I'm glad you liked it! :)
The reasons I chose to make the player have to hit spacebar to collect the wordboxes are twofold:
- As you said, it brings a bit of variety to the gameplay apart from movement
- It's an active action (namely speaking), and I wanted to represent that with a separate button press
If the collection is not getting detected it might be a collider issue, I'll look into it. In the meantime, though, I can tell you that the game checks for the spacebar being held down, not for it being pressed. So you could theoretically play the entire game with the spacebar held down, or more realistically, hold it down a bit before you reach the wordbox. That might help. :)
As you say, player speed could use a boost and a progress bar would be nice. It's in my list of planned fixes.
Thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback!