It’s been 13 years, and multiple Gamemaker versions, since I wrote this. I tried translating it to more recent versions once but it couldn’t do it automatically and it didn’t seem worth it to sort through the changes to get it working again.
I do remember some facts about its construction though. I don’t remember putting in a fullscreen mode.
On the fluidity, a lot of homebrew Pac games I think cause entities moving through an intersection to center for a frame on that intersection. Octropolis doesn’t do that: if an actor is moving at a speed that’ll take it completely through an intersection on one frame, it’ll get advanced by the excess distance on the other side of the junction, in whichever direction it was going.
The octopus doesn’t do the thing Pac-Man does in the arcade, where it moves diagonally if you turn early in an intersection, but it will still let you turn slightly early, in which case it’ll skip over the extra pixels.
If you think the game is chill, you haven’t gotten close to finishing the board, where the game sends the white sharks after you.
BTW, I know of at least one bug in the game, if you stall for a long time the speedup mechanism kind of gets borked. I’ve only encountered it once though you have to stall for a long time for it to happen, it seems.