Thanks for all the feedback! there's a lot of things that i definitely would have liked to polish and improve on further during the jam, so i don't mind hearing about what could have been done better.
i think a few of the unclear parts in the level design likely come down to time management during the jam. i had some issues with scope creep during the middle of the month, and by the time i'd dug myself out of that hole i only had a few days to get all the levels together.
After the jam i realized it would have been good to zoom out the camera some more, but the gap under the spikes section caught me off guard - i honestly forgot i'd made it that way by the time i started getting feedback!
the inventory objects stopping problem is also an interesting one: i thought i had disabled rigidbody sleeping as part of the item script!
maybe it was just something that slipped through. i had noticed some problems with custom gravity from area2Ds sometimes lingering after they left the zone (i ended up working around that by changing the gravity manually in one of the other scripts) but i guess i never held anything still for long enough to notice that issue.
as for whether i'll end up adding onto the game now,,,... i'm not sure. i tend to have a lot of trouble coming back to jam games after the fact, and this one kind of burned me out with the specific compromises i ended up making to squish it into the deadline. i'm still very happy with what i achieved! but i suspect if i were to revisit this concept i'd be starting from scratch, taking a different angle on the same core theme.
too many ideas swimming around my head all the time.........