Thank you for the quick and concise comment!
I whipped up a quick cell shader for this, would like to add some contact shadows and other details for better clarity but its pretty decent as is. Water was honestly pretty simple too, yet quite effective. - the main difficulty was in choosing the color palette :D
For the transitions, the plan was to have all the pals jump and run around from excitement, but that wasn't completed in time properly so we are left with a long wait time with nothing interesting happening. So you are absolutely right, we should have made less of a wait time.