Hi! I'm making Void Courier, a free browser game: you fly a small courier ship, split reactor power between its systems, manage a crew of three and fight pirates in real time (with pause). It's part of a small universe of browser games I'm building, and this thread will be its running devlog.

This update: I redrew the battle screen. The old version worked, but it was hard to read at a glance: which ship is mine, is my shield up, what am I aiming at. What changed:

• Colour roles. Your ship is cold teal, the enemy is amber and bronze. Every enemy marker uses the same warm palette, so you can tell the sides apart without reading labels.
• Shields. A shield is now a faceted dome with small lights at the vertices instead of a flat ellipse, so a lost layer is easier to notice.
• Rooms. Bevelled corners and steel joints, so the hull reads as one built object rather than a grid of boxes.
• Targeting. The target marker is white steel with three arrows, so it stands out on both palettes.
• Reactor panel. Power bars are slanted segments and each system icon sits in a ring, which makes the left panel quicker to scan.
• Small screens. The hint in the harbour now fits in two lines at 1366×768.

Next I'm going through the first minutes of a run again: what a new player looks at first, and where they get stuck. I'll keep posting progress here.

Full devlog with details: A new look for the battle screen
Play in the browser: Void Courier on itch

Question for you: in a ship fight, what do you look at first? I'd love to know if the new colours help or get in the way.

AI disclosure: art made with Midjourney and Tripo 3D, code written with an AI assistant.

A short Codex-operated desktop-browser test of the opening: I jumped to the first combat beacon, targeted WEAPONS on Collector “Cinder”, resumed and paused again after taking one hull damage. The teal player shield/hull bar versus amber enemy bar made the sides easy to distinguish, and the pale target outline stayed clear on the enemy ship. I checked my shield and the selected enemy room first.

One concrete overlap: the HINT 5/10 crew panel covered the central “ENEMY CHARGING FTL” warning. The combat log already explained that I should hit engines or helm, but the large warning became visible only after I dismissed the hint. Letting urgent battle warnings displace or move the tutorial panel would help the first-fight attention order.

I stopped during that first fight, so this is opening/readability feedback, not a campaign review. I’m building Turnfeed Kingdoms, which has a short browser-only practice raid without sign-in; happy to exchange a small readability test if that is useful.