My playthrough thoughts:

• The keyboard sometimes stops working for menu navigation.
• Using Esc to cancel is not so good on the itch.io platform because it also exits fullscreen mode.
• In the first stage, it took me quite some time to realise that to initiate an attack, I needed to select a ship first rather than select a target. I don't think most players would intuitively understand this without a tutorial or instructions, especially since it isn't immediately obvious that the ship is a player-controlled unit rather than another type of target.
• In the second stage with two ships, it seems that I have to issue all commands to the left ship first, and end its turn, before issuing commands to the right ship, but again this isn't immediately obvious.
• If I cannot Move further, I shouldn't be allowed to select the Move command.
• The attack range is bugged. Ships can actually attack anywhere on the map.
• The second stage involves too much busywork without introducing anything new other than a second ship. Ordinarily, I likely would have stopped playing at this point.
• After I closed the game, I saw that you wrote "Waves can occupy tiles and push ships away, as well as push attacks around them." I played through the third stage without encountering this. I even tried to attack what looked like the aforementioned waves, but nothing happened.
• Overall, I think it's a solid start, but needs more UX polish, and further mechanics and enemies.

I wish the game had sound...

I don't think it quite works. First of all, space does not do the interact the same as enter does. I got stuck on the second level not being able to move anything. I managed to move both ships once and ended their turns since didn't seem like I could do anything else. And now I can't do anything anymore.

Never mind, I guess I was stuck on other ship turn with a spent movement and still had to end the turn again. I played it through now. Twice actually since the ending was so abrupt and wasn't quite sure if the end menu had focus on wrong button when I hit enter to proceed to next level and it brought me back to menu anyways.

The game area on the site is way too small. It's completely unplayable that size. And if you go full screen, you constantly need to be hitting esc which brings you back from full screen (and not even doing the action). Not great. So to even make the game playable,I had to fiddle with browser dev tools to increase the game dimensions without being full screened.

So it's pretty bad at showing which ship is the "current one". And then you need to interact with that one to get the proper menu actions. The colors of the buttons also are a bit weird, the default grey ones looking more like disabled state when one of the buttons is focused. And the disabled state too was annoyingly looped through when moving through the buttons.

It needs WAAAY too many button presses to do anything and most of the actions in the menu are completely pointless. You'd really only need move/attack/end and the menu should always be up for the active ship, not requiring activating on the active ship first. Turn ending should also be automatic when you've spent your movement and attack. Another pointless actions you just need to slog through to keep going.

All those info buttons and what was behind them seem to tell a story of this game being started off with a much bigger scope than what was achieved. Of course it would have been more fun with enemies actually doing something too, different stats and what not. But I get it, proper scoping is hard! I guess you sunk a bunch of time making things that ended up being irrelevant. I found out that (at least for me) working with an iterative process where you build the very basics first making that feel good and playable. Then keep building on top of that feature by feature (in the order of importance) so that the game is almost always fully playable. That way you don't end up with a shell of a game you invisioned. It's like if you're tasked to paint the Mona Lisa in five brush strokes. It makes more sense to block out the whole painting instead of spending all your strokes to only paint half an eye. Of course it's different outside of game jams when the time isn't that strictly restricted.

The pixel art was nice though with some cool looking animations. I'd say it was a bit too zoomed in meaning you needed to quite a bit of awkward "scouting" with the cursor to see what is going on in the level. And of course sound would be a welcome addition too. It's super easy and fast to do old schoolish bleeps and bloops that go hand in hand with pixel art style with generators like Bfxr. Even simple sounds bring a ton of more feedback to actions.

Anyways, good job! 👍

Looks like a cute game but I couldn't get it to work, hitting spacebar did nothing. I could move the cursor/selector around but spacebar didn't do anything.

Nice graphics and visual effects! I was confused by the control during the starting 5 mins though.

i'm also among the people who couldn't make this game work. space did nothing, enter only got me to this menu where my only options were info and cancel. if it's a bug, hope you can fix it so I could give this game a try.

There’s something up with the menu that frequently breaks and makes it impossible to select an option.

Although a little confusing at first, once I got the hang of it, it was a pretty good game. Although the lack of audio makes it feel empty, the gameplay and graphics make up for it, plus, I love the theme interpretation.

I failed to actually play this game. I couldn't figure out the controls and nothing was working for me. I tried moving the ship and even attacking but nothing was working. Maybe some information on how the game works would be valuable here.