Critical, you said?

• Input:

  • At the very least, Esc needs to bring up the menu and Space needs to toggle / cycle the game speed. I’m actually not familiar with RTS gameplay very much, but these are some of the most basic standard controls in genres like city builders and 4X. (I noticed later that the 1, 2, and 3 keys do this, but it took a while and I only discovered by accident. Only later, I noticed there were tool-tips on the time buttons).

  • Being able to pan the camera by right-clicking would be nice. This would allow full camera control with the mouse. (I understand right click also performs actions in the game, so this would require some thought about what the button does in context).

  • If you are committed to finishing the game, you should aim to support gamepad input too (though I wouldn’t dwell on this).

• User Interface:

  • The gray tab at the bottom of the screen is quite hard to notice above the gray moon background until you know it’s there. The game low-key has Vi syndrome (cannot figure out how to escape).

  • You need a settings menu in the title screen. Even with the in-game menu, there is no apparent way to switch from fullscreen to windowed mode

  • A user interface theme and fonts (to replace the default Godot UI theme. This is polish and I would worry about gameplay first)

  • “Toasts” (quick on-screen text popups) for voice announcements (“Power low,” “Power restored” etc.). I found the voice clips a little hard to understand, but toasts would also aid in internationalization and accessibility.

  • Get rid of the tool-tips on the bottom-right keypad. Put a stylistic green screen on that calculator and display the information there so that

    • It’s instant. You don’t need to wait for a pop-up or accidentally dismiss a pop-up because you failed to hold the mouse still enough.

    • It is in the same place for each button. You don’t have them popping up above / below / left / right of the cursor based on how close it is to the corner

    • You can include some pictographic information, like requirements, lack of resources, an image of the actual thing.

• Sound Design:

  • Needs music (I’m sure you’re aware). This would increase my desire to continue playing considerably.

  • More noises in general. Rovers should make noises when they’re moving around. I should get a sense that things are happening / are not happening from audio feedback. It’s very easy to over-do this though. The noises should be relatively quiet unless at a high zoom level.

• Graphics

  • The perspective seems a little weird when rotating the camera. Not sure if it is orthographic or something happening with the perspective at 3440x1440 resolution (21:9 aspect ratio). At this perspective, the ground almost looks slightly concave when it’s rotating. An orthographic perspective obviously was a requirement for classic sprite-based RTS games, but you have a rotating camera and 3D models here.

  • The resolution of the 3D scene appears to be down-scaled. I could understand doing this as a stylistic choice, but it is at odds with the higher resolution fonts, UI elements, and color depth. The lines on the mini-map are smoother than the actual scene, which seems a bit odd. The contrast between shaders on the player constructions and the completely flat shading of the ground is also distinct. Lunar regolith is highly reflective, but the surface doesn’t interact with light at all.

• Game design

  • The game needs to tell you why you cannot perform certain actions, or indicate why things aren’t happening. I got stuck in the tutorial twice. Once, I managed to designate the solar panels but the rovers didn’t start building them. Took me a couple minutes to figure out I needed to assign them to do it - I thought this is what I had done by having the rover selected in the first place to make the “SOL” button available. The second time I got stuck was when the tutorial asked me to build the habitat. It would show a red square no matter where I tried to place it. Took a moment to figure out the reason is because I did not have enough metal.

  • I haven’t gotten very far yet, but I get the impression that the player’s capacity to accumulate resources will simply snowball until they win. In this regard, the game is not very challenging.

  • On the other hand, recognize a game-over condition. I let the game run in the background for about 15 minutes and all of my constructions have been destroyed. AFAIK there is no way to recover from this state. It’s Game Over. At this point, the game should enter a game-over state, display some sad imagery, play a dirge, maybe show statistics for the run - something.

    • noticed a bug too: If a construction is destroyed, I think its controls remain visible on the keypad. I still see all the buttons for actions a rover can do, even though the rover is long gone.

  • The singular threat of meteor strikes lacks variety. The way solar flares have the potential to make meteors more dangerous is a nod towards complexity, but there needs to be more interlocking gameplay mechanics to produce a wide variety of situations the player might find themselves in. Consider (and I am only spitballing here - this is not a list of demands or anything):

    • The moon has a long day / night cycle (long enough even that you can do much of the tutorial during the day and then pull the rug out 2 weeks into the game). This can introduce gameplay mechanics involving long periods without solar power, and different properties caused by extremely high and extremely low temperatures. There can be trade-offs between different types of power generation, (solar, fuel cells, RTGs, etc).

    • Having unique sources of power begs for unique on-map resources and unique constructions to harvest them. The rovers might be doing too much. The player should need to build a larger variety of machines.

    • If the power-denial mechanic is shifted to the day/night cycle, solar flares could be re-purposed to interfere with radio / remote control mechanics in some way. They shouldn’t be made completely redundant.

    • Giving each individual construction its own power capacity instead of a binary “the whole moon has power” vs. “the whole moon doesn’t have power.” This gives the player an incentive to build logistical infrastructure to support mining / exploration farther from base, as well as the risk/reward of trying to stretch these limits.

    • A repair mechanic. Increase the costs of building new constructions such that it is more economical to repair damaged constructions. Maybe give meteors a splash-damage range (i.e. direct hit obliterates, but close hit takes something offline). Then the player has “fires” to put out - literally or metaphorically. Damage can also be caused by other mechanics like temperature (ambient, or over-heating), running power systems beyond their capacity, etc. etc. etc.

    • A larger variety of resources may give the player reasons to explore, or engineer work-arounds for un-buildable contraptions, or approach environmental hazards they would have no reason to otherwise, or convert one resource (or a combination of resources) into other resources. This can introduce some aspects of factory-builder style gameplay.

  • (though it is a substantial change to the game design), Introducing a space-race angle to the game, where perhaps there is also a nearby imperialist moon base can introduce PvP aspects to gameplay, as well as a race to claim valuable resources on the map or build offensive / defensive countermeasures.

All that said, you have a really solid foundation here, both thematically and technically. The idea is good. The core systems are there. You need to introduce a few more mechanics to add variety and complexity to the game loop, but don’t do what I always do and quit working on a project way too early.