Sorry for the late reply! Had a really busy week at work, could not even update the description of the game.
Thank you for such a huge and thoughtful reply, feels good to be seen with this level of attention in a world where attention is hard to get.
Just checking, did you know there were updates to unlock if you pressed escape? I ask because in some way I got to complete the game (with barely any UI) there are 17 fishes in total and you get a "You beat the game" screen.
Actually this idea has inspired me a lot, I can put lot of odd game mechanics and secrets and stuff.
I do have an itch to make great game design and this is not enough, but I need to release a game before trying to be amazing.
You mentioned in the first paragraph, running out of time, I actually completely broke the game with some coding in the last 5 minutes and was panicking before I saw that I had one more hour, so I fixed that and also some other bugs.