Thank you for the kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed it. For the color palette I'm actually using the palette of the original NES. It's my first time really working with it, and it's much less restrictive than a lot of the palettes I've been using for my past few projects which was a nice change of pace.
Yeah I was probably a bit too reserved with the one-ups you get from points, I feel like the breakpoints for them are probably a bit too spaced out. I originally had planned to have a bunch more randomly spawning items like the onigiri (one-ups being one), but they all ended up getting cut for time lol.
Originally I had removed jumping off ladders to prevent an issue where you could sometimes clip yourself into walls lol, but I forgot to add it back in after I had fixed the underlying bug that was causing the clipping. I've got a list of small QoL changes I can make once the jam is over, and that's definitely going on there.
Thanks again!