Enough technical problems solved to have this gameplay and visuals. Many more to solve to have gameplay and visuals I devised.

This game is wishlistable on Steam. It's far from release, but it's convenient to wishlist, not to miss when it's out.

Stay inside. Play Video Games.

Looks like you've got an issue with sponginess in the still attached rigid bodies - a kind of 'reverberation' effect It actually makes the visuals really fun. I imagine this is part of how 'world of goo' became what it is - the programmers probably decided to embrace the rubber

Yeah, this issue is fun: subtle, yet hard to solve. Solutions are: heavy workarounds, that make physics less realistic, or performance costly, or tricky compute science, or crazy ideas. Or just embracing it and making a feature, yes.

Asteroids 2.0 😳

this is so cool, keep it up! do you have any writeups i could look at to get started on this sort of thing?

Thanks! I once wrote a couple of tutorials on physics simulation on GPU, but these days it's much easier to do it with tutoring by AI. General approach is: learn compute shaders in Unity, it's the easiest way to compute on GPU. Then just build simple simulations, for example interaction of particles using Lennard-Jones force. It's what you see in my video. Visualize it with Unity spheres at first, later learn faster rendering techniques. Then add more physical entities, like interacting hard bodies. This is one of the tutorials I made:

looks like the 2d particles can move independently, but even when joined they vibrate together. Are they always computed individually with just a few neighbors?

Good observation! Yes, they are always computed individually, no mater how many neighbors.

Star Control II — the Ur-Quan Masters

Reminds me of Escape Velocity!