Thank you for the detailed feedback! I very much agree. Although I’m not sure I’ll expand this prototype with all the features the game ought to have, I have thought that it would be nice to revisit and polish up the fundamental mechanics and first-time experience. The feedback encourages me and gives me some more motivation to do so.

Thanks for playing! Yeah, it’s kind of hard to track your own movement – best you can do is by targeting a planet and using the distance meter. I would ideally come back to this and improve on those aspects, just not sure if I should still try to adhere to all the jam constraints or to follow up at a higher resolution with a full keyboard!

Thanks for your diplomatic comments, lol. I see you gave up learning the controls after about 30 seconds but I already knew my entry was the impenetrable sort that people would have to make some commitment to figuring out, and I respect your mad hustle to play as many of these as possible.

Thanks for playing. Most of what I’ve heard from others has been along the same themes. It is pretty impenetrable, I know.

It’s tricky, but I didn’t invent this control scheme, and I’d run the risk of looking like a poor sport for pushing back against feedback – I appreciate it, really! – by saying the lack of friction can work perfectly fine, even if it doesn’t come together in the current build.

But in the EV games this is based on, landing under fire is something of an advanced challenge, and I didn’t bother at all with trying to make it accessible to new players in the time I had – I was actually crunching pretty hard on the last day and only barely got the planetary landings and menus included.

I also think it’s currently way too hard to read the speed and direction of the tiny ship, things move too fast relative to how close the camera is, and players are supposed to have time to get their sea legs with simple cargo transport missions well before other ships try to kill them. Perhaps in a future release someday.

Sounds about right! The EV games it’s a clone of were a bit like that too, though my prototype, being a bit rushed, has a harsher learning curve on top of being harder to read visually. In the original you weren’t getting shot at immediately in the first star system, and had time to learn to get your momentum under control before final approach. The S key helps a lot by rotating opposite to your current angle of movement.

There’s a visual screenshake effect when you’re hit, but your momentum currently doesn’t get disrupted at all under fire, so you can stay calm and tank a few hits. I even would have liked to add enemy missiles with strong knockback effects that would knock you right out of a perfect landing approach, another thing that’s in the EV games, though obviously would’ve just been cruel in the current build.

After the jam though I may tweak some numbers for the starter player spacecraft, capping top speed more and adjusting the rate of acceleration, so it’s easier to stop overshoots and stay within landing speed.

Thanks for playing!

Thanks. Yeah, controls can be tricky; I wanted to confine everything to a 3x4 key rectangle like a phone, although I’ve noticed that most other submissions I’ve tried thus far haven’t cared too much about that. Maybe in a post-release update I’d try to add an alternative control scheme that feels more natural.

Some keys/controls like the afterburner, primary and secondary weapons do nothing until you’ve purchased those items, so there is some of what you’re describing, though in a less rushed game I’d certainly pace everything out slower, letting the player learn movement on easy shipping missions before they’re thrown into live combat, as well as having some upgrades only available in distant star systems and so on. But right now there’s nothing of the sort, so I’m inclined to agree.

Yeah, it’s definitely a bit impenetrable haha, more proof of concept than anything.

I was leaving myself room to allow the player to purchase bigger and better ships, but the ‘starter’ ship is a little hard to read at that size unless you play for a long time to get used to it. If I do a post-jam update I’ll surely make some tweaks there.

Thanks for the feedback!