Funny you should say that, a few members of the team are also not in the cookie clicker-type game enjoyer demographic! The platforming and other active gameplay was in part added so that we would also enjoy the game, and everything came together super well!
Regarding the difficulty scaling, we made some tweaks towards the end of the jam to improve it, but there’s definitely still some refining to do. I will say, however, that if your pumpkin hits 300m there is still plenty to deal with even with all upgrades purchased (but yeah, nothing really to work towards at that point, hopefully we will get a chance to return to the game and add more upgrades/features).
We’re super proud of how the pumpkin ended up looking. It is in fact a 3D model, rasterized to 2D and made to look like pixel art using a SubViewPort and shaders. Glad you liked the effect!