Star Smugglers

bookworm31 2017-12-04 08:57

I really enjoyed playing this game. It feels somewhat akin to FTL, but the upgrading mechanic after deciding when to sell your goods was cool. I thought the option to invest in a retirement plan and eventually retire was a funny idea.

sbarrio 2017-12-04 10:22

Loved the concept and the script was really funny. I never thought that I would spend so much time avoiding my parents calls while smuggling stuff across the galaxy!

Thumbs up for using HaxeFlixel as well ;)

tuism 2017-12-04 11:02

The concept is great, injecting humour in this with parents' call is interesting :)

Though:

I wished it were more engaging - the overall package gave me very little to "care" for. I think it's due to many little details, like: - The overall design is very bland, almost everything is monochrome, and that makes it hard to know what to focus on, and makes it hard to parse easily, makes it tiring to engage with. - The font is not reading-friendly, and that's bad for something that's effectively a text adventure. - The choices could do with some design - have the action bigger, or different colours, etc. That makes skimming choices easier. - The chances of things could be presented easier to understand/read/parse at a glance. - The shipping multiplier could be clearer to indicate that your goods get more valuable after each successive run.

So yeah overall it's an information design/ui problem that keeps this from being more interesting, I think.

sholf 2017-12-04 12:10

I spent more time playing this game than I should. I love the FTL vibe, really fun! The little humor here and there is also great (please spare the cat). I did find a little "bug" though, you can easily stack up money by repeatedly ending your run and getting 25% interest over and over again. Other than that it's a lovely game! I guess I can retire as a Quantumnare now.

snipera 2017-12-04 12:12

Thought the game was fun :), enjoyed the parents calling and always spoke to them, since it didn't seem to affect the game and at least I didn't feel guilty haha.

- Hard to notice highlight colour, I think instead of changing it to white, you should change it to a different colour so it is more visible.

- My Artifacts was always showing max / max, and I never knew exactly how many I had. Not sure if that was a bug, or something I was seeing wrong.

Focus on UI would really make this better! Fun game though :)

Check out mine if you can! - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/dont-get-hangry

pvtroswold 2017-12-04 23:23

This was great! I loved the humor, the decision making element, and the music was pretty alright, too.

dr-v 2017-12-05 00:28

Thanks for the feedback folks. I appreciate it.

@tuism thanks for detailed feedback. I certainly take your point (and others) about the monochrome. Nominally it was a stylistic choice, but one that made the experience bland. I'm a bit surprised about the font being hard to read thought - was this the experience of others as well?

@Sholf thanks for the feedback. You managed to find a hidden way out of the rat race ;)

@SniperA good on your for being good to your parents :). I will take another stab at the UI for the post compo version, and I will take a look at the artifact numbers.

alottabit 2017-12-07 04:36

Fun game! I liked the humor (those pesky parents), and the soundtrack was really enjoyable as well.

It was weird to me that upgrading one part of the ship raised the prices for all other upgrades - I definitely expected my first paycheck to go a bit further. It would also be nice if there more numbers on the upgrades - other than the cargo hold I didn't really know how helpful they would be.

As a side note, I had to jump through some hoops to make it run - Firefox was blocking Flash Player by default with no notifications. You may want to let people know so they don't just see a mostly empty web page and give up.

deathray 2017-12-07 04:45

I had a lot of fun with this. I love the simple, decision-based gameplay, and the options to upgrade. :rocket: I think this game will inspire me for a while! There does seem to be a bug though: When i restarted a new game after getting arrested on my first game, the prices were already at the elevated level ($100 rather than $50).

acoto87 2017-12-07 05:35

This game is fun to play. The humor is great, and the choices are well balanced, I think. Good job!

cogcomp 2017-12-07 05:56

That was pretty unique. Well done! And the music fit really well!

eerongal 2017-12-10 16:20

This is a really fun, solid game. The mechanics work out pretty well, though it would be nice to have some sort of influence on the choices you make (like a mini game or something that affects it), but other than that it's really fun! nice work!

almost 2017-12-17 08:33

I like the balance of trying to decide how far I should go and how risky I should play.

I don't really understand how quickly the value of an artifact grows and if the number of parsecs is relevant to the value of the artifacts or only relevant to the number of encounters.

Given the amount of reading required, I find normal fonts easier to read than squarish all-capital fonts. Having icons for damage, artifacts, and wanted levels would make them even easier to read more quickly.

Being captured confused me. I'm not sure whether or not I'm supposed to lose my upgrades, but after being captured and then doing an additional run it referred to all of my stuff as level 1 but the upgrades all cost 500+.

vfabien21 2017-12-17 09:32

That's a really nice game about taking decisions. The gamble about when to sell those aliens artifacts is a really interresting mecanism, which I haven't seen very often in such space tycoon games. I loved that constant risk evaluation whether I should push a little bit further or not. And it was nice to be able to use the money in the end.

The art worked really well for me.

So good job ! That's a game I really enjoyed playing.

ashtrail 2017-12-20 11:45

Nice game !

The concept is solid and there are a lot of nice little details (the humour or the weird curly paths when you chose your next destination for instance).

I agree with tuism concerning possible improvements (although I personally didn't have any problems with the font). I think the game could use more content (since a big part of the fun of the game, for me at least, is discovering new situations) and perhaps emphasize achievements to incite the player to continue playing.

Good job (and kudos for Haxeflixel :P) !