This is a game I started on when I hadn't been doing much game development for a while. I wanted to "stay in shape" so I started brainstorming for new ideas.

The game is loosely based on an idea I had a couple of years back, that I always felt had potential. I just never really did anything with it. The Idea is that you are flying a spaceship (that's not very easy to control) and with this spaceship you fly to different planets. On these planets you can get out of your ship and discover some cool things I would figure out in the future.

But everything in due time. let's start with the basics. Flying the ship.
This would be the main mechanic in the idea I had in mind, so I needed to figure out a way to make this engaging.

I looked into some ways of making games more fun to play. One important one is player feedback.
I added player feedback in a couple of different ways. I added some stretching and squeezing to the rocket on the moment of lift off, building suspense until the actual moment the rocket shoots off the planet.

The next part that had to be exciting was the liftoff itself. This was done by almost making the rocket explode. The impact is felt through screenshake and an explosion of particles.

The flying itself is quite relaxing with the starry parallax background swooping by.

Another way to make the game be fun to play is to make it look a bit nicer. So I put on my shader goggles again and started making some shaders, for the planets, but also the parallax background. There's one extra one I have in mind that makes the sky be a different color depending on which planet you're on. but I haven't gotten to that quite yet.

Now that some of the mechanics are in place, I also added the ability to make the astronaut exit the ship. And to make sure that walking around wasn't too disorienting I did some tricks with the camera to make the planets rotate as the player moves across them.

And of course, a final touch: Explosions.

try it here!