Pizza Planet by JoDragon (itch.io)
Guide your ship to various stations you find on the map to collect resources from them. Bring these resources back to the base pod and satisfy the needs of the subject, Jody the I’Onian, who is eagerly awaiting orders for creating a new planet. Little does she know that all of her orders is to consume copious amounts of pizza… And don’t forget, you can build cargo ships to do all the heavy lifting for you!
Idle games aren’t really my thing, but it’s clear there’s been a ton of effort poured into this. The artwork is cute, the gameplay loop is solid, it’s overall a very well-rounded (heh) jam game.
It is very slow to start, but once you’ve got the ball rolling with a few ships it gets a lot easier. There are also a few pausing bugs, one which occurred when I first launched the game and made me think it was broken. Not entirely sure what’s causing these as I couldn’t find any pattern to them, but otherwise a good effort.
I’m not big into idle games either, but it wasn’t bad for what it was, and the art is cute. It’s not really an idle game at first, but once you get some ships, you can step away if you’re fine with slower progress… for the most part. I did encounter a problem at one point where a bunch of my ships got stuck on top of each other in a position where they couldn’t feed the alien, but that was quite late into the game, and I couldn’t identify a specific trigger for the problem.
In terms of balance, the large ship feels too expensive to be useful until well after the main story is over. Maybe that’s intentional, so people who just want to keep growing their “planet” can do it more easily.
However, I did encounter an annoying bug while doing that. I wanted to see what would happen if I made the alien big enough to overlap nearby space stations—and I eventually succeeded. Unfortunately, I discovered that every time she “envelops” a space station, all your ships reset to their idle state, and you have to reissue commands to all of them. Kind of gets in the way of the whole “idle game” concept, unfortunately.
Also, as people on the Itch page noted, you can sometimes clip inside your “planet”. I did it by accident quite a few times just by flying straight at her once she started getting really big. It almost feels like a good thing when it happens, though, because it’s the only way you can properly examine your handiwork after she reaches a certain size. (The camera is quite useless by that point.)
