Thank you, very good review and points well taken. I've been told that I need to play more games and conform to how they operate. You are right completely. I also did jam through this one to add a lot of lower quality content and features rather than a lot of polish. The message system was the easy wrong way of providing feedback in the game so your point there is also very well taken. In November I'll be submitting to the GitHub game jam and I will take my time and try to come up with a very polished idea. I've been jamming hard (I submitted to the past 6 jams) and explored both some 3D things (three JS), this platformer (matter JS) and some standard html, css, and javascript. Feel free to try most of my submissions and you'll hopefully find something adequate or enjoyable among them.
https://lostwords.itch.io/