The concept of Aluminum Acrobat is inspired by such games as XGen Studios' Motherlode, and some blurry childhood memory of what I assume to be Positech Games' Asteroid Miner.

I wanted a casual resource collection game with some mechanical depth.

The interface and controls should be easy for anyone to grasp, avoiding the pitfalls of typical space game UX.

The player should feel tantalized by, and look forward to upgrading their ship.

Your ship cannot stop unless you spend a resource - fuel, cargo, or damage to your own ship. I like this because it creates some fun scenarios:


You miscalculated how much fuel you had left, and now find yourself slowly drifting away from the shop. With nothing but hard asteroids to catch you, the only safe option is to jettison some of your precious ore. After the bitter loss of much of your cargo, you seem to be on course to just barely miss the shop. But, you thread the needle and refuel.

Of course, sometimes you really are stranded in the middle of nowhere without a means of gaining velocity. In that case, you may simply hold left-click on your own ship to get back to base the hard way...

The current gameplay of Aluminum Acrobat is meant to represent a lowly, scrappy beginning where the player must fight hard for every convenience. 

Later, I'd like to focus on building out a midgame where the player, having then earned a decent ship and the skills to use it, would push further out in to space. I have some ideas of what to add to support this, but it might not get done until after the contest. 


For now I'm focused on bug fixes and gameplay tweaks to make sure that mining is never tedious. Whenever I come up with an immediately addressable fix or feature, I put it on a whiteboard for later. I recommend this approach if you feel that something like Trello is too much.