Thank you very much for playing and for the comment. Yeah there were really a lot of things that I left unfinished and that could have added a lot to the game, but when the jam started I was feeling like I spent a lot more time on this than I should have and I wanted to go back to my other project. I might return to it someday though, especially for improving graphics and shaders because that's always fun.
In my mind the pink fog was supposed to be an ocean, since I was doing everything by raytracing I thought it'd be fun to try out some stuff like wavy reflections, refractions and a underwater effect when going inside it. But all those things ended up being pretty time consuming to write and to debug, especially with the very basic openGL setup I was using because of the size limit, so I couldn't get any of that done in time. Making it a fog might have been easier to do now that you mention it though.
I agree that the rings suck in general, I thought they'd work okay as an enemy projectiles but as soon as I put them in I realized that dodging them with the ship was going to be pretty unintuitive and annoying with the 3rd person plane camera, so I just gave up on them and left them the way they were until the end, lol. I probably need to play some plane/spaceship games like Underspace to figure out how to make dodging fun from this perspective.