First, praise: In spite of its early stage of development, the game as a whole is intriguing. The humor is good, I like the concept, and on a specific note, the use of a DnD-style alignment chart as your primary dialogue controller is both hilarious and very clever from a design standpoint. I was amazed at how much the ambient audio really helps sell the experience, almost to such an extent that music barely feels necessary. You’re onto something good, and your time investment has not been a mistake. Keep going.
I’ve only played as far the warp drive (an hour or two) but I’ll probably go back and try again at some point. Maybe once I’m done writing this post, even.
Short list of issues in order of perceived severity (most to least):
- Inputs still getting processed while alt-tabbed really is a major pain, had to unbind the keyboard just to take notes
- Being unable to use your hands while holding a tool feels more annoying than interesting
- You’re right, having to hold a button to confirm actions is kind of irritating, especially when I have to do it every time I want to interact with the ship’s console
- Consider a crude map (or at least a pointer to your landing pad) to keep from getting lost on planet surfaces
- Having to drop the surveying probe on the ground in order to get a reading was mildly annoying
- The text box is a little big, and the text itself is somewhat hard to read, probably due to a lack of contrast
- When boarding other ships, your boarding platform seems to create a wall outline next to the cockpit on the inside of the ship
- Be mindful of color-coding the tools, it may cause issues for color-blind people
Regarding “mixels”: Somebody else commented on the issue of varying pixel sizes in places as an aesthetic issue. Recommendation: 640x360 is a base resolution that scales by clean integer multiples to all major 16:9 screen sizes. At 2x scale, it’s 720p, at 3x, it’s 1080p, 4x = 1440p, 6x = 4k, and so on. You can even cut it in half for a resolution very similar to the old Gameboy Advance. It’s almost ideal for pixel art games, though I’m not sure how it’d look with your current graphics.
Regarding stamina: Consider the role that stamina actually plays. In Harvest Moon and others, the purpose is to limit what you can do in a day, because the day is the fixed measurement of time around which the entire game is centered. In Starstruck, I’m not certain stamina actually serves any purpose, and even if it did, I’m not sure it would enhance the experience any.
Finally, a thought on the general direction of things: The core loop feels like it wants to be about maintenance. Polishing and tightening and sealing and sorting and what have you. To that end, I’m going to make a somewhat controversial suggestion: Abandon the navigation minigame, and maybe even the pick-a-direction interface. Just choose a destination and go, and let the main loop be about mid-journey upkeep. That align-the-intakes thing feels like it’d make for a good mid-flight minigame where they slowly drift away from what’s optimal and you have to adjust them to keep your speed up. More things like that - Rather than just having things break, have your performance be gradually impacted. Less oxygen generation means slower move speed (short on breath). Dirty coolant means your engines perform worse. You know, keep it within the narrative scope of “Keeping this worthless rustbucket in working order, I swear it’s falling apart at the seams, oh fucking Christ did Xorox drop his toothbrush in the turbines again, it took me three hours to realign the blades last time”, and so on.
I eagerly await future releases. Good luck!