No need to apologise! I hope I wasn't too harsh, game dev is stupidly hard, and I had a similar thing last year where I had too much on my plate and had to cut it down last minute, so I get the feeling. Funnily enough, there's quite a few similarities between your work here and my submission last year!
It's a shame you couldn't get it done before the deadline, but with a few tweaks this can still be really cool. I wish you the best of luck in your future work!