Awesome feedback! Thanks.
I would say the cheat-y bit is that I have been a programmer for years upon years, just not on GDevelop and just never did a Jam.
You would probably see that in a heart beat in the way I programmed :) (I hope lol). It's pretty object oriented, though it can still be more optimized.
I wish I understood how to do the 'zoom in' on the player better.. it was one of my questions at the start of the competition on the GDevelop discord. I struggle with the camera zoom vs layers. I did a zoom on the base layer, and my UI layer completely broke. Then I did it on the background but that broke everything else. It was frustrating and in the end I decided I rather have a working game, then nothing at all, so I just skipped it. But yeah I need to get that technique fixed. I want to fix this game with a newer version later, or on a separate publish, no idea how to deal with that as this is a Jam version I don't want to ruin. It should stay the version it is on the jam. So maybe republish.
Also in the last bit I tried to limit the chicken in the screen, but it totally was ignored by the logic. Not sure why. I toggled disable those lines to not cause trouble.
We can talk about it on Discord I suppose, but essentially I wrote this: if chicken.positionX() is greater than maxwidth (etc) then set chicken.positionX() to maxposition on screen visible. It just kept going beyond.... no idea why.
The transition screen is a good idea. Another would be to lock the controls. It is what me and my wife also discussed afterwards. This was the sole reason, you were still moving forwards while the chicken was positioned down on the bottom at Y525. So you let go, but you already moved the chicken to 500 or something and you collide in the first car.
I'm definitely looking forward doing more with GDevelop and will probably get my buddy to join next time.