Thanks for your feedback! I had similar concerns about the UI midway through development but then decided to lean into it after spending a while playtesting and ended up liking the way it restricted overall view a little. The delay for the polar bears is intentional, I was actually having an issue with the way my code base spawned their drop and tried to solve it through slashing their movement speed and having them die for a second while still moving towards you. Although I'm not sure that landed quite how I intended it initially. In the future I'd probably end up creating a global audio manager instead of having the audio linked to individual instances of enemies to simplify my code honestly. The transition I handled through adding a bool data value to water and transition tiles and having character bodies check whether over_water=true before starting their loop, which helped to keep the trappers over land and trigger my animation transitions on movement.
As for the map reveal, that involved more troubleshooting that I'd like to admit haha. But I took a screenshot of my total Playable area, and had a global script track player position compared to total map size to get a percentage value of how far they had traveled, then have that update my player marker and my reveal circle. The screenshotted map was underneath a texture that I updated by creating a transparent section at the point of reveal. With that I had to dial it in for quite a while because my math was wrong initially and nothing was lining up 😅