Woah, I seriously appreciate the effort you put into your feedback. I'm glad it really clicked for you. As you've spent the time to write such detailed feedback, I feel I owe you a response and some insights for all your points (I'm super not trying to convince you or anything, I figure you deserve some of my thoughts , all of your criticism is extremely valid and much appreciated):
- The stakes: yeah it's definitely a weird one. The game is a bit slow and pretty punishing at times, so I think having to play back through would be a nightmare hahah (based on me having to replay it so many times). The main stakes in the game are that you can lose banked scrap in a run, and that can snowball. As you discover bigger ships (through upgrades), your fuel costs go up. I tried to balance it as there are doomed runs and, considering you have to fight for every piece of scrap, losing too much of your previously hard-earned scrap would suck. I tried to balance it in a way where it doesn't happen too often, but you can spiral and lose all of the scrap you've been saving up. Also, not that this is always the best way to punish the player, but you do have infinite tries, but it's super annoying to save up a ton of scrap, then lose it all and have to do it again (I guess it's the Dark Souls punishment). Some people have found it super grindy already, so I have no clue where the line is, but the game definitely needs many passes of balancing. It definitely would be nice to have another layer of stakes in the meta game, I'll definitely have to think about what that could be (narrative maybe??)
- The tutorial: completely fair, it definitely needs some work, a victim of the jam format, unfortunately. The goal of the tutorial was to teach the player enough that they are mechanically able to progress through the game, and the rest of the game elements are discovered by the player. This approach felt right, as over-explaining every piece would probably kill the atmosphere. That said, there's probably not enough feedback in the game to properly support the approach and the core systems aren't really explained well enough either. Will definitely improve post jam
- The dice: this was a concern I had early on. There are a couple of reasons I kept it this way. First, I wanted the tension to lie on the roll itself and wanted to keep that separate from the process of exploring a tile. Secondly, I wanted players to manually place a result onto the 'board' (just a design constraint born out of enjoying analogue games like miru). Last, I planned to have tiles on the board that already have some properties before placing a die onto them, which would bring back some of the tension of discovery. I agree that it is weird in its current form. Due to the resolution of the game, I wasn't able to add icons to the animated dice, so I wanted dice that looked the same to act the same, in order to not require the player to hover over for the net to understand what kind of die it is. The coloured dice in the screenshots are upgrades that have different face compositions.
Seriously appreciate all the great feedback and am really glad you liked it so much. Thanks for playing