Yeah we were trying a bunch of things with the pounce, like a windup animation (that was then canceled because the game was too hard with it). There's a bit of cut content in the pounce dynamic, it should've been faster than the run with a predict mechanic, with a secondary strat that included stealth on the still mice, but the stealth was giving us problems and the demo without the mice felt already so fast paced we just abandoned it and left the slightly slower pounce to force players to corner rats.
The invisible mice were object of a great debate on the colour of the sprite. In the end we kinda liked the idea of the mice being invisible flashy assholes and we left it like this.
Thank you for the feedback!