Asteroid Wrangling

Spacecraft of the future will be able to extract their fuel from asteroids, without needing to carry it all the way from earth. Are you ready to begin training?

You are commanding a satellite on a solar system exploration mission in which you are responsible for its safety (avoiding space junk) and its endurance (filling it up with fuel). The status bar on the left shows your fuel level, which you need to fill to 100%.

Gameplay

The game begins with a satellite in orbit. The only way to restore its fuel reserves is to capture asteroids, which you can do by firing its onboard thrusters, which are activated by the arrow keys. Use the thrusters sparingly, however, as they use the very fuel you are trying to fill up. Newton's laws reign supreme up here in the vacuum of space, so pay attention to balancing out your control inputs in order to remain stable. To replenish your fuel, fly towards the asteroid and close your gripper around it using the spacebar.

It's a crowded place up there, and you'll need to dodge an ever-growing quantity of space junk too, noted in the left-to-right transition in the figure below. The game ends with a win if you reach 100% fuel but a loss if you collide with the space junk.

Assets

I created a short ambient audio clip in Ableton which can play in a loop in the background to enhance the feeling of desolation in space. The repo contains a 3D Blender model of an asteroid, using the texture from here. For simplicity, it can be used as a planar 2D asset in a simplified game environment.