Oh i get it ! Yeah that's not really intuitive. The boat getting bigger as you add more crates would probably have been enough to qualitfy for the jam theme.
Viewing post in Float Yerr Boat jam comments
I was thinking about increasing the size in discrete steps with an animation of some sorts and so on. Probably would still have a bunch of physics bugs though.
Now I think your idea is very interesting. Gems are also used as health so that might result in some interesting interactions. Like, if you lose a gem, you don’t need as many crates attached to the boat so you can throw them at enemies. I would need to figure out a way to spawn new gems but otherwise this seems like a direction worth exploring if we decide to work on the game after the jam.
Thank you for the comments!