Love the work being done here. Really has a nice feel and visuals and has tons of potential.
I know you asked how to make this game more playable. Here's what I'd recommend as an app designer and 30yo who has played many games in my day. Hopefully you can see my enthusiasm and take it as constructive criticism. I tried to leave out any smaller details or bugs as not to distract from the bigger picture:
- Consider removing the mouse as a controller. The only thing that currently uses mouse is the map and the menu. The map could work ok showing just the current country you are flying over perhaps and allowing the WASD to rotate the world and highlight other locations. I I would really love to see a waypoint placement option as it gets really disorientating. OOOOh, I just realized there was controller support when checking something, that feels even better.
if you are going to use a mouse you should let me click on things while flying as I inherently tried to do. Also holding a key and looking around freely would be very useful for orientation and the feeling of exploring - The speed toggle is finicky to use. say I just flew past a weather balloon at max speed and now I am trying to turn around. On KB&M I'm trying to turn and also change the speed at the same time making it difficult to hit the target since I can't easily hold both left and downspeed key at the same time with my normal finger placement. I think a better and more user friendly approach would just be to have a button that toggles on max speed+(any boost). And then another button for airbrake that goes even slower than your slowest current flying speed. Normal flying speed feel comfortable around 50-60%. Typical gameplay would be fly to rough location quickly then hold airbrake while dropping the package. Perhaps holding airbrake could also change the camera angle and show a targeting reticle for the package drop location (that would be a huge gameplay improvement).
- Is it possible to show the dotted line connecting where you dropped off vs correct location in the real world. I love the idea of the map but it kinda sucks to have to open all the time to get that kind of feedback.
- Bonus points for delivering at night would be nice since it is about 10x harder for me. Consider changing the city light orb size to be 10x smaller or have at least 30% more opacity. They visually distract from reading the landscape too much currently
- The airplane graphic on the compass is cute, but consider changing it to just an arrow starting at center point an pointing at the direction. I can't currently just view the compass out of the corner of my eye as those wings on the plane icon are massive and look like pointer arrows. Alternatively plane could be 4x smaller as not to distract.
- I wouldn't consider myself great at geography but better than about 95% of the people I meet. This game can still be really hard (which is ok but not in a fun way for most wanting to learn). Would you consider adding an arrow to show nearest rough droppoff location? Perhaps the arrow would disappear within 1500-2000kilometers of the final location? make sure to add some randomness from center to throw off being able to fly in from multiple directions to get exact center.
- Show the results from the end screen while I'm playing. If you don't want to clutter the normal UI add it to the map view.
- Consider midscreen text popups being more general as well regarding dropoff distance in addition to the detailed view below. for example: "PERFECT", "GOOD", "GREAT", "OOPS". It gives it a nice rewarding feeling.