Nice work including all the themes and making it coherent. Ship combat is fine, but it feels a little bare bones. The crawler movement is pretty irritating, it's slow enough to make me miss inputs or regret key presses. Backing into a crate doesn't pick it up. I don't think hunting for treasure crates on a time limit is very fun gameplay. A heist is fun when you are planning your heist, not simply running in a maze hoping to find the last crate you missed somewhere. The map is very helpful, I wish I knew about it the first time I played.
Viewing post in Corsairs of the Easter Quadrants jam comments
Thanks for checking it out. Yes, I dreamed big, then I ended up with a lot less time than I expected. The funny thing is that I also considered an even simpler ship combat like in the original UFO: Enemy Unknown, but after playing it, I felt the need for more. Looks like it was still not enough.
The crawler movement speed definitely should be fast enough. The cover gif should give you a sense of how it was intended. Every step is set to 0.25 sec. So if it's slower than that for you, I suspect the lack of optimization on my side as the root cause of your bad experience with it.
Preventing crate pickups while backing was intentional, because originally I wanted to add a crate opening animation. But then I simplified the mechanic without revisiting the original idea. During the final testing I noticed it, but it was too late and felt too small of an issue to fix it.
Originally, I wanted to show the map right after winning the battle, even offering the player to place markers on the map, which they would see during the crawler part. But then came the idea of showing it on the bridge. Not too fair, since it pushes the player to replay the game once found the map, but since the whole game can be beaten in less than 5 mins, I felt it's ok for now. In the post jam version, I'll definitely move the map before the crawling part.
Until then, I have added a screenshot about it to the game page.