Very well made game! Here is my honest review:
Pros
- Fun space theme
- Great audio and SFX
- A lot of upgrades
- Various enemies
- I liked spinning wheel mechanic
Cons
- Mechanics overwhelm player very easily. I just started and there are A LOOOOT of text
- Hard to read tutorial's text. By this I mean that the text is anchored to center, and when it fills with letters new line just moves the text you are currently reading and it just interrups reader (idk if you understood what I just have written). Make text anchored to top left corner.
- Controls were inconvenient for me. I got more used that if you press W you go up or when you press W and A you go up left (typical 8-directional movement). You made that W means going forward where the ship is looking. But for me at first it was hard to understand where is ship's forward and backward.
- Because you need to keep attention of a lot of parameters, enemies and your ship direction the game becomes pretty difficult by itself. Try to think what you can simplify or remove.
- 2 bugs: when first entering shop the text near spinning wheel says: asasdsdsadad (it's placeholder text I assume that you forgot to hide); game freezed when I died
My suggestions/improvements
- Make tutorial self-explanatory instead of a lot of text. For example: player tried moving, then you highlight fuel and say that moving consumes fuel and etc. Google: "contextual learning"
- Or instead you can try that on first levels player has only 3 (for example) parameters that he needs to look for. Then after some levels you introduce new parameter and so on. But still number of parameters needs to be less than it is now (in my opinion)
In overall I really liked your game. I hope you will continue to manage it further and release a full game. If you didn't understand something from what I have said, feel free to ask me.