It was heavily inspired by an old ZX Spectrum game called Cyclone, the basic idea was to take the fundamentals of that and develop it into a more polished, arcadey take on the same concept.
And thanks very much, glad you enjoyed it!
Just put out a quick patch to fix the cyclone crash, all downloads should now lead to the new fixed version. Also did some minor tweaks to the stick controls to hopefully calm that drift down a little bit, might have to look into that more with a later update though. Hope that's some help at least :)
You can post issues here, that's fine, or on my Twitter at @farfromsleep if you prefer.
Thanks for the feedback, glad you're enjoying it! I'll have to look into that crash and see what I can do about it, I'll try and get a fix out soon. I'll have another run at the controller code too, I might have made the deadzones on controllers a little too twitchy in general.
Feel free to put my newest one on there: https://farfromsleep.itch.io/whirlibird