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I do not understand.  You are saying you spawn in, never move forward (never use right mouse button) and are able to beat the game?    You actually spawn in outside the asteroid belt and your laser would only be able to reach a few of the asteroids.  So when you are saying the ship feels more nimble, you are just talking about spinning in a circle not actually flying it?    haha, I guess I never imagined anyone would try to play it that way or it would even be possible.   Without trying it myself, my thought would be that you would hit the few large asteroids that are within range and they would get pushed out of range pretty fast and maybe you could get a couple of zurg asteroids, but not nearly enough to get to 3000.  

Version 1.1 is up and is designed to make the game more challenging and chaotic.   
The following changes were made

-  Asteroid Belt 1  now has less Zurg
 -  Asteroid Belts 2 and 3 now have slightly less Zurg
 -  All Asteroid Belts are more dense 
-  Your ship is now faster and more nimble 
-  Enemy ships are now faster and more nimble
 -  Enemy ships now spawn closer to the asteroid belts and will make contact with you faster
-  Helado gets even less fuel efficiency when above 4000 zurg. 
- The distance your ship and asteroids have from the effects of solar radiation is smaller.   Asteroids will be returned to to asteroid belt much faster.

Special thanks to Stand Off Software for their advice

I understand.  Maybe I lost my point in my rambling.   I think because the game is so very easy, you missed the real ´gameplay´ which was meant to be frantically  avoiding asteroids in an asteroid belt that is becoming more chaotic as time goes on because you are sending stuff flying each time you blast an asteroid apart. ( similar to the original Asteroids game).  The radiation box is a giant box outside the asteroid belt and when an asteroid hits that box, it gets thrown back towards the center of the the asteroid belt at double the velocity it hit the box.   There is no inertia dampening at all,  so overall the combined movement inside the belt should increase exponentially over time.  Unfortunately, that barely kicked in if you were clearing belts in 2 minutes .  Something you probably never noticed, but at 3 minutes the timer text turns yellow, and at 5mins the timer text turns red and ominus music starts playing to let you know that you are losing that level and Justice is catching up.

There was a secondary goal in the belts, and that was to collect ship upgrades while still clearing the belt in a decent amount of time.  But because the enemy ships are starting too far away from the belt and because you were clearing the belts 2 minutes faster than how i designed the game, they became a non-issue.  And because the game was so easy, the upgrades were never necessary anyway so it never forced that decision on you ´should I go in this asteroid belt that is ´red´ for enemies, or should I go in an easier belt to get quick fuel to keep Justice from gaining ground.  That decision-making was a key part to why I made the asteroid selection screen how I did, and why there was a ship upgrade that gives you a longer scan range, so with the upgrade you can choose between 4 or 5 belts rather than 2-3...

I definitely do not want to give up on the game, but I at least want to give a shot or two at making it the game I was trying to make before I radically gut the original game design.

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.

haha.. you caught it..  Helado is ´ice´ in spanish, the truckers name in the movie was snowman.. and of course BT Justice.   Please let me know f you like the game.  So far I have only had 7 downloads and aside from friends who tested for me, I have had no strangers giving me their thoughts.  I am pretty sure the game is solid, the premise is good with the chase element, the difficulty system is pretty cool... but what is hard to know is if the game is just ´fun´ for people who don´t already like me LOL.  thanks again.

Yeah, I just launched my first game today and started talking to people.  I think being an Indy game developer is 70% marketing and 30% making a great game.  my game is Fuel Run.    I´ve advertised at all the ´free´ places like major gaming forums, facebook groups, Twitter even the Unity forums.  Not ready to be discouraged yet, but the posts aren´t going to last long until they drop to obscurity, and the leap from getting a click, to getting a download to getting a donation is pretty steep.  Seems weird to work on a game for months, polish it well and then not even be able to get people to look at the page.

I am really excited about launching my first game. The name is Fuel Run and it is available for free on Itch.io.

It is inspired by the classic Atari game Asteroids. Fuel Run is a 3d space mining game where you are the mining and refueling ship for a notorious smuggler. As the smuggler makes a smuggling run of 1000 light years, you enter various asteroid belts and mine for Zurg. The faster you can fill your fuel tanks and return to the smuggler, the faster he can go. This is important because the smuggler is being chased by the legendary lawman BT Justice. As you blast at asteroids to reveal zurg deposits, the asteroid belt quickly becomes more chaotic.

Fuel Run features an interesting difficulty system where the difficulty can be set from 0-100 by raising 10 different catagories from 1-10. This means you have options on how to increase your games difficulty with your ultimate goal of defeating the game on level 100. Ship upgrades come from destroying enemy ships in the asteroid fields and your ship upgrades stay with you on subsequent smuggling runs which will help you defeat the game at higher difficulties.

Fuel Run on Itch.io

Thank you, that is a great option!

I plan on starting to upload some games, but I would like to separate them mainly based on which ones are fast game jam type games, and some more serious long term projects. My concern is that free game jam type games might look unprofessional when I try to sell real games, so I was thinking it would be best to have two accounts.

Is that frowned upon? is it possible to use the same paypal account on two itch accounts?