Startrail

A top-down space game where you design your own ship on a grid and fly it with physics-based dual-stick controls. The core idea: the left stick controls thrusters on the left side of your ship, the right stick controls the right side. Shoulder buttons engage the navigation thrusters — smaller ones typically mounted on the sides of the hull for fine maneuvering. Click the right analog stick to cycle through zoom levels. Movement is fully Newtonian: thrust placement affects rotation and translation, and momentum carries you forward until you cancel it. Building your ship isn't just cosmetic; where you place hull, armor, cargo bays, and thrusters directly shapes how the thing handles.

Press Start to open the ship editor, where you can lay out your design tile by tile (in the game I envisoned this would probably be a starbase or something).

This is an unfinished proof of concept. The flight model works (you can fly around with the default thruster layout), but there's no way to place or configure thrusters in the ship editor yet, so you're stuck with what comes out of the box. You can move around, dock at starbases, and build out your ship's structure, but the gameplay loop isn't there yet.

The whole thing started as me playing around with a shader for the scrolling starfield and procedural nebula you can see in the background — then it snowballed from there. I only had about a day to work on this due to a general lack of time, but I'll probably keep chipping away at it when the opportunity comes up.

Credits:

• Asteroid sprites by statico, CC-BY 4.0
• Propulsion icons by Bartama Graphic — Flaticon, free with attribution
• Battery icons by Freepik — Flaticon, free with attribution
• Laser tag icons by RIkas Dzihab — Flaticon, free with attribution
• Process icons by Vectors Tank — Flaticon, free with attribution
• Shield icons by Good Ware — Flaticon, free with attribution
• Box icons by Gregor Cresnar — Flaticon, free with attribution
• Eraser icons by Freepik — Flaticon, free with attribution

Everything else (code, shaders, graphics, UI) is mine.

Source project available under MIT license at Github.