Hey, thank you for the awesome feedback. I am almost sorry you caught onto the Smokey and Bandit part, because that is sort of a red herring.
Here was my thought process when making the game. I was told that a good idea for a ´first game ever´ was to either make a really really simple game or else recreate a classic game and add a twist. So my goal was to make a 3D version of Asteroids. This really was the absolute first time I ever created any game. After 3D Asteroids was the main theme, I played asteroids and didn´t like the fact that there was no progression or story per se, the game just gave you more and more asteroids and you tried to survive as long as possible. That is when I came up with the idea to have a chase element and to make you need to mine as fast as possible.... adding some Smokey and the Bandit wording was just for fun. The whole idea is that you are a speed miner, not a distraction car and maybe the fact that you figured out the Smokey and the Bandit references made you think the game was something it was never intended to be. But the game you described would be pretty cool. Maybe something similar to what I made, but your job is to distract the patrols and get them to crash into asteroid as you slip and slide through them.
The other points are spot on. The speed of the ship was tricky for me to deal with. I agree it felt slow, and in Unity it is very easy to make the ship faster, in fact I tested much faster, but the problem is it made it hard to target. With the faster ship, flying felt better but shooting felt worse. The game just felt bad when you weren´t able to predict where you shots were going. At one point I tried adding cross-hairs but it just never felt good.
The difficulty thing was hard for me to dial in. I had limited friends willing to test the game repeatedly and for me, it was hard to determine how ´good´ i was at my own game just because of knowing how stuff functioned... and so I erred on the side of making the game a little easy although I was never able to beat the game at lvl 100 with no ship upgrades.
The lack of enemy ships plays into this. It was just hard to decide how long players would be in the belts. The game is balanced around completing an asteroid belt in 300 seconds. If you beat every belt at 300 seconds, Justice barely catches you at the very end. So again, I errored in being easy, so on most of the belts with enemies the enemies only arrive about 120 seconds in and then still have to make their way in the belts to you. I think if the game was a little more difficult overall, you would have been in the belts a little longer and the enemies would have been a bigger part of your gameplay.
I agree completely with your assessment overall, But I think I would have prefered if you thought of the game as speed mining in 3D asteroids with a chase element rather than Smokey and the Bandit in space.
So I will make the following changes
1. Speed up the ship a bit
2. Move the spawn box for the enemies closer to the asteroid belt so they get there in half the time they currently do.
3. Speed up Justice to make the game more difficult, maybe balance it around 250 seconds rather than 300.
4. Shrink the radiation box around the asteroid belt, this will increase the rate in which chaos starts to happen within the belt. Stuff will bounce around more often.
Thank you so much for the review. Obviously I had no expectations that this game would be great or that it would make any money at all, but I am a bit disheartened that I spent over a hundred hours making it and only 6 people have even downloaded it as a free game. But on the good side, I still haven´t found a bug I need to fix.