The year is 2525. Earth has long become uninhabitable, and humanity has moved to live out its remaining days on a space station. After a rogue asteroid collided with the station, the power, oxygen and water generators have been destroyed. It is your mission to retrieve the broken parts, repair the station, and save mankind.

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RocketGame¹ is a space-themed, arcade collect-a-thon game developed at Ferienakademie 2025 by a team of roughly 25 students, including myself, from TUM, FAU and the University of Stuttgart. It was built using Godot 4.5 with GDExtension / C++.


You can play single-player or local two-player co-op. The game is designed to work with keyboard, touchscreen, controller and even JoyCon gyro inputs³.

The objective is as follows: You control a spaceship, navigating across three neighboring solar systems, and your job is to collect the scattered pieces of the space station orbiting around various planets and moons, then finally return them to the space station. Do this in time and you win - if the time runs out, you lose. If you're fast enough, you may even get some bragging rights on the leaderboard!

There are three "rounds" in each game - in each of these rounds, you must collect three pieces of the station and return them. In each subsequent round, the pieces are further away from the space station, in larger solar systems, requiring more travel.

Importantly, the spaceship only has a limited amount of fuel - run out of fuel and it's back to the station, and you'll have to collect every piece you were carrying once more! This is why it's important to use your limited fuel wisely, and to cleverly make use of the gravitational pull of celestial objects to go in the direction you want. Nevertheless, it's a fine balance. Too much thrust, and you'll run out of fuel; too little, and you risk crashing.

The game is surprisingly difficult. Not in the SMB2 Lost Levels sense, where it's just unfair⁴, but more in the classic arcade game sense, where it's the mechanics that you have to master. It could very well be that a piece may spawn in close orbit to a very small planet, requiring high-precision maneuvering. If you crash, you may also have to fly quite a way back to get your pieces back. Or what if you have all pieces, but crash against a small planet, so now you have three pieces to collect from a small orbit? Did I mention asteroids that may collide against your rocket, temporarily spinning you out of control? Needless to say, barely anyone beat the game during our last-day public demo.

There were definitely more features we had planned, like a more varied gameplay loop, difficulty settings which change the amount of time or fuel you have (among other things), online multiplayer, etc. Of course, optimization was also considered. Unfortunately, a week is a really short amount of time.

Because I don't want to leave you empty-handed, longing for this absolute masterpiece of a video game, here is the music I composed for when you're in-game.

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¹: We polled various names for the game. Other candidates were "Last Mission 2525" and "Fly or Die". "RocketGame" won decisively.
²: Though it's probably for the better that the source code is not published. Giving people who have never used Godot before only a week to make a game is like building a house with duct tape and prayers.
³: Massive shoutout to the controls team who basically spent the entire duration of the summer academy getting the JoyCon controls working, wrestling with permissions on Linux and Windows. Sorry you didn't get to properly experience the game, but thank you for your sacrifice.
⁴: Mostly.