Unity game

Solar System Explorer

Fly a spaceship through a solar system with real orbits, in the browser.

Planets follow Newtonian orbits under a gravity model and spin on their axes. They're generated procedurally with a third-party planet generator, with an atmosphere around Earth and bloom on the sun.

You fly a spaceship between them and pick planets to visit. Browsers can't run the compute shaders the planet generator normally uses, so the WebGL build generates planets on the CPU instead.

Player

Flies and picks planets

Spaceship

Input System controls

Solar system

Gravity, orbits, spin

Planet builder

Procedural, CPU path for WebGL

  • Player to Spaceship
  • Player to Solar system: select
  • Spaceship to Solar system
  • Solar system to Planet builder
Simplified to the main pieces and how they talk to each other.

See it work

A real frame from the browser build

A bright sun with a yellow glow rising over a teal ocean and low green hills, with a grey moon in a starry sky.

Captured from the itch.io build: the sun with its bloom over a generated ocean planet, with a moon behind it.