Thank you. I did want to get rid of that filter that comes from the camera method I used, but there was an overdraw issue when i did so where if you moved slightly to the left you'd see a fully black pixel because that part of the screen would not be rendered. Normally this would not be a gigantic issue but it was the very last day and the game needed to be solidly 160x144 4 colours.
Gating the game properly was tough, yeah. Level design was done on the last day of jam, there are no checkpoints in the game and thus it was hard to strike a balance between overly punishing the player and making it too easy