Hello and thank you for the feedback!
The animals should appear at either end of the level, with a bunny near your camp and a fox near the skeleton log. There is a chance that they saw you and ran away before you noticed them, but the fox is a little oversized in this build, so he should be harder to miss. :)
Did the version you played not have an image of the needed keyboard key/controller button to press when you looked at the ground or other objects?
Yes, currently going to sleep triggers the end game screen. In a future version I hope to add a day/night cycle to simulate the passage of time. That way it is up to the player how much do they want to push their luck and stay out in the wild.
We call them “water skimmers”, and I’m glad you like them. I hope to make them move around the stream in a future Sprint. I’m a sucker for the small details in games. And I agree the cat tails should be pickable at some point, I will probably wait until I get a hunger/thirst system implemented. They would make a good test item for foraging for wild food.
I enjoy The Long Dark as well. :) I hope to get more styles of traps and snares in the game. That way you have to use the right type for the kind of animal that you want to trap. On the player walking, is it the lack of a headbob animation on the camera or something else that makes it feel “floaty”? I admit, I had not thought about the audio/visual feedback UI, I had been so focused on getting the new systems in I think I had a case of developer tunnel vision, but you right The Long Dark, Red Dead Redemption 2, and other games that I have been drawing inspiration from all have some kind of visual and audio cues for the player. I will definitely add that to make Backlog as a new item to work on soon.
Thank you again for the thoughtful and detailed feedback!