First of all many thanks for your email. You pointed out many issues that I struggled with while implementing the game, or simply the issues that I couldn’t solve, or haven’t spent enough time on it. As for my replies I put them below, under the proper sections of your comments.
Controls are very hard. Funny, they seem too sensitive to get you off course, but not sensitive enough to get you back on course, if that is even possible.
The behaviour you pointed out relates with the gravity force and the engine thrust. If you’ll get off course it is simply not possible to get you back as the force generated by the engine of first level is not powerful enough. As for the controls sensitivity, yes I made them too sensitive, because I wanted the game to be more engaging and hard to play, but in retrospect I think this approach wasn’t the best and I already eased them up.
A thing about control is that it is hard to code so that it performs the same on all phones. I am not sure whether this is just my phone or on others, but the game is basically impossible for me - droid razr. I can’t believe it is that way for you, so I suspect a coding problem in the control. If you are applying adjustments to your game object (rocket) based on tilt, you should make sure you are doing this on a schedule, not just doing it every frame. Maybe I am just being a little too speculative. If so, sorry.
Hehe, funny you mention that. First versions of the game actually had that problem. I simply had too many data, too many code and too many members and I couldn’t manage to get a grip on them all. This behaviour was leveraged by my friend some time ago when he showed me on his Galaxy S that he has no problem with the rocket steering, where on my HD2 the controls were a bit too sensitive as you previously mentioned and probably on devices such as Galaxy Ace, Htc Wildfire the game was probably unplayable. At the end I reimplemented my physics and the issue shouldn’t exists anymore.
Once I start to crash (rocket past 90 degrees) I can’t save myself. Not sure if this is intentional. But, if it is intentional, then you need to speed up the decent so that I don’t have to wait forever for the inevitable.
It’s intentional. Unfortunately the particles generated by the engine are shot with some speed and the thing is that when I give the rocket ability to drop without any speed restrictions then the result image doesn’t look good (there is too much space between the smoke and fire particles). Personally of course I totally agree and I need to figure out how to solve this issue.
Other thing is that the animations seem a little slow, especially the explosion when I crash, which I always do. I love the animation, it is just slow.
The explosion is made in the slow-motion way and actually when you mention about it I start to think did I make it based on delta time? I will have to check this out too. The explosion animation should take approximately about 5 seconds.
I think the giant clouds way close in the view are a little much. They block view too much and, because they are scaled up, they are very pixilated. I would move them back. In front of the rocket is fine if smaller.
Hmm problem with the android platform 
There are too many devices and as well to many screen sizes 
I don’t know how did I manage to implement everything so that the game works on for example Htc WildFire and Asus EEE Transformer. To be honest with you I don’t have an answer for this… yet… but this issue is quite important and I will definitely spent some time on it.
Not sure if it is in there, but a sense of gravity would be cool. This would make taking off slower but cooler and also would potentially solve the slow decent problem I mentioned earlier.
Finally, I got a sense that everything was a little big. I couldn’t see what was coming because, since everything is big, you are limited on what you can put on the screen at one time. Move the camera back maybe?
Hope I did answer those, above in my comments.
Hope this helped in some way. I am sure I am wrong about a lot of this, but these were just my impressions. I hate doing these things because I sound critical. Trust me, my own stuff needs lots of improvement as well.
Not at all, you’re not wrong about these stuff, this is a matter of fact.
EDIT - just wanted to add that pressing the red ‘button’ at the bottom of the screen to start the game was not obvious to me. Took me a little while to figure out how to start. Silly, huh?
You obviously never played in the game “Push the big red button!”
Cheers!
