Thank you.
The round ships is an interesting idea for a workaround.
I think the big problem with controlling the ship is that I didn't have time to tune all the parameters of gravity and thrust and such and the biggest thing is I didn't have time to make a good level since there were way too many things I had to learn how to do in order to make it all work.
I started coding this all fresh because I didn't know Godot at all when I made the first demo and there were all kinds of flaws in it. However, I did have the first demo tuned better and I had a better playfield design -- in the video I made for it you can see how the objects are placed so that the player can use them to turn themselves around and get where they want to go. Just "hook" the "elbow" of the ship on a small square and use it to rotate the ship. Also the original demo everything seems to move slower, which gives the player more time to consider exactly when to thrust.
In the original one I made (in this video below) I didn't even have the hand-grenade thing because it was easier to carefully pilot and not get stuck. You can see me playing the SLASH ship and navigating all around the screen and then coming in for a nice landing.
I will be developing this game further and making better playfields and tuning it so that the player feels like their piloting decisions matter and they're not just flopping on the ground all the time.
Thank you for this game jam.
I made the demo in the video because I figured I'd learn Godot better if I tried to MAKE something rather than trying to learn how to use it by watching videos. But to finish the game jam entry I had to really keep DOING things so now I actually know that to add another object I create the node for the object, add a sprite to it, then add a collision node to it. I can do that rapidly now whereas before I had to reread the directions each time I wanted to add something. The game jam helped a lot with getting me to internalize all those steps.