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Thank you so much for the praise! The fuel system was actually even more restrictive during most of the development weekend because I wanted the tractor beam to be the primary focus. I slowed the leak down a few hours prior to release because I was worried about difficulty being too frustrating. The art is definitely the biggest weakness, I agree. It is, at best, serviceable. I hope you get more gameplay out of it after the update. I will definitely be looking to do this with a partner next year who can take the lead on art to shore that side of things up. 

It'll definitely be receiving an update after the judging period is over. There are a few small bugs I want to fix, as well as features I had to cut due to not being able to polish them to my satisfaction before the deadline. I'm glad you enjoyed the game for the most part. Tuning the difficulty and especially the wide range of randomness within the spawning is something I'll be including in the update.

Darn, I tested the sound effects at 0% but not the music, because not being able to disable sound effects in a game is a deal breaker for me. Space Sweepers is my favorite movie I've seen this year (though without spoilers I'll say I think it would have been more powerful if it had ended just a little bit sooner) and was a big inspiration in the theming of the game after seeing the mechanical theme. If I trusted my ability to make the cord on a javelin look good in the time constraint it would've been that instead of a tractor beam. That particular action scene near the end of the movie was the visual I was going for with how you kill ships within the game. 

As for how I feel it fits the theme, a grappling hook was the first thought that came to my mind after watching the theme announcement and I wanted to put a twist on it by putting it into an environment where it could really act on inertia and shine. Every object has a mass set as a percentage of your ship's mass and the tractor beam maintains total momentum between you and the item you are grappled on. When grappling a large asteroid which has 500% your mass you will accelerate towards it 5x faster than it accelerates towards you, for example. The "chain"  concept is most clearly visible if you fling a small asteroid and then hold a beam on it as it flies past you; if you maintain the beam you and the asteroid will fly through space in an orbit together around a point between you as their mass is identical to yours. Which, incidentally, is a pretty decent strategy as the number of aliens increases though you may need to use the maneuvering thrusters a bit to avoid crashing especially if blaster bolts hit the asteroid and alter its trajectory.

I'm really glad you liked it and happy to see another Space Sweepers fan. After the judging period is over I'll be updating the game with a few fixes including the music one you found, thank you!

Interesting. Were you near an asteroid but not actually touching it when the bug occurred? I wonder if I maybe had a collider bounding error somewhere that I missed in testing. I want to update after the judging period to remove a couple other bugs I caught past the deadline as well as get a couple features I had to cut due to lack of polish time in, so I hope I can figure this one out and add it to the list.

Thank you! The asteroids were almost entirely the work of Photoshop's Bevel & Emboss and Distort filters, my two favorite tools as I am not particularly gifted with art in general.

I'm really glad you liked it, I loved slingshotting through narrow gaps during my testing. A radar was something I considered adding and probably would have if not for the time constraints forcing me to pick my battles. I'm planning on updating the game after the game jam judging period is over to fix a couple bugs and adjust the luck factor downward a bit, so I may also add a couple of the features I had to scrap to meet the deadline. The spawner currently uses a weighted table to randomly select asteroids, aliens, and salvage when spawning things in front of you with the only restraint factor being a cap on the number of aliens that can spawn based on how many repair kits you've collected (capping out at 5 while waiting for the hyperdrive countdown).