I played the game for a while and here are my comments :-)

First of all, I completely love the concept. The idea of Smokey and the bandit in space is a primo idea that can really go places. That said, this game in its current state doesn't really capture that. here are some critiques:

• The first thing you notice is that the ship flies really really slowly. I'm supposed to be the counterpart to The Bandit here, a fast driving dare-devil outlaw, but I'm cruising around in asteroid fields at the speed of a grandma out for a Sunday drive. In fact most of the time I didn't even have to move an inch from where I started. I just shot at the asteroids around me until I progressed to the next level.
• The music doesn't elicit any excitement either. Eventually I started listening to the Smokey and the Bandit theme "East Bound and Down" while playing and that helped quite a bit actually, but made me even more want to be zooming through avoiding the cop space ships rather than sitting in one place shooting at asteroids over and over. Could you imagine a space game with an upbeat country music soundtrack? That would be awesome and very original. The music that's there now just sounds like generic spacey music.
• Repetitive game play. I've hit on this in my last two points but all there is to do all game is shoot asteroids over and over and over and over. Even on the hardest difficulty, I rarely ever even saw an enemy space ship. It was just sitting in one place shooting asteroids every single level.
• Far too easy. I cranked it up to difficulty 100 my third play-through ever and had no problem at all getting to the end. There's no challenge in this game.

The graphics are fine, I didn't find any bugs or glitches. It seems to work well for what it is, but this seems more like a prototype of a system than a full game. Getting fuel from asteroids is a fine base goal, but there needs to be more variety than that.

Think back to the Smokey and the bandit movie. The bandit's job was to distract the cops so the Snowman could drive through without issues. What if that was part of the job of the player in this game too? Instead of being able to sit and shoot asteroids, you had to seek out the bad guys and keep them distracted or they would go attack the smuggler!

And what if you couldn't actually shoot them (at least very easily) instead you had to get them to chase you and then outsmart them by running fast through the asteroid fields which included other obstacles like tunnels through very large asteroids and other things which your fast and agile ship could avoid but they would crash into. This is the kind of fast-paced action that would really bring the spirit of the movie to life. And it would give the opportunity to give the different regions a very different feel since the layouts and obstacles would be different and increasing in difficulty.

So while this game has an incredibly cool concept, I don't believe that concept is realized in its current form. I hope you keep working on it as the idea has so much potential.

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.

To tell you the truth, I already figured out that the Smokey and the Bandit things were sort of tacked on for flavor, and not really part of the original game concept, but I used examples from that in hopes to spur you on to deepen the gameplay.

As a first game ever, this one is very well done. Not many first games ever by anyone are this polished. Incredibly good job! However, I think the most important thing in my post, and what you should pay attention to the most, is this sentence: "This seems more like a prototype of a system than a full game."

The things like ship speed and the others are important, but the most important thing that stops this game from really being fun is that there isn't much to do and it doesn't have much character. Whether you want to flesh out the Smokey and the Bandit aspect or go in a different direction, in order for this to be a fully realized game, there just needs to be more complexity. If you are ready to dump this game, call it finished, and move onto the next then that's fine and understandable, but if not, I think there is really a lot of potential here to make a really good game, and I don't think I've ever said that to anyone about their very first game before. :-)

What you have right now is a damn good framework for what could be built into a really fun game, but not so much a fun game itself. Look at a game like Orbox C. It's a really really simple game concept. Get the square from the start to the end place. Easy enough. But then they add on additional goals to that which make the game more interesting and varied. Sometimes you have 3 or 4 goals in one level, like you have to get the square from beginning to end but first you have to collect all the glowing things and also break all the ice squares and also turn all the sides of the circle things on. This is a concept that could be really handy in your game. The primary mission is to gather fuel, but there are other things that have to also be done. And the intensity has to ramp up as the game goes on.

Also I do have an idea of about how much time it took to get through the levels. On my final playthrough (on difficulty 100) it usually took about 2 minutes (120 seconds) to get through a level. This explains why I never saw enemies I guess. I was almost always out before they spawned.

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.

Just tried the new build. I'll put my comments about my playthrough in a bullet list.

• I cranked the difficulty up to 100 the first time through starting with no upgrades. Still no problem finishing it.
• I never once used my thrusters. I sat in the same place I spawned in every belt every time.
• I was never once hit by an asteroid.
• Three times I was attacked by enemy ships (up from zero times in the previous build unless I sought them out). One of those times, the attack did hinder my progress significantly because there were a whole lot of them.
• I chose the available belt with the most zurg every time. In case of a tie, I chose the one with fewer enemies.
• In the beginning, I was clearing most belts in about 150 seconds, and toward the end with upgrades from defeating the enemies, I was clearing most belts in about 70 seconds.
• The better agility feels a lot nicer.
• I definitely noticed that Helado was moving more slowly.
• I finished with BT trailing by about 350.

One tip I want to give on adjusting difficulty. What I usually do is make the hardest difficulty impossible, then barely scale back from there. Make it such that is literally impossible to win on difficulty 100 with full upgrades. No matter what you do, and how many times you try you can't do it. Then adjust your other difficulties based on that. Then slightly scale it back so that it is only almost impossible to win on difficulty 100 with full upgrades.