This game is really impressive and shows a lot of promise, though I'm concerned you might run into scaling issues as you go along. If you make the level too big, you could run into some serious performance issues, or worse, floating point errors. If you've got it set so that the player's position is set as the world origin no matter where they are in the level, then you've already got that problem solved. If not, you may want to look into that. I recommend the planets and solar systems episodes of Sebastian Lague's Coding Adventures series. You may have already seen them; those planets look kinda familiar, especially the atmosphere effect.
The 2D modular ship building is really impressive. It would be good to have a little more instruction when you first start, as the energy system wasn't completely intuitive. It seemed weird to have the cockpit in the dead center of the ship rather than at the front, until I realized it's at the top of the little ladder. I named my little ship the Tiddlywink. Check it out:
Unfortunately, I could only play for a little bit due to a glitch that made it so my mouse click was constantly registering even when I wasn't clicking. Randomly firing my laser as I traveled through space was bad enough, but on ground I had to hold the mouse button down to avoid rapidly flashing the camera. It did have the funny effect of making my character seem like a total spaz, though.
As for the concerns you mentioned in the devlogs about the movement being boring, well that's kind of inherent to the way the game is set up. You've got these big empty planets you need to negotiate around and a bunch of empty space between them, and then everything else feels so small compared to the planets that you can just zip around any possible encounter. It's like a size issue. If you make the ship faster to make the planets less cumbersome, you make the rest of the universe feel really tiny. Maybe if you scale the planets down to cartoonishly tiny they'll be in scale with the rest of the game, and then you could scale down the rest of the map so the warp doesn't need to be as fast? Or maybe you could make a series of smaller maps that you jump between with warp points like in X-Wing Alliance? That way you could block off progression until a quest opens up the warp point to a later sector. Other than that, I'd say this game definitely needs some music or space ambience. That'll really help with making the space travel feel more complete.
I'd love to play more of this if you can fix the mouse glitch. There is some really fantastic groundwork here for what could turn into a really fun game. Hope to see more soon. Good luck!
