I don't want to give the wrong impression; I quite liked your game. I only criticize because I care. <3
That makes sense for fuel. I like that idea for a status effect.
I sort of got roguelike vibes. That would have been a really cool direction, sorry you couldn't get to it. Saving is for suckers, I don't personally think I've ever save/loaded a jam game. Not where I spend my time, personally. But maybe the way to do it for a (someday) roguelike like this is to just save the seed you use to generate the level? And then stuff about the player itself. Remind me, was this Unity? I have some experience with serializing/deserializing json in Unity if you want some code.
Balancing jam games is the bane of my existence. I can relate....