Thanks for the feedback - and the pitch shifting is a good idea.
In hindsight we probably shouldn't have accepted the integrated UI when we didn't have an artist on our team and were just using assets. We kept struggling with a good way to indicate when you had a full brace of fish. Right before the deadline it occurred to me I could implement having bands of gold appear on the fishing rod with each fish caught, but it was so close to the deadline I wasn't going to risk implementation before the deadline.