oo, I like these kinds of games. makes me remember dotstream for the gba.
anyway, tried trackpad and did ok. then gamepad and it was haaard. interesting solution on the steering with left analog stick being precise movement and right being bigger moves. though none of them felt right. the left one needed to be pulled to the extreme to get a decent move out and the right was just too much. I think an exponentional readout instead of linear would be better.
well, mouse was the easiest to handle. I got to 22 on my first try with it.
but I always had trouble judging height grace and often bumped the roof into crystals. this migh be mitigated with moving the field that lights up from the ship more forward. I felt like often I would hit the underside of a crystal before even seeing the close charging effect on it.
this and the shield pick ups. I imagine I thought I had picked one up a handful of times without anything happening. it looked like I flew through it? so I'm thinking it would be nice if you enlarged the pick up zone.
also, I agree with the idea with checkpoints. the beginning is kind of a drag and is so slow that I lose focus.
all in all, a real fun game! with a bit of polish it would be a great zen mode game to keep coming back to~