im happy you think the concept was cool! this was the first game jam ive ever participated in and i learned a lot through the process
i want to believe the scope was actually doable within the time limit, and that i just didnt correctly utilize the time i had (90% of the coding was done within the last 20 hours)
i think part of my issue was perfectionism in trying to refine unimportant aspects (i spent 5 hours just modeling evil, for example) and another was the speed at which i work. never being under a time constraint before meant that i didnt really realize just how unoptimized and slow my workflow was
regarding the physics issue, i dont believe its possible to beat the level even without physics, as you cant jump up the height of a box which means you would need a straight bridge across and there just isnt enough boxes for that. i did consider locking rotation on the boxes which would make it possible, assuming you could jump high enough, but that would end up looking very strange if you happened to stack boxes by just barely having their edges overlap
if you have any ideas as to how i can improve this interaction im open to hearing about them, as im still going to be working on and improving the game post-jam