Hi! Thanks for your detailed thoughts and kind words!
But of course horizontal thrust, in a full would be project, would need to have a different feedback or mechanic limit to make it more obvious that it's more of an exception.
Actually, I'll likely remove the horizontal thrusts entirely so that navigating via air streams is the only way to get around (potentially bringing them back as an unlockable upgrade). I would have removed it in the most recent patch, but I'd already gone over the time that I'd allowed before I got to that.
Perhaps game should set the "current choice" for keyboard control to the line that mouse had hovered over.
Hmm, I hadn't thought of doing this. In just about every GUI application/toolkit that I can think of, hover and focus are intentionally two distinct and separate states. My impression/experience is that conflating them presents an accessibility issue.
In one of my other games, I did something similar to what you suggested (rather than a menu, it was a grid of gameplay elements that could be navigated with mouse or keyboard), and a blind player ended up with focus unexpectedly moving around because they unknowingly had the mouse cursor over the playspace.
Perhaps dying was too rare.
In general, I think I'm OK with the music changes being subtle - even if a player doesn't realise that it's tied to their actions, so long as it changes across the play session, that's what matters. Dying isn't an essential part of experiencing that, I don't think.
In a larger version of this game, I think we'd have new music (and new time of day) once you moved to a new level, which might go a long way to giving some of the variety that I think players would want for a session that lasted more than 5 or so deliveries.
On a cute side, I, for some reason, really liked how the vertical gauges on HUD looked, especially the second one, for vertical movement. The bubble in the middle made me a bit of nostalgic at gauges and tools that I would find at dad's room, ha.
That's the sort of feel I was hoping to evoke! Ideally, I would have liked to have given them a more painterly look and feel to match the rest of the game, but I didn't have time to paint them properly and the quick vector placeholders I put together ended up staying in the game.
Initially, the height of the liquid changed position in the altimeter to represent how far away your neutral buoyancy point is, but a couple of players interpreted it as a resource that needed to be replenished, so I added the "spirit level" type bubble in the last patch to try and make it harder to interpret that way.