I really like your suggestion to have the ship turn slower/faster depending on where your mouse is. Right now, it’s either left/right/up/down or it’s off. There’s no smoothness to it. I also originally had it so that whatever quadrant of the screen you had the mouse would make it turn, but that made it impossible to go straight and felt absolutely nuts to control, so I added in that dead zone. Now the screen is divided in thirds and the middle third has you go straight. Simply scaling it like you suggested is an awesome idea though.

Also I’m not discouraged – I’m pretty happy with this for how much time I spent on it and I’m actually professionally developing games in a company so I can’t afford to be too attached to my work anymore.

Actually, I thought the level design wasn’t that bad. Simple, yes, but not that bad. Mostly it was the voice samples that made me want to hit my head on a wall. But that may be my personal preference at work – there were people who apparently thought they were ok. Personally I thought the static was not a big problem, although at first I got the impression that it was showing you how close you are to re-entry, rather than how damaged your antennae were.

The main problem with the controls, from memory, is that it feels like there’s a huge deadzone – I don’t know whether that’s intentional – and it’s hard to tell how close your mouse is to the edge of the zone. I’d suggest that you shrink the deadzone down to a very small area, make the control at the edge of the deadzone very fine (i.e. mouse movements translate into small ship movements), and have the control amount increase as the mouse moves away from the centre.

Don’t get discouraged – that’s a pretty huge accomplishment for 8 hours right there. If you had 16 hours, it might have been a very strong contender indeed.