You might just get pointed to contest rule 2 and be out of luck:
"Games MUST be submitted by the deadline (Midnight PST, November, 29th 2018). NO LATE ENTRIES WILL BE ACCEPTED! Make sure not to submit last minute to avoid missing the deadline." (source: https://itch.io/t/317350/rules)
Essentially, it's your sole responsibility to leave plenty of time for the upload and then making sure it got submitted correctly in case of issues like failed uploads, dropped connections, or even unclear instructions in Itchio itself.
It can feel harsh, especially after spending a long time on an entry, but there has to be a cut off.
Also, we hit Submit button before the deadline and followed the standard itch game submission. So technically we submitted the game before the deadline and it was not last minute. It was not our fault that the submit button did not work as intended or there was a technical issue that itch did not work as intended. This should have been clarified better like literally explaining to check "Entries" and search for your entry.
That is kind of the problem here... because we submitted games on many game jams before so we are familiar with how itch game jams work. So it was quite the surprise and caught a lot of us off guard that the submission system for this jam is different and even if it was mentioned in the rules, it was very vague and not specific enough. It may have been mentioned on Discord but a lot of us were busy working on our game. We submitted before the deadline, followed the rules, submitted the way we submitted on previous game jams, but apparently we got a hoodwinked because of some different systems or settings in place, and not to mention finding out if there is an error is not as easy as it sounds since there is no error message or anything nor any messages of successful submission. It is just disappointing after working so hard and being so stressed.
Thanks for responding.
When you upload via the submit button on itch, the upload process also is part of the submission - normally. But i heard that since IGMC is larger scale and higher stakes there was some modifications (code it think) to this jam which may have affected the submission process, but unfortunately some of us found out too late and the time was up. The rules did not specify the actual process of making sure how the game was submitted and it gave instructions that we thought we understood from previous itch game jam submission process (i did 26+ game jams for fun, this is the only game jam that did this to me - which was not fun because i stayed up till 3AM and couldn't sleep for 3 more hours to alleviate the stress, even more LOL!). I enjoyed making my game with my team. I am just disappointed that it wasn't listed on the entries for me to share to my friends and team.
Thanks again for the reply. I am pretty sure you are busy especially with this high stakes jam, so I appreciate that you take the time to reply.