Yeah, i am thinking of a way to minimize the pause sheet use when playing the game for the first time. Working on a patch to fix it.
About the progress bar, the answer is actually a bit stupid lol. I just drew an animation and made a script to move it together with the top of the progress bar. A completely unintended side effect was that the animation was getting scaled down in the y axis too, but i thought it ended up being cool (the waves seem to get smaller as there is less "blood" in the meter).
Thanks for playing!
P.S. The sprite sheet for the animation is below. Feel free to use it if you need it, with or without credit (although it is appreciated).