The dialog is cute, but I'm not willing to wait for it. The spacebar should make all the text appear instantly so I can actually read it, and then you press it *again* to make it go away...
I didn't understand the instructions at the beginning; maybe you should tell users to click and drag to set the
initial velocity? Or start the first level with an arrow pointing to the moon and don't let users start the level until they have set a velocity? I was (for whatever reason) trying to do stuff *after* starting the level. It didn't occur to me for maybe 90 seconds and
way too many crashes that I was supposed to do something
before hitting the "go" button to start playing the level.
I like the music. Maybe it's Holst's
The Planets, but I always think space games should have vaguely classical music. Very nice.
Other than that...I got fed up with it pretty quickly. I forced myself to play the first 18 or 19 levels, but I was done with the game after the first 9 or 10. I feel like it was usually obvious what you were supposed to do. So it wasn't interesting problem solving and getting creative with looping around things in unusual ways, it was just a whole lot of annoying fiddling around to get the orbit *just* right.
And when you get to the first of the bigger levels you should point out that you can drag the background to look around. And zooming would be nice. The huge mine-pathway in Venus that you have to dodge through was just annoying because you couldn't see what to expect, so instead of being able to check out the level and plan ahead, you had to work your way through the first part and
then find out that there was something else ridiculous trying to kill you.
I dunno, maybe I'm not your target audience. But it felt like the Super Meat Boy of orbital mechanics games, and it was too slow-paced for me to be OK with dying and trying again a million times. And you can't speed it up because you need the time to respond...
I wish I had more constructive feedback to give you...but I don't know how to fix it. I think it's just really hard to make pure physics-based puzzles that aren't horribly fiddly. You see this with things like Fantastic Contraption and all those sorts of games inspired by The Incredible Machine: there are some fun puzzles at the beginning, and then they devolve into a long tweak/run cycle. Only there you often get silly and interesting things happening when you fail; here you're mostly just dying in the same way again and again.
Anyway, best of luck. Wishing you lots of fans who do have the tenacity to love playing this sort of thing,
--Josh
Developer
