Thanks for playing, and for your feedback! I appreciate you taking the time to give such a detailed review.
I originally wanted to make the tutorial more interactive, introducing the different instructions across a number of levels and with an animation of each one in action. In the end there wasn't time for that but I wanted to at least have something in place, I agree though that it could definitely be improved over the current wall of text! I think that would help clear up confusion over the different instructions that you encountered as well.
The speed has come up a few times and is something I'd like to address once the jam is over!
My idea for the second puzzle was as an introduction to the "wait" command, the truck was intended to stop by itself and the player was meant to work around it with those. I used a sprite of a garbage truck as I thought that would give some indication as to why it was stopping, an animation of people getting out could have been a nice touch though!
The UI buttons could certainly have been a bit bigger, I was trying to balance the size to have readability while also not hiding too much of the game screen itself. Maybe I'll try to adjust the layout, adding the UI to a panel so it isn't covering the map itself. I thought the positioning of the buttons would be enough to give a feeling of the intended flow to the player, but adjusting the relative sizes is something I'll consider too!
A falling over animation for the cyclist would have been good, but I'd already spent a fair amount of time making the sprite and the cycling/idle animations. As a solo dev, I had to balance it with the actual implementation of the mechanics and level creation, so adding more animations to the cyclist wasn't as high on the priority list as making sure there was something to play, but it's definitely something I'll consider adding if I update this more in the future!
Thanks again for all your feedback!