The shooting for jumping is indeed a nice idea! I did go back and forth a bunch of times on the jump heights and stuff...then finally stuck to a shorter jump. In hindsight, I should have give it a bit more height or at least some increased hang-time. The death issue is compounded by the fact that there's a very dumb bug where enemies start updating themselves before they're supposed to. Fixing that in the post jam does help the game get a sense of memory based challenge. Otherwise it was just a stupid meat-grinder in the initial builds ^^'
Thanks for the suggestions though, I'll incorporate these into further jams and games :D