Thanks for the compliments and feedback!
I'm sorry about the technical issues, it's definitely not in the state I want it to be in. I'm not sure where the freezing issue came in, but I ended up encountering it too, though only through the Itch App version after submission. I tested the packaged copy a few times, making multiple copies into different folders it after finishing a fresh rebuild of the package and before opening it in order to mimic fresh starts of the game in each folder copy, and all seemed working very well locally with each version.
I uploaded the build through Butler and submitted the project. I then installed it myself through the Itch App, and the game froze up and ultimately crashed the first time trying to open it. In fact, It wouldn't even let me open the app-installed game again even after restarting my computer multiple times. I ultimately had to uninstall and reinstall the game again in order to launch it from the app after that.
I was going to try to troubleshoot that a bit more, but then when I was trying to trim down the gameplay clips I recorded for the gameplay video, DaVinci Resolve decided it didn't want to play any audio while putting it all together. The rendered out version kept the sound, but the sound refused to play in the timeline while editing. I spent way too long troubleshooting that and ultimately had to give up and just accept it, and cut all the clips together and balance the sound visually reading the levels and adding audio fades to blend between clips somewhat. If not for that last snafu i may have been able to polish the build a bit more with the time left. (Naturally i opened DR again a couple days later out of curiosity and of course audio worked fine then..)
On the road failing to load, if what you're saying is just the road didn't load in but rest of the world did, that's really surprising because the road + landscape (static meshes) + houses are all merged as a single HISM for performance. I would think that would make it an all-or-nothing type deal.. but I am new to HISMs, so definitely something I'll look into more in depth.
I agree on the difficulty, I have to tune it better and tie it into the the difficulty adjustment settings. I didn't have time to tune it too much more for the jam, I admittedly bit off more than I could finish and that made the final product a bit rough, again sorry about that!
I do intend to revisit everything after the winners are announced. I don't want to touch the project in the meantime in case Epic needs see it for any reason. I will say though, on that note though, I originally I had 3x as many birds, and their attack timers were much more aggressive. I also dampened the bike crash sensitivity a bunch from where i originally had it. It was pretty insane, wont lie lol.