I liked this game overall. It's a good fusion of exploration and resource management, with a cool pixel art theme.
I don't believe I encountered any bugs per se. All looks well from that perspective.
But I did have the following considerations for gameplay:
- I have a problem with the pricing mechanism - of things getting uniformly more expensive the further you go. It can make the first playthrough difficult if you don't anticipate that this is going to happen. But once you do know to anticipate this, it makes the game too easy - just buy up big and gather as many materials as you can early and sell off later. It would be much more interesting and challenging for prices to fluctuate at each stop (some things going up, some down, based on resource availability). So the player is forced to make detailed, long-term resource management plans based on what the best deals will be at each stop.
- Losing 8 days for random, arbitrary events is irritating. This is too great a penalty without some skill component being involved. This is where the reaction mini-game (or similar) should come into play - not for ship repairs, which just seems daft.
- You need to refer back to the nav chart when presenting the player with the option of using a wormhole. It isn't clear from the description exactly how far ahead you can get. Same goes for the space-time rips, where the ambiguous term 'shortcut' is used. You should really specify that it's only a shortcut to your next stop, because in most cases the resulting damage to the ship isn't worth it.
- On the subject of navigation, you really need to decide whether the stop sequence should be predetermined or not. At the moment, it has the appearance of being non-linear, but in fact it isn't. Even though you have the ability to select a destination that is more than one stop away, you are not permitted to set course, even if you have adequate resources to make the distance.. Rather you are told it is 'out of hyperspace range' without any indication of exactly what this range is. And even though you could potentially go backwards, the time loss would mean almost certain defeat and would make no sense. If the player must advance one stop at a time in predetermined sequence, that is perfectly fine, but don't give them the false impression they can do otherwise.
- I think you need to change the way an unsuccessful delivery ends. Because the most obvious consideration is, if you're only going to lose money for a late delivery, then why make it? Any logical person would say 'fuck this' and sell the cargo somewhere else.
But all up, a good effort, and I encourage you to see it through.
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