Hi Johnonym, thank you for the detailed feedback! During development we only managed to get a couple of playtesters so I really appreciate the thoughtful comments and constructive criticism. It'll help us a lot! We are definitely going to continue working on the game, and hopefully flesh it out a lot more and bring it to market. We really like the game and think it has a lot of strategic decision making and replay value that fans of the genre will like.
- Good point about the hyperdrive effect, we'll definitely work on the effect so it doesn't feel like something went wrong.
- The thruster lever gave a lot of players a hard time unfortunately. It turned out to be not as obvious/intuitive to use as we had thought. We will rework the UI for that so it's completely obvious how to use it, thanks for pointing out the problem.
- Glad you liked the UI! This was my first time doing 2d art for a game so I'm glad someone liked it haha (my main skills are programming and music)
- Yes, it's possible to skip all the planets and go straight to earth and try for diplomacy, although it makes it harder. In the game, there is a meter for how strong the galaxy's technology is. For each planet you visit, every planet gets a bit stronger (their ships become higher level during combat and your starting stats for diplomacy get lower). So the risk with going straight to earth and trying diplomacy is that you have a much lower chance of success. When I play for diplomacy ending, I try to research the diplomacy options that will increase my chances (upto +15% for both subjugation and trade) and that requires quite a bit of resources so I stop by other planets and gather those. But yeah as of right now, there's really no penalty for skipping all the gameplay and going straight to earth. It's actually even a good way to see all the endings quickly haha. Failing subjugation (the Captured ending) is my favorite. We will work on making it so that it's more punishing to go straight to earth and only very skill level players should risk that strategy.
Thanks for the compliments about the visuals and sound design. For a 2 person team, this was a pretty ambitious project and we're proud of what we've accomplished so far. We have a good vision for the final version of the game and will continue working to get there. Thanks for playing!