Thanks for the analysis! Your will to chase higher scores regardless is noted. :P
To address certain points:
- Could you elaborate on the shovel?
- Agreed, the way enemies suddenly spawn can be quite a surprise, especially if they spawn on top of you and just pointblank you there.
- Also agreed on the way enemy attacks are untelegraphed, doubly so since their delay between attacks is randomized. There was originally going to be a pseudo-sealing system that increased how long an enemy takes before it attacked depending on how close you were to it, but that never made it in.
- The luck-based prefiring situation is unfortunate, wonder if this can be addressed by controlling the randomness of how the door spawn points are picked. However, there is at least a pattern to whether or not enemies will spawn from either the doors or only the dark hallway.
- Relatedly, this type of randomness control can be seen with how weapons are randomly dealt, where you are guaranteed to get all 5 weapons within 5 swaps, with zero chance of a repeat weapon happening (ie: Tetris bag-style except repeats when crossing bag “seams” are disallowed).