Hello!

I tested the game for around 25–30 minutes, and these are my first impressions.

- I liked the fleet building and being able to adjust different parts of the ships.

- In the fleet layout screen, I wanted to rearrange the unlocked empty slots. I accidentally bought some useless squares because I did not realize one click would buy them.

- I also have a few ideas about the in-game visuals. The shields look a bit too thick to me. Maybe they could be thinner, with a little more detail. The missiles also feel too big and too slow. I think they could be slightly smaller and faster.

- When controlling my fleet, it would be nice to have clearer visual feedback for where I am accelerating or drifting.

- The hit feedback and sounds felt good overall.

- On the level map, there are some unreachable or unfinished areas, but I guess this is because it is still a playtest. I also could not clearly see the details of the selected level. Maybe I missed it, but I think the game should answer “what happens in this level?” in a simple and visible way.

Overall, I think this is a good project.

I also developed a mobile Android space game. I was planning to improve it long term, but as a solo dev, I think the current state is enough for now. I still have not received enough feedback for it. If you can check the questions on my feedback page, I would really appreciate it.

Good luck with your project!

Played through the easy, medium, and hard tutorials, and then a couple levels with the civilian fleet, on version 3.5.  I liked being able to configure the ships with different options, and choosing ships with different predispositions to start with (power vs speed, etc).  I also thought the styling and art were good.

I was playing on a laptop (and thus a smallish display with a little less brightness than typical desktop displays) in a brightly-lit area, would have appreciated a little more contrast.  I think the main menus were fine, but once I started the tutorial, things were harder to read.  My display was already set as bright as it would go; I didn't see options in-game for contrast adjustments in the settings menu, but something like that might have helped.

The easy tutorial let me choose different weapon types, but it wasn't clear to me what the tradeoffs of the different weapons were.  I went with the laser for this one, and it didn't feel especially effective; fortunately, the missiles helped with that.  The ship speed felt a bit slow, but I figured that might be a purposeful function of the large ship size as compared to my opponents.  It took me some time to get used to the "tank controls" (movement keys working with respect to the ship orientation rather than camera orientation); I know some players prefer the tank controls, but maybe there could be an option to choose between the two?

On the medium tutorial, I skipped placing the smaller ships.  I was unable to drag them out when the tutorial popup text explained about their positioning, and then the tutorial went right into outfitting the flagship after that.  Then it seemed like it was time to launch the flagship, so I did, with no smaller ships.  I still won, but it seemed like I missed part of what I was supposed to have done.  It felt like the projectile weapon had a more noticeable impact on enemy health than the laser did.

On the hard tutorial, for the first time, I tried ramming the enemy ships, to see if my superior size and and shielding would be another way to deal damage.  This time around I'd placed the allied ships, though, so even when I stopped shooting to try to see if ramming was doing anything, the allied ships were still firing, so I couldn't tell if I was actually doing any damage this way.

I had a hard time keeping an eye on the indicator bars (shields, energy, hull) while playing.  I was mostly focused on the ship and projectile movements, and without focusing on the bars instead, it was a little hard to see the levels.  I didn't really want to take my focus off the combat, though, so mostly I wound up ignoring those indicators.

I couldn't tell if there was a way to repair the hulls of existing ships at the shipyard, or whether permanent hull damage was intentionally part of the difficulty.  I've played games that handle it different ways, but the tutorial hadn't dealt with existing hull damage, so I was a bit surprised.

The civilian map I got at first had a shipyard after the first level, and I was a little surprised that I couldn't go back to the shipyard after the second level.  I'm in space, and I'd cleared out the enemies, so it didn't seem like there would be anything to stop me from going back.  I was even more surprised to find that when I left the civilian region and re-entered, the map changed, which meant I was able to just repeatedly leave and re-enter until I got a map with an available shipyard.  Maybe that's an intentional way to let players reset their level progress if they're low on resources?

Hi! I tested version 3.5 on Windows.

The home/menu screen felt noticeably laggy for me. My main difficulty was understanding the beginning of the game. I gradually understood a few parts, but the fleet choices, map and immediate objective were not explained clearly enough for me to feel confident about what to do next. Unfortunately, I became confused and did not feel motivated to play again.

I noticed another tester reported a similar onboarding problem. I think a short compulsory first-run tutorial would help—using clear arrows, highlighting only one button at a time and explaining each action in simple language. Allowing a new player to start with a preset fleet and one guided battle before introducing full customization might also make the game easier to learn.

The visual concept is interesting, but I feel the player receives too much information before understanding the basic gameplay loop.

Since this topic mentions swapping feedback, I would really appreciate it if you could also try my free browser mystery game, CluePop:

https://rahulsinhaapps.itch.io/cluepop-mini-mysteries

I particularly need feedback about the first-time instructions and whether clues are easy to see on smaller screens. Thank you!

Hello, I played for about 20-30 minutes. The visual presentation of your game is outstanding. Here are some issues or thoughts:

1. I first tried the game on Ubuntu, but it got stuck on the telemetry popup at the start. I couldn’t close it at all (tried every keyboard and mouse button). Very strange, and I switched to Windows after that.
2. There are too many choices before the real gameplay begins. With zero knowledge of the game, players can only pick randomly. I’d suggest streamlining the first playthrough—fewer choices, but jump straight into an engaging yet simple combat sequence as the tutorial.
3. I’m not sure if WASD does anything. I pressed the keys but my ship didn’t seem to move.
4. The ship assembly mechanic, similar to inventory management, is quite interesting. I think focusing more on this system and cutting some of the unnecessary mechanics could yield better results.

If you’re interested, you can try my game: https://gamefang.itch.io/tramp-become-president

Graphics are straightforward, the UI is intuitive, sound effects simple, audio balance level good

There seems to be some confusion between the tutorial and ship coordination? The UI seems to contradict the Tutorial:

 A/B for primary secondary fire is reasonable on a controller, however when selecting keyboard/mouse controls the controls shown remain as A/B. updating the controls to show a mouse icon with the appropriate keys being clicked would help avoid confusion. Its good that later on when you start the tutorial battle it shows the appropriate keys based on what you selected at least.

the tutorial says to press Launch, but the only key I see is Start Battle?

friend/foe? the outline around my ship shows what looks to be like several red silhouettes, it threw me off a little as to who was an ally and who was hostile. I realized later on that it represented shields, it might be more helpful to the player to give enemies and allies different colored shields and use some other variable to show that a shield is weak(opacity?)

Game seems a little harsh at the start, some wiggle room to figure out mechanics would be very helpful, the tutorial was alright but it can take time for players to get used to mechanics as they play, I don't think you'd need to make the game easier early on necessarily, but maybe providing a way to do on-the-fly hull repairs early on would be beneficial.

Delay after clearing out a wave of enemies can be quite a while sometimes, leaving the player with 20 seconds or more of just waiting for enemy reinforcements, an option to fast forward at moments like this help with the game's pace. Sometimes the number on the countdown and the 's' overlap. An indication of where enemies will be arriving from would also be great, even if its just a general vascinity. 

I'm unclear on what recycling does, I can recycle money? assuming that's what credits are. 

The store page could use some more visual indications on what each product does, for example, in the image below

you could put a cropped screencap of the ship in action, or what it would look like at the deployment phase. the same goes for weapons, a single screenshot of how that weapon behaves would go a long way in communicating its use to the player.

Core gameplay loop is solid, though fairly simplistic in its current form, reminds me of games like FTL and StarSector.

I was able to quickly figure out how to navigate the game after a couple tries, though I don't quite feel like I'm very good at it, the core design seems, for the most part at least, to be fairly intuitive. 

If you could, I'm trying to get feedback on my own game, I recently did an update for the demo, both available as a download on here and on Steam, the GX build is outdated: 

itch download: https://silvercricket.itch.io/maryanneette

steam store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1963130/MaryAnneEtte/

forum for feedback (please post here, it improves engagement): /t/6490435/willing-to-exchange-feedbackreviews-maryanneette-an-ac...

Hi, I played your game. Here is a Video recording: 

If you want to give my game a go you can find it here: https://simenhs.itch.io/hexatown  It would be a great help to me if you could record a video when playing it.