Flash game design postmortem

Nice game. Since you're interested in criticism, and I think it's the little touches that make people think a game is 5/5 instead of 4/5:

- I second the tiny screen complaint. The small enemy fighters might as well be pixels. A full screen option, if technically possible, would dramatically improve playability.

- I don't "feel" the movement system. I'd prefer really big thruster effect when I accellerate and turn. You have this but it's tiny. I want to feel Newton's Third Law. This game is way way behind Star Control II as far as the fun factor of simply moving the ship around.

- Combat doesn't feel strategic at all, but just like a spazzy click-fest. I have no idea how you'd solve that, but look at how much more fun the combat is, again, in Star Control 2.

- The store system, where an option to buy the weapon doesn't show up until you buy the previous one in the ladder, feels gamey and artificial, and turns me off a bit.

- Going into the Flex interface in the starbase instantly, with the music and sound suddenly stopping, is jarring and feels very amateurish. Something like a docking animation, with the buy/sell interface consistent with the look and feel of the rest of the game, would go a long way towards making this game seem professional.

- Nexus warps on the minimap look way too much like planets, they should really stand out.

- The pop-up mission objectives, again to me, make this feel like an amateur game from the 90s. I'm not sure how that could be made better but other games (say the level objectives from Starcraft or Warcraft) don't feel this way. Having some voice would of course be best but I understand the size constraints. Still some Flash games do this very well, notably Sonny and Sonny 2, and Robokill.

- Sorry, but the player ship is kind of ugly.

PS: I'm very much in your target market. I've bought Robokill, World of Goo, Braid, Aquaria, and many independent RPGs.

"Flash runs much slower than native code, even slower than Java (which is interpreted byte code)."

A little part of me just died.

Java hasn't been wholly interpreted for an awfully awfully long time. It's amusing that people still have the perception it's slow, when there are only a handful of things out there that are comparable in terms of performance.

What I was the most interested in was the financial aspect of it. Unfortunately it was an unwritten section. Does anyone know any resources or article talking about the financial aspect of flash games. Is it possible to make any money at all developing them?

Fun game, but it needs a couple things before it is playable.

- Most important is some form of "Maximize" button that puts the game window into full-screen, or at least full-window mode. The game window as it stands is a tiny fraction of my screen, way too small to see what's going on. At the least, I'd expect that somebody has written a GreaseMonkey script by now to set the width of your Flash embed to 100%, but really this is something you should build in yourself.

- For a game that revolves around rapidly clicking things as they come onto the edge of the screen, surrounding said screen with clickable banner ads that open in the same window is just disaster waiting to happen. (that's what ended my playtesting session)

Oh, and one playtesting note: I made it to the end of the tutorial without realizing that I was supposed to have killed that "practice satellite" way back at the beginning. I flew around aimlessly for a while, and was pretty close to simply closing the tab instead of flying all the way back to the start to see if I'd missed anything.