Glad you had some fun with it!
I think I mentioned this in the Discord, probably before the jam, but I had a few broad goals in mind this time. I wanted to overpromise and underdeliver, I wanted to build something big that would give players a sense of adventure, and I wanted to not finish or at least "not finish". I think I succeeded in all of those.
The exact structure here is something I'd been thinking about for a while though previously in the context of a potential collaborative project. It made perfect sense to do for this jam, with a bit of jankiness added, though my estimates put it as being really tight in terms of timing. It would have been a better fit for a two week jam, but I decided to just roll with it anyway since not finishing a game isn't the end of the world for SBIG Jam.
I'm planning on doing a postmortem where I'll talk about this in more depth and without trying to avoid spoilers.