You should not be sorry about this wall of text. I love hearing people's opinions of my game and stuff like this is so much more helpful than a "good game" or "nice visuals". I am really happy that you actually did come back again to try my game and I am so sorry that the save and quit doesn't work. What's weird is that I think it works for me because when I tested the continue button, I kept my tasks. I have a couple of guesses of why it might not be working but it honestly is a bit more complicated than I originally thought. As I am still kind of new to game dev, I am just very happy the game runs haha.
For the collisions I see what you mean with the telescope. The way I made my map was with multiple tilesets and used different layers for the floors, walls, and decoration. I got a bit hasty with making collisions for my decorations so they can definitely be a bit inaccurate. And for the slider minigame I think the hitboxes being inaccurate is just based on the speed of the arrows as in the inspector I have the hitbox be the exact size of the zone. I kind of noticed this when making the minigame but was running out of time by then so I just had to hope it was good enough.
For this jam I wanted to practice focusing more on the visuals of my game and try and make all the pixel art by myself since I want more practice doing that. I originally wanted the main character to be a human but after trying for a while I could not make anything I was happy with. I eventually decided that I should try and pick something that would be easy to animate like flying or hovering to try and save time lol. So that's how I decided on a hovering robot. I had assets in my mind but still wanted to try and stick to my original goal of making stuff by myself.
The enemy was also going to be completely different too. I had ideas of systems to actually distract the enemy, hide from them, and even temporarily disable them but had to scrap those ideas due to time. I also wanted the enemy to spawn these dangerous tasks once you got grabbed where instead of losing tasks completed (3 to be exact), these unstable tasks would spawn on the map, and you would have to repair them before they fail and decrease your completed task count. I was going to have 3 of them spawn so that is where the number came from but I kind of agree that it is way too punishing. If I was able to go back in time, I would put the max tasks completed to somewhere around 10 ish and have the tasks lost be 1-2 for dying but this type of information is imposable to know when making your game.
If I ever want to try and make this a full game, I would probably start with making the character a person and the enemy something more monster-like. Having more time would also be helpful as I could add more features that I wanted to add and make the collision fit things well. I feel like a lot of my excuses were because of time, but I guess that is just what happens in a short game jam like this... Just so much content has to be scrapped because of time limits. Eventually I would like to make a commercial game to sell on Steam and stuff, but I would like to wait a while before that.
All of this feedback has been genuinely so helpful, and I have learned more from this game than the others I have made. I am so grateful for this comment, and I am genuinely sorry that the saving doesn't work and that the punishment was too frustrating. I have never played Alien: Isolation but have seen a bit of gameplay of it and it means a lot that my game makes you think of it. I tried to address all the issues you had and gave my thoughts on them but if there is literally anything else, please dont be afraid to ask! I am addicted to seeing that bell go red lol. Hope this comment helps explain my thought process a bit and that blaming time isn't too annoying. Thank you again for playing my game and thanks so much for this comment.