I love it! Great work, it came out really great! Reminds me of this Facebook-hosted idle-trade-explore game from 2011 that I was absolutely addicted to. It helped me to pass time working at a bookstore, which helped pay for night classes for coding and game dev!
Easy Improvements:
- Simple UI visuals for stations/trade hubs would be a good simple upgrade.
- Just a few random NPCs portraits, with a few background visuals like old SNES RPGs and maybe they're aliens and say a bunch of gibberish sounds, but it would expand the immersion quite a bit.
- If exo-planetary data is available for a system, generating a known-system-map would be *really* cool, so you could sometimes see the system your ship goes to. Ex. like this or this , or how Starbound handles system overviews. I think the Exoplanet survey makes that data available publicly? NASA Exoplanet Survey. AI Formatted Map. Same, but NASA hosts it in a wrapper.
- It is very easy to just look up high-cost, approximately-close trade goods.
- Maybe Trade/Merchant System Installs or some other limiter to stop the player from just finding the highest-cost item they can get to. Players would need to build a fleet of scout-like merchant-scouting vessels that would help assess trade value if data about systems was a snapshot that decayed for the player as soon as they left the system and only updated when they got within a specific proximity.
- If merchant tools could only get an approximate range-value for goods demand in a system, so you're not certain to get the gains your merchant ship is predicting outright (Note: I don't remember if the goods value decreases per sold item, alongside demand).
- Events that stop the trade process -- Tax collectors, Pirates, Ship Damage, etc. That way your ship upgrades have more impact. I didn't experience much of this if it was present. SWN is a TTRPG that has a pretty good random-space-event generator, worth checking it out. It also has good generators for all kinds of space stuff.
- I also found that I couldn't edit/remove installs that I'd installed by accident on my ships, but maybe I was just doing it wrong? I found that system to have some UI that were in different parts of the ship-interaction interface, so I might have missed it. Maybe just as trade has a kind of Shop window, the Ship docking bay could have an interface for repairs/CRUD operations on the ship.
Also, the main pic for it on this page has a weird scaling issue making some of the text you should be able to read look like webdings (ex. "Top ['rathssers" instead of "Top Traders" :P).