Great work on your first jam! Game is pretty basic right now, but if you put time in it, it can grow to something pretty nice. Liked the smoothness of your animations, even if you had little time for them.
Regarding optimization, game ran smoothly yet with a couple of bugs. Seems like you're planning on updating it, so 1) collecting honey after a death with having it doesn't display it; 2) collecting poison after that and ending the level crashes the game; 3) BGM slider didn't control music's volume.
General optimization tips : Optimization takes your precious jam time, decide if it is worth it; Some things do not need to be ran every frame, move them to creation or on event scripts; For something simple you do not need giant textures, if you're shrinking them to what you need anyway; On major steps check how your game runs on your to-be-exported-on platform; Know the limitations of that platform; Keep learning and look for help if you're stuck! (but look at the documentation first)
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It is true that the game is pretty basic, as most things were rushed through unfortunately. I do want to put more time into it and see where it leads.
Thank you for the bug reports! I did not have time to do much testing with the upgrades so these are really helpful. The BGM slider seems to keep breaking, I’ve had the same issue twice while testing the game out and had to keep fixing it. I fixed it yet again after the jam so hopefully it is working in the next update.
At the start of the jam, I took some time to do proper event signals, as well as dynamic code to make things optimized. But as time went on and I started rushing certain things, I basically dumped a bunch of stuff in global variables and hardcoded a bunch. In the short run it seems fine, but if I’m hoping on a full fledged game, it seems like really bad practice. So I’m still trying to figure out where’s a good balance for this.
Once again, thank you for the kind words and review!