Hey! I played the game until I got the "end of the demo" message and I took some notes of my thoughts while playing:
- Please give me vsync.
- I feel like the extraction bonus should be a lot bigger.
- Not sure I like being able to zoom out and see not just e.g. map contours, but everything in the level (e.g. where a repair drone is). That makes doing that the optional way - instead of the (in my opinion) more fun experience of searching in the level.
- Apropos, I really like the "find a repair drone to repair something" mechanic.
- On the other hand, not sure if the idle income mechanic works to well. It makes me just want to idle in the between-run screen, which doesn't feel like it fits the game too well.
- Ugh, prestiges. I'm so glad that most Nodebuster-likes don't do it, and I'm not looking forward to having to do the same grind here time and time again either, even if it will (hopefully?!) be faster.
- The rockets are nice!
- I keep clicking at the Tech Tree when I want to do the last mission again. The positioning just makes it very "Start Run" button-ish.
- Even apart from that, it probably also doesn't help that Tech Tree is in most Nodebuster-likes something you access all the time. Maybe call it Prestige Tree instead?
- There are plenty of times where I'm coming back to the upgrade screen and I have not even remotely enough to upgrade anything. That doesn't feel good. In general, it feels like progress is very slow.
- A pattern that maybe isn't great: It's probably optimal to spend a loooooong (and not very exciting) time in level 2 farming prestige points from those turret space stations. Once you've beaten the boss and no enemies spawn anymore, they're rather easy to kill, especially with rockets. I'll easily get 4-6 prestige points per run that way.
- And looking further at the upgrade tree - most of the upgrades are just more stats and not very exciting to be honest.
...and then I reached the end of the demo.
While I'm not sure that I like the prestige/idle mechanics and I feel that it's too slow/grindy at the moment, I think you have a pretty nice base to iterate on.
Personally, I would try to either give the game a good progression without the repetition of prestiges or try to make the prestiges more interesting (which is probably the harder thing to do).
Also, the extraction mechanics seem like they are one of the more unique parts of this game concept, so I wonder if it would be good to double down on that and explore that a bit more.