Thanks for playing the game, I'm glad you find it fun.
The map pulsing is a good idea, and I'll certainly look towards adding it.
As for the gamepad control-scheme changes, I cant directly test any of these changes due to lacking a controller of my own. Therefore any changes made are mostly going to be guesswork rather than something I can actually experiment with. However I will have a look at the code to see what I can do.