Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.
I first want to say I'm very happy to see you looking into feedback so early into your development. While this may affect the score, I feel this is the sort of thing this jam truly exists for. So please don't be discouraged by score.
Wait, didn't the guy below me say all this? Crap. I swear, I wasn't copying him.
Anyway, as someone who is often high on stream (and tonight was no exception), I started off feeling concerned and not knowing what the heck was going on. However, this quickly began to fade as I went about experimenting and got a quick idea for the gameplay. It quickly became about how far I could get on the limited resources I had, then once I got the item that gave me full stats I got to truly test around and see how things worked.
Upfront, I love the concept of switching between working inside the sub and playing outside. I'm reminded of We Need To Go Deeper, but as a single player experience. With that in mind, I want to give suggestions for improvements.
1. When firing missiles, it shouldn't just fire over and over if I hold the mouse button too long. When I was trying to fight, I often had it where I'd fire two missiles. This makes it too easy to waste them. A longer delay between shots could deal with this, or you could make it only fire once per click. Based on the invincibility frames you employ, I think the click option is better.
2. Starting off with such few resources and it being a few levels before you'll be able to get to full, it can feel really difficult to start. As such, I'd recommend more starting resources. Along with fixing the above, it'd go a long way to make things play nicer.
3. If you're not beholden to your current use of fuel, I'd recommend making fuel act as a boost in speed rather than just draining. If you want to keep the current use of fuel, I would suggest slowing its base rate of consumption but also allowing players to get a speed boost by burning more. This way, a player who wishes to conserve fuel and instead rely on ammo would be rewarded by less fuel use overall, but if a player needs to conserve ammo more they can rely on fuel boost to get through enemies. This lets players choose what they conserve and what they spend.
4. Faster movement in the ship would also be a good idea.
5. Speaking of the ship, you have three levers for adjusting make HP, ammo and fuel (this really played into my WNTGD feelings). However, rather than the current system of increasing max stats, what if these levers instead allowed your ship to produce those resources or to reduce the amount used. So for example, each level of fuel would reduce the amount of fuel used. Each level of HP would give or improve a recharging barrie . Finally, each level of ammo would generate ammo.
6. There is no six. I just wanted to have one more. :D Hi!
Overall, I love the prototype you have going on and I hope to see more.