Oh, don't apologise for the uncomfortable sounds, it absolutely adds to the game and is clearly designed to be this way!
About the advices, I don't think I have any about the game itself (as I'm also a beginner in gamedev, and I do it just as a hobby) - but for the jam itself it could help to leave comments for other people's games to get more visibility to yourself and your game. It really sucked when I had score lowered because not enough people rated my game (it was my first game jam and I only made the project available for downloads, and no web version).
If you ever need someone to playtest your games, or a second opinion on something, or anything like that, feel free to ping me on discord, I'm on the GWJ server :)