Thank you so much. Your words really meant a lot to me, especially "dont know how you made it in time with so much content".
My initial idea was way more complex, but luckily my wife talked me out of it and into doing a simple single room game so I could finish on time. After day one all the movement was in place and basic mechanics and I was a little too cocky about how much I could polish it ... but then I kept adding in upgrades like a dummy and had to implement them and the stupidest thing I did was decide you should get a color swap if you upgrade your armor or if you unlock the one percent bot (I didn't have to do any new animations ... but recoloring is still work and then coding the right animation based on the upgrade combo) and a sprite change with the Top Gun.
My wife was out of town for most of the jam, so I could take all my evening hours to focus on the game, which was nice, but even then I ended up taking a day off work and pulling an all-nighter right before submission to get a working build out in time.
I'm still pretty new to this. Once I understand arrays a lot better and shaders better, and dialogue for sure!, it probably would have cut development time a lot, but as it is I had to just brute-force a lot of things using the code I do understand. It felt nice to get the game uploaded on deadline, and feedback like yours is really meaningful, but I have to scale the next one way, way back if I want to keep from burning out. Like take what I think is small enough scale and then cut down more. I think using pre-existing assets would be smart too, then I wouldn't be too overwhelmed and could focus on fun gameplay, code and design.