Yeah, I think that if I could offer the game designer some ideas, these would be it:
1. Have a rechargeable "radar ping" that would help players find objects (and avoid destruction)
2. Have some objects following paths, instead of just static, and generate all objects to a list (I'm not even sure it maps them out to a field, actually- I think if you go far enough away, it's just randomly generating them). IOW, a finite world- in theory, if you're bored enough, you can just win by avoiding the Ecliptic Plane and just swallow enough small asteroids (however, slingshotting around bigger bodies is mucho kewl).
3. I really wish that the graphical representation of the smashing was a little more interesting.
4. More interesting sound and more variety of objects would be kewl.
5. Self-directing entities (i.e., active enemies of one kind or another- maybe spacecraft that can shoot you and do minor damage to your "mass", maybe even Killer Planets) might be nice.
I just liked this game because it makes use of basically a single mechanic to make things work. It's not quite arcade-quality in overall polish and feel, by any means, but it's one of the few original Flash games I've encountered, really.
It's a pity that, just like everywhere else in gaming, the really fancy games are also the most incredibly boring, because they tend to use gameplay I've already seen a thousand times before, aping console platform games or mindless shmups
And many of the designs just feel... unpolished, or they simply have really poor scaling of difficulty- I've played a couple where, even with a lifetime of click-fest training under my belt, I simply don't understand whatever really specific dynamic is involved well enough to even get more than 30 seconds into a game- which is extremely annoying, and bad design, imo- most people complain that my single-player games require too much twitch skill, so if it's getting on my nerves, it probably sucks.
It's like the guys who program these things are so glad to just get everything working that they then don't want to work on the balance enough to make it feel perfect. Given how many games some of them have made, I'm guessing that that's what happens- they're like, "hey, it's feature-complete, I'm done", and move on...
Many of the games I've sampled over the last week (I'm on vacation, so I'm allowing myself some goof-off time, which usually means thinking about game design) have had really nice graphics, and a few have had really good gameplay (another game from CrazyMonkeyGames.com, Bowmaster Prelude, was pretty smooth) but I have yet to find one where I'd actually want to play it more than once, because it's really that good of a game.
I have that problem with arcade games in general (I'm not one of those guys whose life ambition is to beat a shooter without losing a life- that seems a completely pointless project to me) but I am fascinated with how arcade games have to deliver a simple, stable and easily-accessible product for end-users, with straightforward controls and objectives. I've never made an arcade game, so I assume that 90% of the game design is programming the game code for each individual situation or object, then putting it all together and making it hum, once you get past the complexity of Space Invaders.
Even a game as simple as Asteroids represents a lot of code that had to be massaged to give users a compelling enough experience that they'd keep putting quarters in, so I have quite a bit of respect for the designers of these deceptively-simple titles, and quite frankly looking at the not-quite-so-kewl games is more instructive than looking at the commercial titles, because the flaws show me a lot more about how good gameplay could've happened than a perfect game does.
