Wow! Thank you so much for the detailed and thought out review, I appreciate it more than you think!
The main criticism I have gotten thus far on the game is most definitely the tutorial or lack thereof, and I totally get it! The game is very complicated- on purpose yes, but complicated nonetheless.
I like your idea of having narration in conjunction with an idea from another reviewer, which is having the sub start off in a state in which stuff needs to be fixed, showing the player how to be properly equipped to handle the stress coming.
The progress bar issue is most definitely one that I could have fixed, I was just setting them up so quickly that I didn’t think about it. The distance one is actually the only one not to have a lighter background, which is arguably the most important one haha.
Water in the sub, fuel, and oxygen in your tanks cannot be edited by the player, only stopped from filling up / leaking by fixing in game events. Another example of needing a better tutorial!!!
The UI issue you mentioned blew me away honestly, that’s something I would never have noticed!! I want to change the layout of the sub anyways for any “final” version I make so I will keep that one in mind!
There also are background “sounds” but no music, and they are quite quiet so it is definitely unnoticeable sadly. Also there is technically an alarm sound in the game files, but for some reason I could not get it to play properly in engine (I don’t know why, and didn’t feel like I had the time to fix it so it got scrapped sadly) but I definitely agree, sounds can make or break an experience!
Once again thank you very much for the insight! The only way to grow is to learn from these things and you definitely taught me a lot in the span of a single message. One day in the future I do plan to release an updated version of this game, so I hope you are able to see that one day! I appreciate the review very much!