Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• What I loved
  

  • Very clever control scheme. Though at times it felt difficulty to control this unwieldy and speedy space-ship, it was very reasonable and an interesting way to control the game. I think separating the accel/decel controls from the heading would've made it much more intuitive. When things were diagonal it was hard to tell, at times, if i was really slowing down or not
  • Aesthetics were a win, for me. As far as roguelike graphics go, it felt very space-themed and the animations were a very nice touch.
  • The tactics of space combat were also quite satisying. The UI did a good enough job of showing the enemy's stats that choosing which weapon to fire with wasn't a trivial choice and you could see the impact of it clearly. 
    

  What I WOULD have Loved

  • The game was only a touch buggy, i noticed that the UI didn't scale properly on different monitors. Also the end game was somewhat lackluster. I got a prompt informing me that I'd won but nothing else, the game just kept going.
  • The mechanics around shops and money felt a little inaccessible given the length of the game. It was hard to make enough money (past the starting 25) to really do much of anything, but when I WAS able to do something, I had a great time doing it and wish i could've done more
  • Tough to do in a 7drl because this game already had quite a big going on, but a little more depth to the star systems would've been great. Maybe some asteroids flitting about and other such space debris.

• This game feels great to play. Ship movement is well communicated and energy management creates interesting situations. The planets and stars look nice. The graphics and UI elements feel very “space-y”, and the music really ties it together to create a nice sense of immersion.

  The quest for the Orbitron Device was a little frustrating, most of the clues as to its location were not particularly helpful unless I had already been to the solar system that it is in. Winning or losing felt like it was a little too strongly influenced by rng; I won games where the macguffin was on a planet in the starting system, and I lost games where the starting system was completely over run by pirates.

  The ship combat was very difficult, and I found that a more successful strategy was to avoid the pirates altogether, put my money into energy improvements, and focus on exploration.

  It seems like all the systems are in place, it just needs a bit of tuning to be a really nice space exploration roguelike.