Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed the sound design. I spent a lot of time with those stupid 8-bit sounds so it would feel like something similar to Mario.
That's a really good suggestion about darkening the background. I had wanted to change the colors of things that were jumpable vs not, but that would have required some time in Blender I didn't have. (I think I mentioned this in my post mortem).
In the third stage, if you stand behind the hatchback (red car) and jump, it will fling you super high. Alternately (and much more difficult) if you time a jump exactly right on top of the car you will shoot stupid high. In stage one and two jumping right behind the car will place you perfectly to get the candy, then to land on the trash cans perfectly. That was supposed to subliminally get you to try the same on the 3rd level. It appears to have met with mixed success as a plan.
I will look into the soft lock. I have invisible barriers on either side of the level so you don't continuously fall off the map since you can move in all directions. (In level 5:1 I take them away so you can fall off.) I thought that I had placed the fences in such a way that you couldn't miss them. But I now realize that I could widen their Area3D to catch you even if you "technically" missed the spikes because it doesn't matter in the end and I want to prevent a soft lock. You can also get stuck on the wall of the building when falling and soft lock.
I am curious, when you soft locked, did you try pressing Escape to pause the game and click on of the level buttons to restart a level? That was the addition I made in the last 30 minutes of the jam to try and partially address soft-locks I missed.
I actually have more camera views I didn't get to use, including a 3rd-person free look and a 3rd-person follow camera. I just didn't think cramming those candies into the existing levels would be fun. But yes, my idea was to slowly introduce the candies and then in later levels make more candy combos. There's even a reset candy I didn't use. Plus various changes to the CRT shader that I was going to mess with. So I plan to make a bunch more levels. Which is why I'm trying to grab all the info I can on bugs.