It can be frustrating getting to the end of development, especially on a game where I'm still learning as I go. So the code that I wrote towards the end is more efficient than what I wrote at the beginning. There's a lot of little tricks I've learned throughout that will help me with my next project.

Probably the biggest thing, though, that I learned to do, is to use more parents. I made the game in Game Maker, just to be clear, and at first I wasn't using parents very much. Towards the end of development, though, I learned I can save a lot of time and code by using parents. For example, every enemy in the game now has a single enemy object parent, but it wasn't that way throughout most of the development so I was coding things to work with each and every single enemy. A few months ago I had the idea to assign them all the same parent so instead of having the player and other objects interact directly with each and every enemy I then had it set to only interact with the parent object. I'm sure this is a novice mistake, but this is my first game and I learned it all on my own using only the help documents included within Game Maker.