Did you include your Game Design Document in your downloadable files?
Yes, it's DESIGN.md and also in the source.zip and all-the-things.zip and in github

Tell us about your game!
This is an arcade-style game and so you learn by dying. In theory your job is to return 'the portal' somehow, then you will be equipped to 'clean it up'. If you (somehow) remove all the blue squiggly enemies, you win. You're not expected to win. Soft 'winning' is figuring out the portal thing and leaving the main room and flying around with the blue things.

As mentioned in the DESIGN.md a big inspiration was geometry wars pacifism mode. I didn't want to copy that though because they already did that and the nuance that makes it fun is hard. Iterations over the speed/duplication of the tentacle mobs and over the spawn 'up' and destroy 'down of the squiggly mobs (from small-to-medium or medium-to-small for instance) was difficult. In the end for getting the game jam submitted we decided on closest to balance, it's hard/tedious to win but also people who don't play perfect won't immediately overload into many thousands crashing the game. With much experience, there are different settings that might be more fun for an 'expert' and even possibly dynamically changing difficulty. But of course that's too much for game jam.

Here are the controls, this is cheating:

arrow keys: go horizontal opposite way your going will eject a staff, staff will bounce mob and kill squiggly

space: bash, will shoot you forward temporarily invuln, causes a spark which mobs and squigglies will spawn from.

r/f5 reset, counts as a death but doesn't spawn a spark

f4 full game reset

above is all you need for the portal section, afterwards:

space/bash is much faster once you have acquired fuel (spawned by vip after portal is returned :-))
q/e/enter will auto-eject staff very quickly. can sometimes jam! (there are many things that are.. 'buggy', of course much of it is too much to fix in a hurry, but a big part of it is on purpose. 'find the 'bug', 'isolate it', 'dont fix it and its a feature now'. sandbox/physics simulation rules, go make your own fun.

items that you touch you consume items your staff touches probably follow you or your staff. some items are slightly touchier than others.

gate switches are triggered by all kinetic objects. vip gate tries to 'protect' the room from mobs.

never used game maker studio but lead dev is full-time sre in enterprisey stuff. used aseprite with a wacom tablet (the ones without the screens) for vip/shepard/mob designs. rest was made in game maker studio directly, except the 'fuel' which you'll recognize as the 'jam' logo downscaled terribly. :-) we thought of this as a fun easter egg for players from the jam but are prepared to draw a 32x32 jam jar ourselves if this a concern for ya'll. :-) ;-)

Did you remember to include your Game Design Document?
Yes, it's DESIGN.md and also in the source.zip and all-the-things.zip and in github

Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes

Extra Notes
This was a whole lot of fun and so glad you put this together! We learned a lot and got a chance to throw together some cool stuff. Thanks for hosting this and can't wait to see all the cool games people made! Code on GitHub, history from first week before first currently public commit is privately available if you'd like to review but the commits are boring.