Great game! The controls with only 8 directions are working surprisingly well. I really could steer the small ship between swarms of moving enemies without collision.
There is a lot potential to make some bigger game with this postcompo - especially with the focus on flying.

Man, the music is really messed up (in a good sort of way), and so are the sound bits in the menu... feels very alien and oppressive (hmm, kinda fits your nickname:)).

The controls are really slick.

I liked it! Man, I thought the controls were relative like Asteroids, not absolute, at first. And the asymmetric ship had me confused which way I was pointing too.
But once I figured that out, I played this quite a bit!
Absolutely love the tones on the menu buttons - I sat there dragging the mouse across them for a while.

Excellent audio. Game's too simple for my taste, but it works pretty well.

"HOW DO I SHOOT HOW DO I SH- oh wait i can just evade them!"

I like it. simple and fun. managed to get to level 19 on the first try.

Heh, this is similar to my game idea - fly a ship to a target and avoid enemies...
The controls work well, and I like the menus.

I just get the following with the Linux version. Any ideas?

bash: ./Cosmic Heist: cannot execute binary file

Hm, I don't know. I have only been able to test the Linux build on my own machine, where it of course works. I don't know terribly much about making programs for Linux, but I was able to build that binary on Ubuntu. I'll try to read up on it and see if I can figure anything out. In the meantime, my other games that use the same base code work fine in Wine for me, so you might try that if you can be bothered :-P

Does anyone know more about Linux builds?

Forgot to ask obvious questions about your Linux!

What distro do you have?
Are the file's permissions good to go?
What is the output of "ldd Cosmic Heist"?

That last question makes me think, maybe the filename shouldn't have a space? I don't honestly know. You could try removing the space and seeing if that helps.

Let me know!

It'd be nice to have some indication of where the player is due to head towards. At the moment it just seems a bit aimless. I was scrambling for a shoot button at first too... it's almost MANDATORY to have a gun on a spaceship in a videogame.

Maybe an additional intro showing that the guns are damaged or somesuch?

Great fluid mechanics and movement though.

@dogbomb: But what fun are genre conventions? :-)

The ship is definitely not pointy enough, that's one thing I would change. Everyone has trouble figuring out where they are facing at first. Although technically that is realistic for space travel... probably not good for gameplay though haha.

The idea is that you are stealing some kind of merchant ships or something along those lines, but I don't think it really explains that anywhere. It should.

Thanks for all of the great feedback everyone!

Very well rounded and polished. Obviously some solid work up front on your own code base. One of the best entries in the 2d shooter department I have seen so far. :-)

Cool. The music and simple swooshy gameplay made me feel like I was playing a sub-game on some Slamtilt pinball table. It's a bit odd that you can take so much damage without much in terms of consequences. I'd prefer impacts being more deadly and causing rebound, then restarting the level again if I take more than 3-4 hits or so. Or not restarting, but rather refilling health on the next level. You'd have to clear the area around the starting point in that case though, to make sure there are no unavoidable crashes right at the beginning.

I've open-sourced the game.

Here's a link to its page on my indie dev website majigger: http://cheeseandbacon.org/cosmic-heist/

And here's a direct link to the file hosting on Google Project Hosting: http://code.google.com/p/cosmic-heist/