So I unfortunately did not have time to work on this project for quite some time (family/irl stuff), but I've made good use of the time I had today!
I fixed the timing stuff and added the part of the animation that makes the snails fly out! Here, check it out:
half-way through the gif I'm like "this is never going to end x.x"
The gif shows off almost all of the features added so far, including the multiplier and how it gets reset if you run into anything. The game looks pretty sweet right now! I want to work on optimizations now, my code is getting quite large. My code is 1378 bytes from these additions, and after some optimizations I made during the writing of this post I got it down 20 bytes. I'm sure that with some more effort I could lop off more bytes.
This is really the first time I've been able to play the game, and it's a ton of fun. (I'm not saying this because I wrote it, either. I genuinely found it enjoyable) It's fast paced, but not too fast (for a while at least).
I might try to get the up and down animations more visible. I don't like how fast they are.
There's also a bit of a glitch in the beginning where it plays the animation sequence (you can't see it, but it's running the code) before it draws the snails, causing a uncomfortable wait. This is fixable and shouldn't take too long.