No worries, as I see it the whole point of these jams is to end up with a heap of games to play and foster some community spirit and actually playing them is pretty important for that, haha :)
I figure for a lot of these jam entries a lot of the magic is in that kind of first "exploratory" playthrough so it being fairly linear is a good thing for efficiency if anything.
You should have seen my notes! I had it mapped out at one point so there were 4 different paths through the game, then later realized that meant way more work for me and parts of the game would never be seen by players. And when you're doing a game jam, you can't expect to necessarily get a lot of time dedicated by the player. I then almost straightened the whole thing out to be 100% linear, but I liked keeping a little split so that you can play it a little differently if you feel compelled to play a second time.
