Star Smugglers by Dr_V
A event/choice driven smuggling game. Try and take the cargo as far as you can before selling it and buying upgrades for the next run. The further you go, the greater the rewards, as well as the danger!
Controls: Mouse Only Note: This is a flash game - recommend using firefox!

| Flash (web) | http://whitesnakegames.com/?page_id=45 |
| Sauce | http://whitesnakegames.com/source.7z |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/star-smuggler |
Ratings
| Overall | 162th | 3.69⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 100th | 3.789⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 191th | 3.475⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 434th | 3.225⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 373th | 3.214⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 164th | 3.417⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 59th | 3.737⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 131th | 3.528⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 14🗨️ |
galaxy!
Thumbs up for using HaxeFlixel as well ;)
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.
- 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
@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.
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.
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).
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+.
The art worked really well for me.
So good job ! That's a game I really enjoyed playing.
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) !