Orbital, a game similar to moon lander except instead of trying to land on the moon, you are given the task of trying to get a spaceship into orbit around a star. Featuring some random pictures from the interwebs ( one, two, three, ).
I've always thought moon lander was a very interesting game and a natural extension (imo) would be to try to bring something into orbit intsead.
I used newtonian physics, so the simulation of the orbit isn't as accurate as I would like it to be. However, it works and allows the player to get a feel of what it would be like to get a ship into orbit.
As stated before, my inspiration for this game is moon lander, so there is a degree of similarity to it.
The resulting game does seem to fulfill my goals of trying to get a ship into orbit. Some extensions that could be implemented to make orbiting significantly more difficult is to add more celestial bodies into the mix, in which case the player will have to find an orbit that does not collide with any other celestial body. Another idea would be to allow left/right thruster be controlled independently and achieve rotation that way (instead of a rather magical rotation that you can in theory attribute to small thrusters along the edge of the ship).
