I genuinely think this game's page is absolutely #1 the best game jam game page I have ever seen. Absolutely stunning, just insane polish with the phone and embedded game viewer, the parallax background, the CSS, just fantastic. A high, high bar of quality established. While I don't necessarily think this approach would be the best for a published indie game for-sale, this is an incredible direction for a game jam game. Very mysterious, atmospheric, stylized, simple, beautiful. The best game jam game page. I would be floored to see something top this.
The game itself is very pretty, and is very impressive in its size and complexity. Moving the ship around is very fun, you configured very fun physics for the player ship. I wish flying the ship and playing with the physics could have been a bigger part of the game, as currently messing around with the ship is the most fun part of the game, and the player is punished for it, due to the fuel system and how bounty hunters start hunting you down within like a minute of you not paying more money to the space station. The actual gameplay is mainly just reading through menus, which are charming in their writing and humor, but the menus are frustrating to navigate through, and solving the story segments is a method of trial-and-error, with severe punishment for failure. It discourages exploration in the branching dialogue tree, since everything is very slow due to the inability to skip text, so even though I'd like to choose new options to see the additional content and text, I know that if I waver from the path I know doesn't kill me, then I'll be pretty severely punished and have to start all over again, which isn't fun. The writing blocks, while charming, loop very quickly in their procedural placement on the planets, and the goal of the game to pay off the debt relative to how much you earn from each encounter makes the game unnecessarily long. At least nothing is lost when you die, which is nice in that I don't have to restart all my work, but once I realized that all weight and stakes of death was gone. Death was in some ways helpful, as it essentially just teleported me back to the space station where I could sell more cargo to get more money to give more money to pay off my debt. A lot of the game felt padded out and stretched unnecessarily, with extra steps that just felt to waste my time, like converting from cargo to money to debt paid in an extremely clunk menu UI. If that menu UI was less annoying to navigate (having to renavigate back to "Sell" after every time I sell something, and find the highest unit of cargo it will allow me to sell right now, instead of just being able to sell all my cargo at once, etc.), I feel the game's length would be cut in half, and it would leave a much better taste in my mouth.
This game has lot of really awesome stuff to it. Really lovely, cohesive graphics. Charming writing. Tightly-tuned, inherently fun physics and overworld movement. Complex and layered systems. An expansive world. Cute dialogue choices.
However, all of that awesomeness is bogged-down by clunky menus and UI, slow, repetitive pacing, an overextended run-time, and an unsatisfying anticlimax. I wish this game had better Awesome per Second:
Don't feel like your games need to hit a certain run-time. A brief dose of dense, highly-concentrated epic awesomeness, fun, and impressive quality is infinitely better than a long, stretched out, and consequently lighter experience. Always leave them wanting more. You two have a penchant for high-quality and relatively long game jam games, but I challenge you to focus that same talent, skill, and energy into a shorter experience. Compress that 1 hour of gameplay down to 5 minutes, and see how rich, fun, polished, juicy, and vibrant the results could be.
It's always a pleasure to play a Saucey Armadillo Games game. I'm still absolutely going to make my way through your entire library, don't you worry. I look forward to it, and I look forward as always to your next game. Cheers, my friends.
Sincerely,
Gunnar Clovis