It sounds like you have the collision polygon covering the whole image. You need to change it to only cover the outer edge by having both outer and inner boundaries on it.

I don't think steam is a good option. I've heard that you need to put down $100 just to be considered by them, and then your game gets pitted against a mass of others to see which one users prefer and gets voted in.

It would be crazy money if you actually got your game on Steam, but you need to have either one hell of a game or just stupid blind luck, combined with a pre-existing mass of followers who use steam and can help vote it in.

Not easy.

On top of that, I don't know if they even accept HTML5 games. Though if they don't, that would be horribly ironic considering they accepted Construct 2 onto it.

This would be more of a web design issue rather than construct-specific. You can use any typical method to send a file automatically after a payment. A good start is the fact that almost, if not, everyone sets it up so that the file download is sent in an email after payment.

Yeah, 8-direction is intended for games with a top-down view, or possibly side-scrolling aircraft shooters. If you're not making that type of game you should be using something else, like platform.

Seems unlikely, but I'd like to know for sure as well. While from a technical standpoint I have difficulty grasping how they even could do that, if it does not work that way then it really shouldn't be an option.

I'm almost certain all keyboards use the same keycodes. If I'm right those codes are what are used in any game to determine exactly what a particular key press should do. While searching online for key code definitions I've not found multiple forms either.

I haven't actually tried using the Dictionary object, but in the meantime you should be able to create a dictionary object that holds the name of every applicable keyboard key as a value, with the associated dictionary key set as the keycode.

This way, when someone presses a key and you read the keycode, you can compare it against the dictionary and get the actual key name.

Wouldn't a massive number of tiny individual sprites create a huge performance hit?

Without knowing the details, you should be able to check if that animation is playing before interrupting it with another, and if it was playing you do the same On Finished stuff.

Procedurally generated, so the level basically goes on forever with randomized terrain? I'd love to know that as well.

An Array seems like it should work well. Just save the various texts as strings inside it, then you can choose a coordinate in the array at random and pull the text from it.

You might be able to use a Particle emission instead of a series of spawned Sprites. You can remove gravity and tweak acceleration/deceleration to make them hang in place, and use the lifespan (what is that called again?) to decide how long it stays behind.