Wow, that was an incredibly detailed review. Thank you so much for the feedback — I’m really glad you enjoyed it.
I’ll explain a lot of the design choices in the devlog, but yeah, the simple floor texture was intentional. Since the game throws a ton of particles at the player, I wanted the player to fill in the empty space of the environment through destruction.
The 3D audio effect was a total gamble — it could have worked perfectly or blown up in my face, especially because my own setup is mono and the effect only works in stereo. I had to trust the documentation blindly. So I’m glad to hear it landed the way I hoped.
Unfortunately, HTML export in Game Maker is terrible. I found out that to make something like this work, I’d have to write a JavaScript script directly on the game page, and I don’t know how to do that yet. I’ll try to learn it for the next project (fullscreen).
The theme was tied more to the story than to the gameplay itself, and that probably caused that feeling of disconnect. Sorry about that.
Again, truly amazing words. I appreciate them a lot.
(By the way, I played your game yesterday but couldn’t vote at the time — I did that recently, and I’ll be leaving a comment soon.)