Surely this artist must be ahead of their time! From the text about phytoplankton I can tell that there is clearly a hidden message to decipher; a meta-meta-narrative if you will, about the day-to-day struggles of man and the feelings of doubt that consume us. 10/10, a true masterpiece.
In all seriousness though, you should be at least a bit proud that you took the first steps here and managed to submit something that technically is playable and has some basic interactions going on - that's already much more than can be said for many of the other participants in this jam. I don't have the exact numbers, but I believe there were around 30K people who entered, and anecdotally the average team size I've seen has been around 2 people, so with some quick maths I can guesstimate from the 7.6K entries that there were likely between 10,000 - 15,000 people who didn't submit anything at all (30000 - (2 * 7600)). Game development is tough, learning in general is tough, but you actually did accomplish something with this entry, even if it's just a stepping stone for future development.
Here are some suggestions for the future that you can take or leave:
- Don't self-deprecate your efforts; it encourages you to give up sooner, and even if it's clearly beginner-level work, people would prefer to see the work of someone who tried their best the whole time than the alternative. IMO The self-deprecation talk can be excluded entirely. It's fine to include a description on the game page explaining why things don't work if you don't manage to finish everything!
- Don't underestimate an interesting narrative! Even though there were just a handful of paragraphs in the text that popped up in-game, it did actually manage to catch my interest, and with your writing style I believe you genuinely could make an interesting story (meta or not) with even dead-simple gameplay.
- Consider how you want to continue to learn going forward; I noticed that this game was developed in Unity, and with your admission to being new to game development, I can't help but feel that there might be better options for you to try. Godot has been gaining a ton of traction recently, and in my own subjective experience it is significantly easier to learn and use than Unity, and has a brighter future ahead due to its open-source nature. In this year's jam, it is now nearly neck-and-neck with Unity in terms of % usage by developers (37% to 43%) compared to last year's wide gap (19% to 59%). You can find many great tutorials on YouTube for free (e.g. Brackeys), or if you want a more structured environment, I can recommend GDQuest's beginner's courses as a good starting point. Of course, nothing beats reading the documentation and trying things out for yourself in-engine!
Regardless, I hope you continue your game dev journey, and I hope you will choose to participate in more game jams in the future!