Glad you noticed!
I wanted the player to feel a bit stressed, and I did't want the game to go on forever. I found that the time bonus had to decrease over time, but then I found that at a certain point, it gets crazy hard to keep playing, so I would end up with just about the same score every time. I started decreasing the time bonus much slower at that point, and that really helped. Then a friend suggested a countdown sound when you only have a few seconds left, and I think that added to the experience as well.
I would actually have wanted the level layout to be the same every time, so the player can learn an optimal path, but I couldn't figure out how to do that with the limited code size. Same thing with the sometimes jerky movement - this happens when a new platform must be (randomly) placed, and it ends up in a position overlapping with an existing platform, or too close to one, so the game has to randomize a new position and check again. Without the code size constraint, I think this could be fixed.
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The countdown sound does add to the experience, I agree!
Hmm ... hmmmmm .... in line 1, replace "D=1:IF...THEN..." by "D=MOD(INT(D)-1,4)+1". That's not exactly equivalent, but I think it does what you intended. And then you have enough bytes left in line 1 to replace "FORI=0TO127" by "FORI=0*RND(-4)TO127" or something? I am sorry, I could not resist ... just love these kind of puzzles, and had to do something similar for mine.
Thanks, those are both good ideas to save some bytes!
The reason I can't make the level look the same every time, is that the random numbers are used both for placing platforms and treasures, so even if you seed the PRNG the same every time, it will start to diverge when you pick up a different treasure. This could be solved with a second PRNG, but that's a bit of code, and you'd have to be mindful of the speed. Another idea would of course be to store level data instead of randomizing it, but that's truly not suitable for a one-screen comp. A third idea would be to use the program code itself as a sort of (bad) PRNG to generate the level...