Yeah, I wasn't assuming you'd change the color. a background bar seems like the best option, that's why I left it vague as to what you could do to fix it. And "ambitious" is not the same thing as "high effort". You can put a lot of effort into perfecting an experience that ends up being very short on the player end. And that platformer comment thing is just my personal experience, for some reason literally every programming class I ever took (up until college, where you aren't allowed to have fun anymore) started us out with trying to program a platformer game in whatever engine. Scratch, Unity, you name it. So, that could just be a "my strange and coincidental experience" issue. Also... let me get this straight... the lag of your controls on starting a game... was intentional? If so, why???
And yeah, now that you mention it, a lot of what made it feel flash-y was the animation style. A lot of what I was saying was just me trying to think of reasons for a vague feeling I had.