Thanks for the feedback! We were short on time due to work and had to change our idea with about 4 hours to go in order to turn our project into an actual game people could have at least some fun with. There are a lot of polish ideas that we simply didn't have time to implement, some of what you and Mark Brown said and also some that we had planned.
The connection to the theme was different from most projects. Instead of restricting existing mechanics into "only one" being available to the player, our "only one" refers to the ship only having one function remaining (the shields). Compare this to a game like geometry wars where you can move and shoot, or FTL where you have multiple systems to take care of. This theme was a bit abstract and everyone has different perspectives on what it should mean, so we completely understand where you are coming from and agree.
I didn't know that physics engines were a thing. My game involved bouncing balls off of walls, so knowing how collisions occur (angle of entry equals angle of entry with respect to the tangent of the normal of the surface) would have made the game more predictable. But for what I knew at my age (12) it was a big deal making a game like that, even if I was doing it entirely wrong on the algo for bouncing objects off of surfaces.
