You have successfully guessed one of the mechanics I really wanted to put into the game! 

During development I kept wanting to have Shimmy have access to a “brick” or something exactly for the purpose of holding down a button of their choice. This would introduce the ability to hold up to two buttons down at a time and improve Shimmy’s multitasking capabilities in the game. At the same time, I wanted this to induce some decision-making for the player, such as figuring out which button they want to have held down or figuring out the correct timing to quickly run over and remove the brick from a button.

Funnily enough, I also thought the tedium of having to constantly manage even one brick would’ve gotten a bit silly given the size of the map so at some point we toyed with the idea of using Shimmy’s mallet instead, and give her the ability to “Thor’s hammer” itself back to her at will. This however was a fairly tricky thing to put in, as it would’ve removed some aspect of the “run around the face of a gameboy” part of the game and might’ve even ended up keeping the player just playing on one half of the map.

In the end, we also weren’t able to figure out a game to have the gameboy play until like day 2. A simple bullet hell was what we settled on because it made use of all of the d-pad and we opted for a melee system to encourage a back-and-forth between the buttons so the player doesn’t just sit on shoot after finding a blindspot. The push-back mechanic also serves the same purpose of encouraging the player to have to use the d-pad rather than chilling on the AB buttons.
(Fun fact: the gameboy micro was chosen, if not for the epic pun, because I thought the aesthetic of Shimmy running over the screen itself looked cool. We wouldn’t have been able to do that with the original gameboy)

With the bullet hell idea finally set in stone and having only 2 days left to make the whole game (we had to essentially do 2 games lol) the brick ended up being put to the side as the planned bullet hell had no reason to hold down a button without either slamming into a bullet or making running over to the other side redundant. BUT I STILL REALLY WANTED THERE TO BE A BRICK IN THE GAME >~<

Anyways oops sorry looks like my game designer mode accidentally tripped haha. Might end up just copy pasting this as a devlog since it reads so much like one already.

Thanks for playing! (And also nice ant idea we’ll consider that one hehe)