Gotcha. I tried again this time understanding about the rescue and GPS beacons and it does indeed add a nice extra layer to the gameplay. Personally, I would jettison the idea of having to press a button to activate the beacon or rescue the person. It seems entirely redundant and a bit confusing. Made doubly so by the fact that there are two different buttons to press. A better mechanic might be if the button activated a tractor beam that pulled the survivor towards you. Then the player would /want/ to press the button.
I had simply assumed that the explosions were triggered by the asteroids colliding with each other, I didn't get at all that they were exploding as they went off the bottom of the screen. Although I did notice a lot of explosions going off on the bottom of the screen, so I guess maybe I should have put two and two together....
> Don't hide on the bottom.
Some real talk. It's a top down shmup, no matter what you do or say, the player will always hang out at the bottom of the screen. It's human nature. ;)
I understand what you mean about having the player explode the asteroids being a step away from your original design.
It would definitely shift the emphasis away from avoiding the asteroids and towards shooting them.
If you want to stick to avoiding them, I'd recommend shrinking the explosions and slowing them down a good bit. The fun in the cascading explosions is watching them unfold while desperately trying to get out of there way. Shrinking the explosions will reduce the danger of any one explosion, putting the emphasis on the cascade as a deadly threat to the player. Slowing the explosions down will draw out the sequence of the cascade, giving the player more time to react to them and also extending the period of suspense as you wait for the explosions to stop.
Alternately, if you really want the game to be about dodging the asteroids, you might consider the hard decision of yanking the cascades and banking them for a future project. It might be that the cascades will always work against a 'dodge'em' play style because the once the player sees one of those cool cascades, there going to want to see another, and another...
I can't really advise you about what do as far as the code base is concerned. I will say, you have a working prototype here, you might twiddle with it as much as you can to flesh out your design before moving to the 'total re-write' phase.
ps
You did a great job responding. I'm glad you took comments in the way they were given, which is as constructive feedback and not at all an attack on your or your work. Also do understand that these are just my thoughts on the game, others might see it differently and it is ultimately your game so your totally cool to try and thread your own path around the issues I've raised, or even stick to your current solutions. I can tell you I've had it happen to me plenty of times that I thought X was wrong with a game and somebody changed Y and suddenly I realized X was never really the issue at all :)