Thanks for playing, I appreciate the kind words! That's a good point on using the up/w key to enter portals, I know with a lot of platformers it's like 50/50 that they let you jump with the up key. With that in mind it would have probably made sense to enter the portals with down/s since that's less likely to be accidentally pressed (Or just let the player remap their controls).
I think with games that are really arcade-ey it can still make sense to give the player limited lives, but I totally see where you're coming from. Maybe a good solution would have been to just let the player continue anyway when they run out of lives with a reduced score. That way they can at least see all of the content. Or maybe just only have limited lives on the harder difficulties, not sure.
And thanks again! My plan in January was to participate in all 12 GWJs this year. So far I have no plans of straying from that, so see you next month!