I want to start by saying that I'm pretty bad at this type of game. I sometimes struggle with the controls on certain 3D games, and, unfortunately, this one was exactly the type that tends to give me issues. That said, I think the controls were just fine, and that they work well for this style of game.

The tutorial was okay for the basics. There were a few things that took me a bit to get right, like strafing around the asteroid and using the inertia damping toggle for the moving backwards part, but I felt that was more a skill issue on my end than anything else. I would have like if I had to manually advance the text, instead of it auto advancing. I think I missed a couple of things as I was trying to get my bearings and at one point when my littlest grabbed my attention for a few moments. I don't feel like I missed any important gameplay information, as that the instructions stayed up until I completed a task, but might have missed some flavor type text. I liked the personality of the character giving the directions, so wanted to catch it all.

I also think it would have been good to include how to open up the ship/turret panel and the controls. While playing, I didn't realize that I could open the ship/turret panel manually. It is on the image on the itch page, but I still think it would have been good if it had been included in game.

While the tutorial worked for the basics, I don't think it really prepared me for the game itself. The game was really fast paced and the difficulty curve was quite high. There was so much going on, between the number of asteroids and the number and different types of enemies, that it was easy to get overwhelmed. I think it would have been helpful if there was an easier first level, or a practice combat level beyond the small amount in the tutorial, to help get the player into the core gameplay.

Things were moving so quickly in game that I didn't get a chance to read the item/tool text or descriptions when I pick up items. I don't know if there was a place I could have read about all the items I got in a run, but it would have been nice. I didn't really acknowledge that the random items I was collecting were upgrades for my ship. I was so focused on trying to survive that I couldn't take the time to read and process the item popups. On one of my runs I did get a turret fabricator, which was pretty cool. Being able to take a few moments to read and decide what I wanted was nice.

Not counting the tutorial, I found a gate only once over the several runs I played. I was able to beat the boss and move to the next level, though lost fairly quickly once through. Between the random chance of the game and my lack of skill, it didn’t feel bad that I only got to the second level once. The game has a bit of a rouge-like feel, as well as being difficult in general, that made me expect to lose a lot. Because of that, it felt good when I did well and expected when I didn't.

The screen shake when certain enemies hit me was a bit much at times. There always felt like there was so much going on at once, that the screen shake could be a bit overwhelming and made it hard to find the enemy that was causing it.

I think it would be helpful if there was a better indicator when I hit a ship, even if I didn't do any damage to it. Some of the enemies with shields took several hits before I took the shield down and did damage to them, but I only acknowledged damage numbers once the shield was down. Given how often I missed, it could be really hard to tell if I was actually doing anything to the enemy shield or if my aim was just off. In general, you may want to introduce the enemies with shields on a later level, or at least only have lower shields on the first level.

While it's not my usual style, I can see how this could be a lot of fun for someone who likes this type of game. You've got a lot of good things here.

I have a 4K main monitor and am playing the linux download.

So far I like your game, though it is has a bit of a steep learning curve and is luck heavy, which means a run is very dependent on what you get. It is still mostly fun even if you don't get what you want.

Bugs:

With the game's resolution being set to 854x480 or lower resolution, or with a lower resolution scale and a higher resolution, some of the UI in the ship selection screen runs off screen. This is still the case with your update. Setting it to 2160x3840 resulted in there being a massive black border around the game obstructing some UI. The hotfix you put out with changing the default settings will fix this bug for most people, but this could still be an issue if somebody changed the settings to be something that has the UI run off-screen, if the base settings don't work for them.

There seems to be a bug with the gates, after you take out the boss, you can go through them before they finish charging.

There is another bug if you lure the gate boss into the orb at the center of the first level, or they spawn in it. If they are destroyed by the damage from that orb, even after they are destroyed, it will not be registered and so you will be stuck in that level.

In one of your loading texts it says to use N to drift forever when it is Z that you need to press.

With the Dart's teleport you can teleport inside solid objects like rocks, and not take any damage.

Open Notes:

Some of the higher tier versions of the enemies show up a bit early, as the tank weapons cannot harm them, and they can rip right through your shields and take large chunks out of your health. I think that the eldrich versions should not be able to show up at the very beginning, as that is an almost sure defeat for your ships.

Rock crabs deal too much damage, they deal as much damage to your hull as an Eldrich Slow Gunner does, and they spawn regularly on the first level.

I feel like you should not be able to take damage while you are getting teleported through a gate and you cannot fight back.

This game feels difficult from the start, and only gets harder over time. It might be nice to have more healing points throughout the level. It also might be nice to have a little bit more time and a bit more of a ramp-up for the enemies at the beginning, as several times I only survived a minute or less because I got swarmed by enemies, and sometimes higher tier enemies, which meant that I did not have enough time to upgrade my ship.

I found that I was going with the Carrier more often than not, as the fighters help me deal with the enemies. Sometimes they even deal with all of them, though dieing a lot in the process. This allows me to get upgrades and turrets, then find the gate and beat the boss.

I think that you overdid the shaking effect when you get hit by rock crabs as it can make it really hard to see where the enemy that keeps shooting at me and thus giving me this effect is, and even when you see the enemy it is hard to aim, while they keep on shooting and taking down your health.

I wish that there was a way to skip sections of the tutorial. The moving backwards challenge felt a bit more than I wanted to do at the time, but I did not see a way to skip that.

Some of the collision shapes of the astroids, and spaceship bits felt small for the shape, as my ship sometimes went through a sprite that looked like it should block my ship.

I like some of the humor you put throughout the game in the items and tools.

It took me a while to figure out how to open up the ship/turrets menu that allowed me to make more turrets using keyboard and mouse. It also took me reading some of your devlogs before I found the F1 display of controls. I feel that these things should be shown in the tutorial.

I wish that there was, in sandbox mode, a way to make your own weapons to outfit your ship with.

Some features I though were cool: I thought that the turret fabricators were quite nice, and helped quite a bit with survival. I liked the item and tool containers with random useful things.

I did not understand how the lockboxes worked, I tried moving around them, I tried shooting them, I tried having enemies shoot them, but I could not figure out how to open them.

On one of my runs after I got through the first 3 levels I got lucky enough to reach a point where I was all but immortal, I was dealing over 10000 damage with my guns, I had crazy high and fast health recharging, and I had a lot of shield, this happened very quickly.

I feel like the balance of when you randomly get upgrades is not great. At the start, when you are struggling to survive, you rarely get random upgrades, however, later on when you are established and holding your own easier, you start getting more of them and ones that are higher tiers.

I feel like you should maybe have a higher chance of getting the random upgrades earlier.

Your SFX feel a bit quiet compared to the in-game music tracks. It seems like the SFX volume is set lower then the music volume. Setting both SFX and Music volume sliders to the same value makes the SFX sounds loud enough.

I wish that there was a way to go straight to the main menu from when you die.

Requested Feedback:

Is the game fun, and is replay value yet apparent:

Yes, the game is fun, though it has a steep learning curve and I do expect to die a lot, but keep wanting to continue. I do think that this game is a little too difficult, I think that some of the changes I suggested above would help.

Is the game's onboarding effective:

It seemed pretty decent, I played through the tutorial and mostly understood how things worked.

Again, I like your game, it may need some improvement, but even as it is, most of my issues did not stop me from enjoying the game. I think that the main issue that lessened my enjoyment was the higher tier enemies kept spawning at the start and destroying me before I had a chance to fight them.

-R

I am playing 0.40.5, on Linux, with a 4K monitor.

I went into the Options and set the Resolution to 2160x3840, leaving the rest alone. It resulted in very large black borders on each side, with the viewport only taking up about the center 1/4 to 1/3 of the screen. I could see part of the controls, but the edges were cut off, including the apply button. I changed the Resolution Scale down a lot, and used the arrow keys to select Apply. That did not help. I then changed the Resolution to 1920x1080. That made things better, though the Resolution Scale change left them still problematic. I dragged it back to the right as far as I could with the mouse, and then again used the arrows to apply. Then I could see everything, and I moved the slider all the way back to the right and applied. I'm going to try playing at 1080p and see how it does. If I run into problems, I'll switch back to your default.

The font size for the text of the tabs themselves on the Options screen is really big compared to everything else.

The menu screen transition feels a bit jerky, and I think it might be disorienting or headache inducing for some people. It is short enough and if only here may not be too bad overall, but it might be an area to look into for accessibility.

Next I went into the Sandbox, as I wanted to check everything out. The ship selection screen is so much nicer than last time I played!

Looking around, I did notice some display issues, so went back and changed the resolution to your default of 1355x768.

I like the Overview/Stats offering differing ways of looking at the ships' info. For someone starting fresh it certainly helps to translate how those numbers line up in comparison.

I am not certain what button is supposed to be used for the top ability from looking at the screen. The bottom is clearly R, but the top looks almost like an inverted Q, or maybe a fancy capital U. It looks like the font is a low res pixel font that was majorly scaled up. The F at the bottom right is clear and crisp, and neither the R nor F look fancy, which is why I did not initially think U, but a fancy U makes the most sense currently. I went back to the game's Itch page and looked at the images of the controls (these are awesome btw!), and the Heavy Ability is R, which makes this character a V for the Utility Ability. The bottom is too flat for me to see it as a V. Not trying to be nitpicky here, just being detailed with my thoughts. I went back and double checked the ship select on the Play screen to confirm this is the same there and not just for Sandbox.

Later on I skimmed through older devlogs and saw that F1 brings up an in-game copy of the controls, though only once in a run it seems. I did not see this mentioned in the game itself, nor on the game's page, including in the image of the controls. This would be helpful to include beyond the devlog so the average player will know about it.

That transition shake as I'm going back and forth between Play and Sandbox to compare is really unpleasant.

I'm going to go ahead and play through normal from here and come back to Sandbox after the tutorial.

So, I've skimmed the devlog, and obviously played the previous version, but I'm going into this looking at it fresh. It is afterall a pretty big update.

I'm starting out by comparing the ships to see what the options are like. The Overview shows the initial selection of Tank as the lowest Difficulty. Makes sense for the easiest to be the default for new players who just jump in. I notice that all 3 ships have Mass Drivers, but they are different. The damage and rounds per minute are different for each ship. Also, on the Dart, they do not have the target reticle that every other weapon has. My initial guess would be that weapons with the reticle can track, or at least slightly adjust their aim, while those without only fire straight ahead. Looking at the ship art, I would say that lines up with some looking like rotating turrets, but the Dart's wing Mass Drivers looking to be static hardpoints.

I did not do very well last time, so I'm going to stick with the Tank for now, but the Carrier intrigues me. I feel like my situational awareness is lacking, so having fighters able to find and hit the enemies for me may be just what I need. I will certainly be back to try that one out later.

Overall the tutorial feels better than before. I still had a bit of trouble with the moving while facing another direction, but my second try I got it. When I got to the controls for the Utility Ability, it showed the same fancy V button image and was just as unclear to me as before. The auto advance for dialogue text still feels a bit fast to me on some parts, but the arrow keys to advance are also inconvenient for also practicing the controls with the mouse, with constant swapping of positions, so not forcing players to press them is good. Maybe having a message log that the player can pull up to reread anything they missed or went by too fast. Possibly even something like you have for the combat log that fades, but gives you a bit more time to read. I don't know how much text there is to read beyond the tutorial, but for the tutorial I think it would be good to be able to pull your instructions back up if you missed, or misread, something.

I found the gate, and defeated the boss on the first level, then I stuck around to do a bit of testing before going through and was swarmed. My final score was 148,610. I feel like this first level is much more reasonable than the previous version. I was worried about going through the gate to see if the next area was as hard as I remembered the previous first area being, which is why I stuck around to practice with the Barrel Roll a bit, and then got swarmed.

I'm still having an issue with Barrel Rolls. Sometimes they work and others they don't. I think it is the timing. Using the Sandbox I did some more testing, and I think that the timing of the button presses just has to be so close that I am having a hard time in the heat of combat, when I need it the most, hitting them just right. Personally, I think that I'd prefer if you are boosting and press a Strafe input, it would do a Barrel Roll, without needing to let go of Boost and perfectly time hitting the key combo. Maybe you could make that an option players could toggle. After this I rarely even tried to use Barrel Role as it was not worth the risk.

I really like the Tank's 4 weapon slots. I see now that the weapons themselves define if they are rotating turrets or straight shooting, and not the hardpoint/weapon slot. I picked up 2 straight shooting 14 damage weapons, with ~180 firing rate. After playing with them a bit, I think next time I will only go with one higher powered straight shooter, and keep more targeting turrets. For the moment, however, I'm going to try out the Carrier on my next run.

I found the gate pretty quickly, but had very few upgrades, so stuck around trying to find more. I found the Carrier to be pretty good for me overall. I would like a UI element to quickly see how many fighters you have. I don't always notice the text when one is taken out, so a small dot under the ability for each fighter would be good, or even a number. I ended up losing when I was near an asteroid and hit T to target an enemy only end up targeting a Rock Crab on that asteroid and got a lot of camera shake. By the time I disabled targeting and tried to point away, it was too late. My score was 72,262,

I tried again with the Carrier. I really like the fighters dealing with most enemies for me, though I find trying to hit things myself is harder due to the slow movement, and the best thing to do is evade while the fighters do the work.

I see that the Tank's Shield is a huge benefit. I was doing fine, at full health, and then got hit hard and it was over. I'm going back to the Tank for now.

I replayed several times, and it felt like the difficulty was much harder than the first run. The first run I got a bunch of upgrades, and played for a while without feeling overwhelmed. I had 2 14 point energy weapons with decent rates of fire. Since then the Turret Fabricators have been offering mostly weaker or equal stuff to what I start with. Reading through the devlogs I see that you have random chances to spawn enemies of varying difficulties. It feels a bit extreme for Eldritch difficulty enemies to spawn on the first level. Their shields alone make damaging them difficult, and they hit hard. It is hard to be certain, but I'd say that most, if not all, of my deaths have been from them. I like the idea of varying difficulties, but I think the first level should prevent spawning the highest difficulty enemies, or at least drop the rate down a lot.

I took a break, and realized that the first time I played the tutorial was enabled. I'm now wondering if the tutorial gate takes you to an easier first zone than the regular game start without the tutorial. I don’t really want to redo the tutorial, but I think I need to test this. Not only am I more comfortable with starting there, but getting those upgrades from it would make this other level much easier.

I decided that before doing the tutorial again I would restart the game and do a normal no-tutorial run. The level feels better than the last several I have played. The turrets were not as generous as the first play, but I eventually did get better, so maybe it was just extreme RNG. Though that first run was very nice, compared to all the Turret Fabricators in the games played after. In this latest run after the restart I got a Beam Laser 3 Energy, 76 RPM. Pulse Gun 8 Energy, 95 RPM, and then non-targeting Pulse Gun 14 Energy, 246 RPM. This run and the first I also got Coccoon of the Gods, which is awesome and so far my favorite upgrade. This run my score was 55,434.

On the loss screen it would be nice if you had an option to go to the menu, rather than quit the game entirely, as I may want to switch to the Sandbox. Not a major hassle to restart, or get into the game and quit to menu, but shouldn't need to, just to get to the menu.

Now I am retrying and enabling the tutorial. The down arrow advances dialog, but the right arrow does not skip. After getting to the controls for forward and reverse I saw the gate, so went for it and skipped the rest of the tutorial. The Strafe commands are showing and the Gate is not accepting F to charge, even though it does show the interaction text saying to press it. I have pressed the Strafe keys, but it is not clearing that box, likely since I am nowhere near the asteroid. I'm not sure the way back to the tutorial asteroid from here, so am restarting. I tried again after being told to go here for some fun, but the Gate still would not charge, so I guess I'm going through the rest of the tutorial. I paused to write this last note, and when I resumed the indicator of where to go was gone. I had turned off Inertia dampening, and was able to use the direction indicator to resume traveling roughly where I was headed, and eventually the indicator showed up again. I'm guessing it was distance related and had stayed up before, but resuming from pause something rechecked and decided it was too far away to show. Once I got there the targets spawned right on top of me, causing them to launch off away from me, so I had to chase them down. The zoom in crate was also moving when it spawned. And now when it tells me to Boost over to a new area, the indicator is not showing. I caught a flicker of the gate around the curve of the planet, so I headed that way, angled away from the planet, hoping to get a better angle that might let me see something more. That worked and eventually a marker showed up. I made it there, but it did not advance. I probably missed boosting enough or through the right area. Either I followed the wrong indicator, or the detection is not at the marker arrow, as I've been flying around and it won't advance. I'm guessing the detection is based on expecting the player to come from the previous tutorial step, so not having a good orientation for that, I don't know which way to travel to trigger it. So much for my attempt to speed through the tutorial. It looks like I am starting over again. I'm thinking I had gone to an earlier marker, and did not see the correct marker for where I needed to go, and that is why I could not proceed. It would be nice if the tutorial markers where set to always show for cases where people may play around testing things out and lose their way.

During my next tutorial run I had a Giga Harmless Drone, which meant it took a while to deal with the shields and then take it out. Initially I thought I was missing when the health bar didn't change, then I noticed Giga in the name and it got close enough to see the shields. Then I got a Mega on the Turret Mode step.

I did several runs through the tutorial, but did not do as well in the following level as my first run, so went back to the normal mode without the tutorial, rather than deal with it each time. I finally had a decent run with the Tank. It took me almost half an hour to find the gate as I was constantly feeling bombarded, but I seemed to get enough good upgrades from random drops, along with a single Turret upgrade, that I was dealing enough damage that even the Eldritch enemies were dying reasonably fast. It still felt overwhelming with the constant enemy swarms, and like I never had a chance to hunt for the gate. Eventually I was again near the edge, and just started going around the perimeter taking out what I had to and destroying every asteroid I could until I saw the gate particles. It was still a fight to get there, though the boss was fairly easy. I'm not really sure what I have that makes my hits so powerful. The one moderate weapon upgrade certainly didn't do it. Must have been some of the upgrades that I didn't have time to read. I'm not sure how to view the upgrades outside of a Turret Fabricator, and I haven't seen one in a while. I just made it to the second stage, so maybe I'll find one here and can see what all I have... I just glanced at the controls image and it looks like Tab might be what I was wanting.

Here are my stats as I start the second area:

Max HP: 414, Max Shield: 2630, Shield Recharge Delay: 4.25, Rate: 0.25, Max Energy: 110, Max Speed: 167, Acceleration: 0.92, Boost Max Speed: 313, Rotation Speed: 0.03, Speed Scale: 1.0, Damage Scale: 76.534, Fire Rate Scale: 0.85, Kinetic Armour: 220, Energy Armour: 315.

Upgrades:

Grave Robber x3, Two Horses x2, Transmutation x3, Engine Tuning Nanobots x2, Chumbawamba's Best Friend, Bounty Guzzler x2, Chromatic Chainmail x2, Old Boomerang x3, Cocoon x2, Don't Jinx It x2, Hopes and Dreams x2, An Extension Cord Plugged Into Itself x2, A Case Of The Zoomies x4, Vampire's Blessing x3, Weight Of Existence, Not Today x3, Demolition Permit x2, Fame x2, Hal > 9000, Noise-Cancelling Headphones x2, Spice x2, Griffiron, Nothing x3, Cocoon of the Gods, Pure Gumption x2, Phaser x2, Sadistic Cannon x2, Fresh Cabbages x2, Garish Christmas Jumper, Unhinged Collector, Virus Injection, Polarised Sunglasses x2, A Single Horse x2, Shiny New Weight Set, Avarice x2, Green Vegetables, Black Market Fuel x2, The Secrets of Manifestation, Aura Farm, Touch of Bloodlust.

I replaced one of the starting Mass Drivers with a Pulse Gun 9 Energy, 116 RPM, non-targeting.

I guess the key to this game is to start destroying every asteroid you can as soon as possible, stopping to upgrade your weapons if you can, and hope you get lucky in the drops. Getting good early drops can set up the rest of the game.

Stage 2 was much more open, though it also quickly became a swarm of incoming enemies. Thankfully, all my upgrades made it fairly easy. And being so open, it was also easy to spot the purple of the gate from rather far away. I manged to get another weapon upgrade (Mass Driver 17 Kinetic, 132 RPM), it was also non-targeting, but with the damage boosts I have, I think that is fine now. I've also taken to largely moving backwards and strafing while firing as my way of dealing with enemies I can see. I rarely do any targeting mode any more, and instead just spray over the area, often in a bit of a spiral, if there is no direction indicator.