:O That was super cool! Thanks for doing that. The kipper kids clip was uncanny! I don't think I'd seen it before but I wonder if it got in my subconscious somehow.

Your thoughts on the "universality" of the mechanic of escaping orbit were interesting. It's funny how certain mechanics can sort of naturally imply certain goals. I think having a spherical planet with gravity does that. The Psychonauts title screen has that kind of gravity and I remember really wanting to orbit that.

I had a hard time figuring out what kinds of goal-type things to put in the game when I was trying to finish it. With procgen it's tough to walk that line between authoring elements and letting the generator generate things. Procgen encourages you to iterate through a lot of levels and see what the different combinations are, and pre-authored elements can get tiresome in that context if they're too based in novelty. Some types of mechanics interact in pretty graceful ways with the generated level, though. The satellite worked out pretty well, I think, in that it never feels too out of place, but the generation of the level changes out you relate to it- whether you have a good opportunity to launch yourself up to it, or maybe it bonks into a really tall tower and falls out of the sky, etc.