One of my favorite entries of the jam. Simple controls, simple movement, a clear objective, I like the speed and physics at which the octopus moves around and there is sort of a janky feeling which makes it fun, uncontrollably bouncing around due to meteor-like objects hitting your character, either giving you a good boost upwards or sending you straight to the death pit!
But most importantly, FUN. It's very creative and I can see the general design of the game was gameplay oriented, or GAMEPLAY FIRST.
My number one concern is the level design, and I'm gonna let this out of my chest: I really, really hated the stars. But I learned to 'get good' and managed to get some rather decent scores, from 35 to 50. I think the game could be improved really easily by two main things: First, the stars of course. You could completely remove them as an enemy, giving them another purpose, of course, for example, pushing you away with tremendous amounts of force, etc (it would be a waste of assets to simply remove them from the game). Because of the nature of the game, anything falling from the sky could send you to the game over screen at any moment with the right amount of luck, and this leads to the second suggestion: Making the game a descending platformer, you are, well, a diver! Having our friend Octy descend further and further into the ocean instead of awkwardly climbing upwards to get more food/points fighting against falling objects would improve this game drastically and make the name fit even better, I would simply make the level/s lead the player into the deepest depths of the sea, increasing the difficulty as you go deeper with... hey, you know what? Maybe the grumpy stars could be waiting for you in your journey to the bottom of the sea. Another thing, make sure the player can see those pesky stars after descending from a platform or something. You would never want to fall into unreactable, off-screen, instakilling spikes... would you? I wouldn't want that in any platformer game I play. Another little suggestion would be having the sea cucumbers impact the gameplay a little bit, maybe reducing the score upon collision, maybe extra bounciness upon collision, whatever you want. But hey, after all it's your game and I can't force you to change anything.
Another thing, I like the idea of "submit your score or die" but I would rework this, only because of the design you went for, which I would say it's a mix between 'casual' and 'platformer'. And I'm not saying this as if it was bad, 'casual' just means easy-to-learn, simple controls and a really friendly presentation, these are all points in favor, for any game. This decision you took led me to play it with my right hand with my finger ready to click the submit button right before I fell to the bottom or saw that I was headed right into a grumpy star, I don't know if this was intended or not. Maybe let the players submit the score even if they die?
Excellent art and sound, not a single complaint, art style is really unique, hand-drawn, music, sound effects and even the font fit perfectly, objects are distinguishable, very, very rarely you have objects blending in with the background and the game tries to be cute and it doesn't miss.
Conclusion: Great all-around for a 48-hour game jam, a 9/10 from me and the biggest player-filter-award goes to the grumpy star right at the left of the level, what a son of a...