Dan, what a fantastic game!
Starting with the visuals, everything looks amazing and, most importantly, cohesive. This looks so polished, it’s astounding that you did this on such a short timeline. It even had voice acting.
Both the shmup section and the dungeon crawling section were… stellar :D
Navigating the ship felt good. The tank-controls make sense considering what you’re piloting, though I kept trying to use “absolute” directions. The only thing I found myself wanting to do was use the mouse to rotate the ship, making combat a bit snappier. I died a lot, but that’s a skill issues on my part :D Once I upgraded my ship’s cannons to the Triple Blue Rings of Death(tm), I was clearing out whole areas infested with baddies with no problems. It actually gave me a “OH SNAP” moment going from the initial cannons to the ultimate ones.
One thing I’d suggest you experiment with is using twin-stick controls for the ship. I… may… have bound my gamepad to keyboard inputs and I felt so much more control over the ship navigation.
The crawling portion was very solid. The character controlled really well, and once again, it looked stunning. Really good ambiance altogether. Having heard that you forgot to put spinners in lulled me into a false sense of security, and I didn’t realize that there were invisible walls until I noticed I could buy a module to detect them. Sneaky!
Actually, what I really liked is that different players want different crawling experiences, and you turned getting those luxuries into a part of gameplay. Don’t like automap? Don’t get it! Want a compass? Make one! I like that approach as it lets you customize your run.
I don’t have large constructive criticism, because the game is so solid. All I have are suggestions for polish. A few things would be:
- Unless I missed an upgrade, it would be nice for the starmap to show the derelict ships you cleared out
- Similarly, removing the arrows point to the cleared ones during ship navigation would make the screen less cluttered with information you’ll never use again.
- With instant step, I would be nice to have some sort of audio indication you’re turning. When I found myself in secret room, I’d accidentally turn too much because I couldn’t tell I turned. (I suppose the compass would have helped :D)
- There’s nothing stopping you from farming resources until you can buy the warp drive and leave. Maybe it should require a rare resource, forcing the player to explore further and further out, leading them to more difficult areas. The highest difficulty I found was 1.5ish before I had enough I needed to win.
- When buying upgrades for ROD, it would be nice if they dropped in his inventory rather than the cargo, it’s one less step in equipping.
Anyway, these are all nitpicks, I really think you should consider extending it and putting it on Steam or something. You have a really good idea here.