Thanks for playing and for the great feedback.
I think the frame rate issues are mostly due to chunk loading of the infinite world and I agree definitely needs to be resolved. Even playing on a high-end dev machine I notice a little frame stuttering. Claude and I did spend a while making fps improvements, but the chunk loading still causes frequent pauses. I'll definitely be looking into smoothing that out!
I agree, the gameplay feels unfinished. I have a post-jam roadmap put together for it which includes mothership communications to create objectives for the UFO, which would give radar-like nav waypoints. When the player hits tier 4 the idea is to do a raid on an army base (which already appear in the game if you can find them, just not much going on there yet). Maybe I can borrow you for a second play test eventually :)
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You could try just getting rid of the chunk loading and having everything loaded at once. Then just control what gets rendered and updated. Instead of infinite it could just be a large world and if optimized properly it should not need to be steamed in. You can still use the chunk system to prevent rendering far away chunks.
Yeah, that makes sense. I got the agent working on something along those lines this morning... I'll post back if it succeeds.
The main reason I have it doing an "infinite world" is just that I am not an artist so wanted pure procgen producing the game world. But I should be able to use that to pre-bake a sizable hunk of the world, I would hope, and do less on-the-fly generation at runtime. Then, as you say, fall back to JIT loading if the player exceeds the large pre-baked initial area.