The background clouds in Jumpcoins are alive. Not only do they bumble around on their own, but they react directly to the player's actions. When you jump, nearby clouds move out of the way. And when you die, the shockwave pushes all the clouds outward with it, then they pull back in slightly to fill the vacuum.

I believe zero players consciously noticed this extra polish!

During development, I tuned the brightness of the clouds way down, because I figured players would find it distracting. After all, it's a platformer, not a cloud wrangling sim. But I feel like I must have gone too far, so it went unnoticed.

I ended up with about 100 lines of cloud reaction code, which took probably an hour to write and fine-tune. But in a compo game you have no time whatsoever to waste on unnecessary fluff! So how do you find the right balance between loud and distracting, delightful but subtle, and unseen/wasted effort?