Thank you so much for your comment!
For the planets, we have multiple spheres (one for the base color, one for the "clouds" with a transparent texture) that are randomly placed in a 50 x 50 grid with 50-30 units between and random traits (name, available element, whether the planet has a moon/clouds, scale multiplier and rotation speed). The rotation is applied to all three axis (with slight variations), making them spin in a way that is not giving you the feeling of a looped animation. The player spaceship is only rotated on the Y axis. Our Scene setup uses a SubViewport with a scale of 640 by 360, giving off this clean pixelated look.
I agree that the game can be somewhat easy with some techniques. Initially, we wanted to have a full on inventory where you would need to manage the elements you collected and potentially throw some out to make space for a big distress call, however in playtesting it showed that it threw players out of the gameplay loop too much.
I think if we'll touch this project again for an "After Jam" version, it would be great to have some modifiers (such as a slower ship speed with bigger inventories) and maybe some sort of combat. Instead of just losing health when colliding with objects, maybe the spaceship could also lose some elements on impact, to make it harder to hoard elements.
- Laura