My experience with this lovely game

Some thoughts which hopefully the developers will find useful:

First of all, thank you for not making this game Free To Play. I much prefer to pay for a complete game experience than to get a 'free' game whose whole design is to make me pay money. This is becoming rarer and rarer on Android. Also I have been playing this on both Samsung Galaxy S3 and Nexus 7 and it seems relatively bug-free on both. Good job!

I also enjoy the art style although I feel that the darkness of the app icon made me overlook it in the Play Market for a while. Perhaps something brighter to compete with all the flashy looking apps! Once you are in the game, though, the art is really nice.

I really enjoy the simple interface and the resource management idea. It is a refreshingly original take on this sort of game. Keep your Fuel, Air and Ship's Hull up and get to the location marked on the map. Simple! Also there is the fourth 'resource' of learning the Star Language so you can solve puzzles. Very cool.

I have to echo the concerns of other people in this forum, though: the game is too random and this makes it unpleasantly difficult. No, difficult is not the right word. 'Punishing' is the right word. The game feels like it punishes the player at random and without warning or reason.

I am not complaining that there is randomness. Obviously some randomness is fine in a game. It makes things interesting and keeps you on your toes. And this is obviously supposed to be a challenging game. No complaints about that. But when EVERYTHING is random it becomes too difficult to make decisions. After playing this game for hours I do not find myself to be much better at it than when I started. I know what I need to do, I know how to manage my resources, but the high degree of randomness means that my best plans and most carefully considered decisions are rendered useless by events I have no control over.

Legendary game designer Sid Meier once described a game as 'a series of interesting decisions'. There are many potentially interesting decisions in this game, but if my decisions do not matter because random chance will decide the outcome then the decisions are not so interesting.

Running a bit low on oxygen? Too bad, the next ten star systems have no garden planets and then I encounter an oxygen-draining random event. Dead. Ready for a bigger ship? Too bad, you can't find one. Doing well? No you are not, you have just been teleported to a system from which you cannot escape because you don't have the right tech. Looking for a specific tech? Maybe you will find it. Probably not.

Sometimes things go well and the game is a lot of fun. Other times it is a boring grind. Still other times, it feels like the game actually hates me and is doing things just to be cruel. I realize this is not the case, but it very much FEELS that way and I am afraid that I will get so angry I will damage my Nexus by throwing it at something!

I wonder if you are tracking game statistics such as the number of times a player 'gives up'. Because I have been forced to give up a LOT. I have also only managed to get to the end (green planet) ONE time in hours of play. Ironically, it was soon after I started playing. I haven't made it so far since. I think a 'give up' scenario should be very rare, as it is perhaps even more frustrating for the player than death.

I have specific suggestions but I will save them for the next post to keep this from getting too long.

Some thoughts which hopefully the developers will find useful:

First of all, thank you for not making this game Free To Play. I much prefer to pay for a complete game experience than to get a 'free' game whose whole design is to make me pay money. This is becoming rarer and rarer on Android. Also I have been playing this on both Samsung Galaxy S3 and Nexus 7 and it seems relatively bug-free on both. Good job!

I also enjoy the art style although I feel that the darkness of the app icon made me overlook it in the Play Market for a while. Perhaps something brighter to compete with all the flashy looking apps! Once you are in the game, though, the art is really nice.

I really enjoy the simple interface and the resource management idea. It is a refreshingly original take on this sort of game. Keep your Fuel, Air and Ship's Hull up and get to the location marked on the map. Simple! Also there is the fourth 'resource' of learning the Star Language so you can solve puzzles. Very cool.

I have to echo the concerns of other people in this forum, though: the game is too random and this makes it unpleasantly difficult. No, difficult is not the right word. 'Punishing' is the right word. The game feels like it punishes the player at random and without warning or reason.

I am not complaining that there is randomness. Obviously some randomness is fine in a game. It makes things interesting and keeps you on your toes. And this is obviously supposed to be a challenging game. No complaints about that. But when EVERYTHING is random it becomes too difficult to make decisions. After playing this game for hours I do not find myself to be much better at it than when I started. I know what I need to do, I know how to manage my resources, but the high degree of randomness means that my best plans and most carefully considered decisions are rendered useless by events I have no control over.

Legendary game designer Sid Meier once described a game as 'a series of interesting decisions'. There are many potentially interesting decisions in this game, but if my decisions do not matter because random chance will decide the outcome then the decisions are not so interesting.

Running a bit low on oxygen? Too bad, the next ten star systems have no garden planets and then I encounter an oxygen-draining random event. Dead. Ready for a bigger ship? Too bad, you can't find one. Doing well? No you are not, you have just been teleported to a system from which you cannot escape because you don't have the right tech. Looking for a specific tech? Maybe you will find it. Probably not.

Sometimes things go well and the game is a lot of fun. Other times it is a boring grind. Still other times, it feels like the game actually hates me and is doing things just to be cruel. I realize this is not the case, but it very much FEELS that way and I am afraid that I will get so angry I will damage my Nexus by throwing it at something!

I wonder if you are tracking game statistics such as the number of times a player 'gives up'. Because I have been forced to give up a LOT. I have also only managed to get to the end (green planet) ONE time in hours of play. Ironically, it was soon after I started playing. I haven't made it so far since. I think a 'give up' scenario should be very rare, as it is perhaps even more frustrating for the player than death.

I have specific suggestions but I will save them for the next post to keep this from getting too long.

tom_braun wrote:
I have to echo the concerns of other people in this forum, though: the game is too random and this makes it unpleasantly difficult. No, difficult is not the right word. 'Punishing' is the right word. The game feels like it punishes the player at random and without warning or reason.

I am not complaining that there is randomness. Obviously some randomness is fine in a game. It makes things interesting and keeps you on your toes. And this is obviously supposed to be a challenging game. No complaints about that. But when EVERYTHING is random it becomes too difficult to make decisions. After playing this game for hours I do not find myself to be much better at it than when I started. I know what I need to do, I know how to manage my resources, but the high degree of randomness means that my best plans and most carefully considered decisions are rendered useless by events I have no control over.

Legendary game designer Sid Meier once described a game as 'a series of interesting decisions'. There are many potentially interesting decisions in this game, but if my decisions do not matter because random chance will decide the outcome then the decisions are not so interesting.

Running a bit low on oxygen? Too bad, the next ten star systems have no garden planets and then I encounter an oxygen-draining random event. Dead. Ready for a bigger ship? Too bad, you can't find one. Doing well? No you are not, you have just been teleported to a system from which you cannot escape because you don't have the right tech. Looking for a specific tech? Maybe you will find it. Probably not.

Gotta say I think you're wrong here, while my experience was similar to yours when I first started playing I can now complete the game 80-90% of the time on any ending. Sorry if you already know but you can use Omega to replenish 25 oxygen/fuel/hull points which helps me a lot when I get in a tricky spot.

However since so many people have the same complaint it might be worth the devs including an easy option in a later update.