because you can get hit by attacks from outside the screen a lot - while the surrounding frame is important for the style, it eats up almost half the screen estate. I tried hiding that by placing ALL the HUD elements on top of the frame, but that's basically just placebo to hide how much of the screen it takes up. There probably was a more elegant solution... The transition between levels take too long, especially once you've seen a few dozen of them. There's a key to skip it, but I didn't advertise it to the player anywhere. The game is difficult to actually quit (press Escape on the title screen). This is mostly because of the jam time constraints, I didn't want to mess around adding persistent objects at the last second and I also didn't want the potential for people to ruin their runs by accidentally pressing the button mid-playing. (Perhaps some middle ground where a global keypress pops up a show_question could've worked - dirty, but quick and simple). Though these popups don't work all that well with games that run in fullscreen mode (which, in turn, is basically a prerequisite for a mouse-controlled game). Perhaps making the game mouse-controlled to begin with was the main issue... I'm pretty happy with the psychedelic background: it's basically a white sprite (depicting some random text glued to a giant arrow) drawn rotated in a loop (0-0 iterations, I don't remember which off the top of my head) with the color lerped from hue 0 to 000 over the circle; it's rotated at a certain speed each step so they spin around, and the whole thing is drawn onto the room at a layer below all other layers... the entire thing is drawn to the blank canvas outside of all backgrounds, which leaves afterimages (a bug involving funky afterimages when the view got outside the room is what gave me the idea, actually) and then a very transparent white noise texture is drawn tiled over the entire layer at a random position, which causes the old iterations of the loop to slowly fade away. (The NOISE slowly fading away makes it feel much less noisy, which is a nice bonus!) The view-shake effect is just Game Maker's built-in view_angle system, so nothing special's going on there. The same system is used for the level-end transition. The levels falling apart is caused by a control object adding random values to the hspeed, vspeed and image_angle of all objects in the room, and then increasing the random amount more and more over time as the transition progresses. The chromatic abherration shader is a carry-over from the previous jam. I focused entirely on visual effects for most of the jam, starting on the core gameplay loop on the final day. In retrospect, that distribution might not have been the best idea, since the gameplay is really unpolished. Overall, it was a great learning experience, though I would've been glad if a larger portion of the learning wouldn't have come from my mistakes. Welp, there's always next time, I guess 