Thanks for giving it a try! Mind explaining more in what way you found the controls awkward? How were you expecting the controls to work?
I wanted to make the controls be a fairly faithful reproduction of the classic Asteroids arcade game. The W key or up arrow is your thrust forward. A and D keys or left and right arrows are how you turn the ship. Takes a little getting used to, but one could argue that Asteroids is a beloved classic arcade game largely because of the unique controls it had.
For how it meets the jam theme, it is the mix of action/arcade genre from Asteroids with the unique puzzle like mechanic from Katamari Damacy of contacting items to grow in size. There's then a mix of the rage game genre for how your growth progress can be undone due to collisions with objects larger than yourself.
Hope that clarifies things!