Thanks for your comments! I had a blast working on this, and the month long game jam was the perfect time for me to go through the entire game development process. I also plan to look into exporting it for Android, and potentially iOS, depending on how painful the processes are: playing on a tablet or phone, preferably one handed, was one of my primary goals.
I was torn between setting the velocity to zero before applying the force, and combining it. It looks like I went with the wrong choice :D I struggled for a long time with the raycasts (the 3D math in general), and conveying the game status to the user visually, but I am very happy with the outcome. I'll let you know if I update the game further, or if I throw together a dev log video.