- Items : Roguelikes generally depend on staying interesting in each playthrough by throwing a bunch of random items at you constantly, giving you chances to stop, examine, craft, equip, or identify said items… something you can’t really do while constantly in flight and in danger of crashing into something. I have to force all of the itemization into menus between missions or after landing during a mission.
-Specialization : This is not something I was really forced to do, but the 90s flightsim inspiration pushed me towards a deep and varied aircraft loadout system, with specialized types of aircraft (fighter, interceptor, bomber) which can exclusively equip more specialized types of weaponry. Unfortunately, this means it’s not necessarily going to be any fun to have random items thrown at you every time: you may get a bomber and a bunch of advanced air-to-air missiles you can’t even use. This motivated me to have permanent technological upgrades, which is important for its own reasons that I’ll get into below.
-New-school Permanent Progression : In Rogue, Nethack, and other directly rogue-like games, you’ll lose absolutely all of your progress if you die. Thanks to the success of games like FTL, Rogue Legacy, and Binding of Isaac, players have come to expect being able to make some sort of long-term numeric progress beyond their personal understanding of the game. These are often either upgrades, side-grades, new classes that are a “reward for dying”. I completely understand why players like these, but they are difficult to balance with the necessity of taking things away when the player dies so there’s still risk. I settled on letting players keep any money they earned and rebuild their lost items when they died, but even then the system is sometimes confusing, lacks enough risk for expert players, and is far from perfect.