Going over the successes, opportunities, and future of my entry, "Theory"

Successes

• Sound/Music -- I always try to do dynamic music whenever possible. This time around I also added a musical cue for when you were in danger, something I should have thought of in many past LD entries. Also, I'm gradually getting better at making sound effects from scratch!
• Graphics -- For once, I'm proud of the graphics I made. I haven't attempted pixel art for a while, and Erwin's run cycle came out decent. It was fun drawing the cutscene and dialogue graphics as well.
• Dialogue -- Having dialogue boxes pop up from time to time helped me get the mechanics across in a way that still flowed with the story. It didn't take long to code either, so I should definitely do this more often in future LD entries.
• Cutscenes -- I wanted to try doing simple cutscenes at the beginning and end, consisting just of text and a slightly moving "still" image. It felt like it was worth the effort in the end, because it really helped the experience to provide a little in-game backstory. Plus, the ending will hopefully inspire me to do more with this concept in time.

Opportunities

• More levels/mechanics -- I really wanted to make more levels and more game mechanics to go with them, but due to time constraints I only had time for 5 of them, and two "enemies" (the watchers and the sentries).
• Difficulty -- The last level was a huge spike in difficulty. People seem to be breezing through the first four levels, only to hit a brick wall with the fifth. I probably should have had a checkpoint somewhere in it, but I didn't have checkpoints coded. Kudos to anyone who sticks through and beats it; to everyone else, I apologize for making it so freaking hard.
• Stability -- Ghost form takes a long time to recover stability afterwards, but it felt like having it recover too fast made things too easy. What I should have done was put some kind of pickup that recovers your stability, and put them in places where the player typically ends up hanging out to recover stability anyway. That would have improved the overall flow of the game without compromising difficulty.
• Graphics -- I may be proud of what I did this time around, but there's still much room for improvement.

The Future

• I kind of gave clues in the ending cutscene that more was in store with this game. In fact, this entire concept came from a game idea I had a while back in which various animals are captured by these alien robots, and each develop special powers that you use together as a team to solve puzzles and escape levels, kind of in a Lost Vikings sort of way. Similar to Erwin (who was named and themed after Erwin Schrodinger and the "Schrodinger's cat" thought experiment), they are all connected in some way with animals used in theories, thought experiments, lab experiments, and so on. I won't list them all, but one example character is a dog named Ivan, named and themed after Ivan Pavlov, and his power would be to reprogram the behaviors of the robots, among other things. (If anyone finds this concept interesting enough for a full game, I could use some collaborators!)