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Oh, turns out the hacking cost was the same as the un-upgraded base energy capacity, and the condition prevented its use even with full energy. Will be fixed in the next build, I'll implement something to make lack of energy more visible anyway.

I definitely like the proposed weapon slider tweaks too, playing with sliders does feel a bit annoying right now. Thanks for the illustration, I'll probably do something similar. 

My thoughts about a common upgrade pool for all weapons didn't involve dividing the crystals between weapons, rather having 1000 crystals would allow you to invest 1000 into every weapon at the same time, since right now one has to take a leap of faith by upgrading any new weapon since the previous one is probably already more powerful than the un-upgraded new one. This would leave a player with less choices to make, though...

Thank you for playing, I appreciate the detailed feedback! Pleasantly surprised you'd played long enough to unlock the railgun :)

Bug reports are appreciated, I totally forgot about changing F1 in webgl build...  Will investigate the rest. The 3x salary: 0 was indeed supposed to be a joke, and you can get penalized for destroying pick-up - eligible crystals, I'm assuming that's what happened here.

Adding hotkeys to HUD and auto-fire on weapon swap are both very good ideas, I guess I also should add more feedback to abilities, i.e. hacking drains a lot of energy so you probably couldn't use it because your energy bar wasn't almost full.

Not sure if I understood the part about crystals and stats correctly, are you suggesting having all crystals go into a common upgrade pool which raises the stat cap for every available weapon at the same time? I almost implemented that before uploading this demo, changed my mind at the last moment. Sounds like a much better system tbh.

Thanks for playing! Did you complete 4 levels and reach the galaxy map? Assuming so, since you saw the purple thing. I know the planet bug you're talking about, my bad, thought I'd fixed it. You almost made it to the enemies, too. 

Initial quotas are very permissive, my last demo was apparently overly hard so I wanted to be cautious this time. 

Appreciate the feedback! Tutorials are the bane of my existence, I'll try to make them less verbose :)

Fun platformer, but feels devilishly difficult, level 3 filtered me. The again, I'm totally unfamiliar with the genre, but I could appreciate the gun juice and the character animations, these feel awesome!

Haven't subjected myself to the arrow key controls since my flash gaming days though, I'm not sure if that's something one expects in platformer games nowadays but it certainly didn't feel right to me. Neither did having a target reticle cursor in a game without mouse aiming. All minor nitpicks tbh, game's cool.

Saw an issue with tutorial not auto-advancing after repair purchase in your vid - that was a small fix. As for the part where you couldn't play further - planets in the first system have to be completed in a specific order, and it seems like you briefly hovered over the correct planet, but didn't click on it. After you zoomed in during the initial tutorial, you kept playing with a zoomed-in view, this is why it might've felt too fast. My bad for not making the tutorial arrows and available destination planets more noticeable, I'll work on it, will add a zoom reset with each subsequent level too. Thank you for the footage, it was very informative.  

Can't believe I'm getting psyopped into scope creeping my game, on a DD jam page of all places! Must be those hypno portals at work smh.

Honestly, it doesn't sound bad, I'm just wondering how worthwhile it's going to be compared to an already well-tested limited area gameplay. Not much to procedurally generate other than backgrounds anyway. 

Appreciate the feedback, thanks! Did you find the controls agreeable? They've been the biggest source of complaints last time around, I've reworked them since.

Glad you enjoyed the tentacle bit, I plan to do a lot more with them down the line. 

Fair point about the visuals, I've largely neglected them in favor of simply adding more stuff. Definitely will need to spend some time on them. By warp effect, do you mean screen warping on time slowdown/damage taken, or when you enter a portal? There aren't really any effects for the latter, yet. 

Asteroid gravity has been on my to-experiment-with list for a while now, I'll give it a try, but as for free roaming - not sure I could make it work when so much stuff is already designed around having a limited playable area to catch asteroids in.

Rushed things pretty badly to make it in time, a lot more stuff in this version than in the previous DD, but not as much playtesting.

EDIT: Tested and added a WebGL build, saves should work now. Also did a little bugfixing and rebalancing since yesterday. 

Honestly? I think making it HL2-like is a great idea, I'll work on that. Regarding movement, it becomes a lot more responsive as you acquire more movement upgrades, and I kinda want to keep it this way. I will experiment with stronger auto-braking, though.

Needing to turn off a shield to pick up things was something I didn't put much thought into, it just felt "right", but if it's a source of annoyance then I'll opt against it. 

I've been having lots of second thoughts about upgradeable zoom myself, it really ruins the size factor of massive asteroids. I'll probably scrap it altogether and set the default zoom value to an equivalent of one or two bought sensor upgrades.

I've gotten lots of similar feedback about the controls being hard to deal with, but I'm unsure how to amend that while preserving ship inertia for that semi-realistic feel. Would higher linear velocity damping values help?

I would also like to know which difficulty were you playing on. On easy and medium, asteroids move significantly slower than what I originally intended, but maybe I should also reduce their right-side spawn probability,, that will definitely make things less chaotic.

As for the tractor beam, do you find it unreliable because a crystal you're using the beam on can miss your ship if your lateral velocity is too high? Again, I don't find that unrealistic and upgrading the tractor force should definitely help with that, but since it appears to be a constant source of frustration, I will tune its values a bit.

I appreciate the constructive criticism! Were you using the starting laser all the way? I intended for each subsequent weapon to be stronger than the last after getting enough upgrades into it, but I've had people who didn't feel incentivized to try the new weapons before, which leads me to conclude that the weapons need a rework. I'll probably end up moving away from being able to upgrade every single weapon stat altogether, since as you said, it might be nigh impossible to balance.

Good point about having the tractor beam be able to penetrate the walls from the get-go, having those crystals slip away is frustrating. There's an upgrade in the late game that makes pickup-eligible crystals become unable to pass through walls, but I'll probably keep as an upgrade, since otherwise collection would become a bit too easy.

My furthest plans involve giving the player a choice between asteroid-rich and enemy-rich levels as he progresses, so I hope the game will suffer less from doing both at the same time.

Just released a big update, added 5 types of enemy ships, various features and bug fixes (most significantly, fixed the save system). Currently wondering where to take this project, feedback wanted!

Thank you for your feedback! I still haven't been able to nail down the controls. Being able to move in four directions and potentially losing thrusters on one side after taking damage is a gimmick I kinda enjoy, I'm not sure how that would work with arrow-turning, but I'll give it a shot. Might give up on the whole directional damage system altogether. Trailer needs some work, I agree. The leaderboard is sadly for tracking own progress only :)

Greetings! I recently released a demo for Aste-Droyds, a classic Asteroids-like with fully physically destructible asteroids. Trailer available here: 

This game began 4 months ago as a learning project whose difficulty I had grossly underestimated, but over time it has matured into something I'd consider showing to other people, and possibly even expanding into a bigger game worthy of a full release. This is where I need your help.

I would like to gather some feedback, in the following areas specifically:

• The tutorial: Is it too annoying? Too verbose? How good a job does it do?
• Performance: A lot of expensive calculations happen when large asteroids collide or split. I'm aware of the issues in the WebGL version, and optimizations are on my to-do list, but for now, how bad is it, in your opinion? Does it ruin your enjoyment of the game?
• Balance: Overall difficulty curve, as well as how balanced do you think the upgrades, subsystems and weapons are. There are a lot of stats that you can alter!
• Last and most important: Would you want to play more of this? I have a lot of features in mind, but I'm still not convinced whether my implementation of the formula works. I have lots of planned features in mind, but I need to be sure that my foundation is solid enough to expand upon.

Feedback in all other areas is also more than welcome. Please mention how far you made it into the game (Wave number). Thanks in advance!

Recently released a demo of my asteroids-inspired game Aste-Droyds, available here. 

I see! Should be a relatively easy fix. 

Thank you for the feedback! Yeah, blaster might be a bit OP :) I'll fiddle with weapon values and upgrade costs until it feels right. Honestly thought it wasn't an instant upgrade if you leveled up the plasma beam somewhat before unlocking it. Did you upgrade beam damage or caliber? The former does little against rock asteroids without the latter, I need to communicate that better. 

As for the tutorial breaking, did the first asteroid never spawn for you? If you kept moving, you might've missed it, I'll alter the spawn logic to avoid that, but if the Wave 0 never began, that's a headscratcher. 

As far as completeness goes, it's honestly hard to say. I still have half a dozen features I'd like to add, plus a proper endgame/bossfight, but part of me wants to call this project a done deal, it was never meant to be a big game anyway. I'll address all the feedback I've gathered for now, and try to gather some more to see if this game is worth developing further.

Good point, also adding that now.

I thought I'd eliminated all possible issues with the tutorial, save for the asteroid possibly not shattering correctly. I did not test it extensively in the web version though, bummer. I'm uploading a downloadable version with a skippable tutorial now (can't believe I forgot about it), web version when it finishes building.

I moved the weapon modifications a bit further into the game because getting them required completing an objective and my players couldn't get a grasp of the controls... As things stand, you need to do a thing on Wave 4 to unlock them. Probably need to change the controls.