Moonshot is a game developed for GitHub GameOff game jam with theme, well, moonshot.
The theme is very vague and can be interpreted in many various ways, but I went with a pretty direct meaning.

The idea for the game was that a player character was shot to the moon for an unknown reason and now needs to come back. JMR suggested to take inspiration from the type of games where you shoot player character and need to travel as much distance in one run as possible. After each run you get some coins for upgrades and try another one. The game ends when you reach some required distance. This kind of games was pretty popular back in the days of flash games.
This seemed quite interesting and suited the theme interpretation well, so I went with that.
The initial version of the game had continuous style of movement and the rocket behaved in a much more realistic way. This was because all games of this type seem to have this kind of movement. I didn't really like this though. It would be very hard to dodge obstacles, so the rocket would have to move pretty slowly to give the player enough time to maneuver and that would hurt the game dynamics. Instead, I decided to switch to discrete movement. So, there would be a fixed number of paths and the rocket would switch between them immediately and always move along the straight line. This automatically increases the dynamics of the game, as now both rocket and obstacles can move faster and the player can still react and dodge them. This also helps to have all objects on the screen all the time, so it's much easier to focus on what's going on.
This kind of games always involves playing multiple runs, each not lasting for very long. After each such run, the player collects some gold/coins for upgrades so that they can go further on the next run.
We decided to go with that idea and so fuel was added. The rocket is burning the fuel at a constant rate and when there's no more fuel current run ends. To add some variety, bonuses were also added. So besides asteroids, there's also fuel tanks and cash floating in space.
To make the player go further with each run we had to add upgrades. We chose three upgrades that seemed most useful:

• more fuel - so that the run can last longer
• acceleration - to allow the rocket to cover more distance in less time
• durability - so that each collision with asteroid slows the rocket less

Fuel and durability worked well, but acceleration turned out to be somewhat problematic. It sure did allow the player to more quickly reach the required distance, but at the same time it made dodging the asteroids harder with each upgrade, because there was less and less time to react. This was not visible early in the development, because at that point the rocket's speed was still small enough. The game mechanics should've been modified so that the time to react doesn't drop so significantly with rising speed.

This was a good lesson that when building a game with upgrades, it needs to be designed to take it into account. Simply adding some upgrades to the game won't make it better, one needs to design the game upfront with upgrades in mind. This also requires spending some time for balancing the cost and effect of the upgrades. That's noticeable in particular when creating a game for a game jam, because there's limited time. So - will the game benefit from adding upgrades? That will depend on the game obviously. For some games it makes sense, For some others, maybe it's better to polish the game mechanics instead. I believe this game does benefit from having upgrades, but it could've been done in a better way.

The graphics for the game was done as 3d models that were then converted to 2d images. This has some drawbacks as well as advantages. On one side, it can give more realistic and better looking sprites. I really like asteroids and the moon in particular. On the other hand, 3d models always come with lighting and shadows, which is less common is 2d sprites. This can result in images that are quite dark in some regions. This was particularly visible in this game, as the background was very dark. Another thing is that this makes much easier for making animations, especially if all you need is to rotate the object.

Overall, I think that the upgrades should've been balanced in a better way and variety isn't very big. This is noticeable especially at later stages. But in a jam it's always about the time. What are you willing to put in the game and what you need to put aside is something that needs to be taken in consideration.