itch.io

Thank you very much, seeing you play was both fun and very useful for me to fix some issues! Patch incoming soon (tm). No really I'm planning update normally before Monday, a lot of things are ready already. Among other things:
- Better HUD (immersive helmet style)
- Display of exact health
- Flash overlays when taking hits, hit-stop, camera shake so you really feel them
- Critical integrity state where the whole HUD turns red with an alarm and pulsing so you feel the urgency more
- Update to the tutorial so you can't die (I feel like you skipped it cause of the death and having to redo the waypoints)
- Showing controls directly in-game (hopefully you went to check controls after you skipped but otherwise you would have played without special ability the whole time) 

About the controls, it is indeed by design: the experience I want is about piloting and mastering the aircraft itself and its in my opinion core to the immersion of feeling like you are piloting and not just directing the aircraft. Basically this is first person style whereas screen-relative would be third person style.

 I think you still did pretty good for no prior experience and just half an hour reaching wave 4 is not bad at all. I'm sure after a bit more time it would start to become intuitive. 

The controls do surprise and confuse a lot of people though and I'm not sure how exactly I can make it easier to get into it. I'll probably improve the tutorial further, I might turn it into a mini-level instead of sending you into level 1 straight away so you get a bit more time to just fly around in safer conditions.

I might need to state that it's normal to have a bit of a hard time initially as well to encourage people to try to master it. I think my target audience won't really have a problem with this but I think there's a lot more people that would also have a great time on the game if they don't get discouraged initially by the controls. I know some of the best games I've played are games I almost gave up on on the first level (Sekiro, Risk of Rain Returns) but I'm so glad I didn't.