Thank you for the feedback, it’s really useful 😀
I could not go for joystick system, since I am targeting web / PC.
But I wanted to go for a propulsion system at first, where a force is applied to the spaceship, and you can rotate the ship after applying motion, to shoot wherever you want, which make sense for a “forward gun” (the main one), but it would most likely cause motion sickness to some of the streamers and players.
More precisely, I wanted the player to be able to accelerate in a direction, rotate, and shoot the enemies behind. It would add other difficulties though, like avoiding enemies in the movement direction, for instance.
And I did not have time to make two movement system. I will try to let the user choose the movement system for the next version.
For the second issue, the whole “die and retry” system I had put in place is not clear enough:
- If you die, you keep your upgrades, as long as you do not restart the game (close the tab)
- You will respawn at the last reached place (something like that)
- Continue will put you back at the last level you loaded (at the beginning of the level)
- It’s supposed to be a functionality to pause the game and continue later, since there is no save system
- Start game will put you back in the first level difficulty, but the game systems I’ve listed above must be interfering with the design I had in mind (it’s a bug) -> you must be spawning in the last galaxy place you’ve reached -> so it’s diminishing (except for the learning curve) the difficult nicely (but it’s a bug)
I had never run out of fuel in the galaxy, since I know what to do, but I just tested it : you will respawn at the last position reached before you clicked on “Main menu”, the next time you open the galaxy map.
Normally, you can reach Luyten 726-8 (the one before the Snow level) directly from the first level with full fuel, if you do not waste any. -> I’ll make the difficulty lower and/or clearly indicate what to do once on the galaxy map
“I would have preferred if the map was a fixed designed, and designed to specifically provide a smooth difficulty curve.” -> I am sorry, it’s a bug
“On the topic of accessibility, I found the colors for the fuel dots and XP dots to be too similar for me to easily distinguish between them.” -> thank you for the advice, I can definitively make them of different shapes, I will focus on that (just after the parallax effect that woahh_jess mentioned)
“On the topic of fuel, …” -> yes, I will definitively implement a fuel-bar (same for the health and experience)
I am new at Godot, so I did not do it during the weekend, but I’ve seen some tutorials, it’s definitively something that I can implement.
I think it is not indicated clearly enough, but you can totally set the difficulty you want by using the cheat code “level up”.
Spoiler:
You can actually exploit the “run out of fuel” functionality + the spaceship continue to move after “Game over” to clear the game in 2 tutorial maps + the last one, which I’ve just done 🙄