Hi Triston!
I know I covered a lot on the stream and that we already messaged each other on Discord, but here's the official feedback for your reference!
I don't have too much to say about the sound and music where it was, which is a good thing. I always say that for most games, the audio shouldn't outshine the game, but at the same time, great audio in the right spots could help you retain an audience and help you earn more. This is usually for those games planning to release soundtracks and such, but realistically, it's not the priority in your project at the moment.
Visually, I find your art style for everything pretty fresh. I enjoyed the cutscenes so far, and the story has me intrigued enough to know more. As a colorblind player, visually nothing in your game hindered my experience, so I don't have any accessibility advice to give in that regard. If there were any color-coded items, the descriptions and such were enough for me to not feel anything was ruining or hurting the gameplay.
Gameplay:
I can only imagine where you could go with the game, as I mentioned to you that I played quite a bit of GunBound in the past, and it'd be interesting to see a squad- and card-based iteration of the genre! While the gameplay loop evolves in your game through story and ship enhancements, the strategy aspect of your game has a bit of room to grow.
For the bugs, I know you are already working on a few, like the ship selection so I'll leave that out of this feedback on focus more on what would get me to come back to your game more. From my experience, you are in the right direction to start, but I figure you'd like to evolve and add more types of ships and their capabilities/limitations. As it stands, the 3 ships are very similar and can equip most, if not all,cards. This leads me to think of two other games you can turn to as references: Hearthstone and Mech Arena. While these are predominantly somewhat Gacha games in terms of pulls, unlocking, and battle passes, they do have elements in them that drive a sense of diversity and progression in their character and deck building.
So with Hearthstone, they have class-specific and then a general pool of cards. I was thinking for your game, you could probably have something similar in your card shop where the ships have "build" specific cards that can't be used by other ships to give them more personality. I would also suggest maybe setting one of the card slots to require a build-specific card to make sure players strategically have some kind of limitation. Now, this is just one recommendation; if you could come up with some other approach, that would be fine too! I was using this as an example of how the ships could stand out even more as unique within the set of cards. I am thinking that, moving forward, you might even have more ships and such so players build their own squads based on their style of play, so yeah, this is at least how I picture your game so far. I do still need to play through the rest of it.
Mech Arena is interesting in that all mech types can "kind of" equip each other's weapons, sort of like you have a classic pool of cards. Yet the ship frames on yours have varying special abilities and even target timings. So this is the reference that came to mind: you have a base ship with its own traits, and the cards are customizable and changeable traits.
Again, the above are only for reference! I've said it on other streams, and I'll say it too. You, as the dev, should create what you feel would make your game fun and not bend to the streamers and feedback of others. It's how Expedition 33 came out so successful. If you have ideas for your game, make those the priority. Everything else is just thoughts on what hooked me on other games that I thought of for yours.
Additionally, from what I understand, some people had a hard time hitting their targets, with practice though, I think everyone would be getting better at aiming. That said, I totally understand why the current battlemaps are as small as they are, but I'm hoping that we could have maps and fights that are zoomed out a little more to give the ship movement even more value. Nothing wrong with the current stage as it is now, but I could imagine some huge battles and even harder-to-aim scenarios on larger maps as the game progresses.
Keep up the good work and continue to create! Thanks for the game!
Regards,
- Glim
GlimMusic.com