I said in my last post that if I could get the complicated maths working in a reasonable timeframe, I'd stick with an idea involving newtonian orbital physics and procedural world generation.

The reasonable timeframe was achieved and I subsequently dumped my original idea, a No Man's Sky-style game w/ procedural planetary systems where interplanetary travel would involve actual orbital maneuvering, orbits could be established in the first place, etc. I've been sitting on plans to make a sequel for my entry into the first-ever Extra Credits game jam, Astronaut Plus Skateboard, for basically since I put APS out in the first place.

I liked a lot of it, but one thing that irked me deeply was how badly it did larger planetary systems, and how utterly incapable it was of supporting actual rotating/orbiting bodies. The general lack of gameplay wasn't great either.

GIFs from the testing system showing off movement and a brief bit of zooming off into suborbital flight:

Transiting planet in front of a sun, first most basic test of a procedural system:

Now, truth be told, much of the underlying code I've been hacking away at in spurts for a couple months now, with some snippets that're over a year old at this point. This kind of project is way too complicated to learn & implement entirely within 72 hours, and if I do manage to get it to even a proper tech-demo stage come jam submission time I'm probably going to submit as Unfinished to err on the side of safety, since this is getting close to basically just being 72 hours of continued development on a game I've already made.

(Additional disclaimer: Astronaut model and some animations are placeholder/re-used art from the original Astronaut Plus Skateboard. Skybox is also placeholder, and was generated using the last pre-Steam release of SpaceEngine, hovering out in an arm of NGC 6503.)

All that said, I'm pretty happy with how things are going, even if it ends up being another LD where I come out smarter, but without a finished product or any user ratings.