Edwin Hubble’s got nothing on one team of VFS Game Design students.

Aurora is a browser-based solar system sandbox game developed in Unity by Dustin Kaban, Jarrett McKenna, David Millar, and Chris Wimer. And it’s already a hit, well before its official launch. Their universe is growing at an alarming rate.

Spend a couple of minutes with the game and its appeal is easy to see – you create temporary gravity wells to create a solar system, altering orbits and expanding your area of influence. Civilizations come and go. Planets collide. Worlds ends. And then it all begins anew, set to a peaceful musical score. Most of all, it’s fun – and the game is getting better and more polished by the day. (You can play it – and rate it – here.)

Aurora is their final game in the year-long program, and the team has been aggressively prototyping throughout the process, releasing builds to the public beginning in December to help establish a following – and get crucial feedback – as they barrel towards Industry “Pitch & Play” Night on February 8th.

This week, they released the game on the popular site Kongregate and entered the Unity Game Contest. Within about 24 hours, it had more than 75,000 plays (now over 150,000) and hundreds upon hundreds of comments. They’ve already rolled out updates to respond to the feedback, even as Aurora rockets up the leaderboards.

As they explain, it’s all part of their master plan.

Hi, guys! So, Aurora’s a hit already… What kind of player feedback have you gotten so far? Has any of it resulted in fundamental changes to the game?

Chris Wimer: We’ve had so much feedback, it’s incredible! Between Facebook and Kongregate, we’ve had well over 100,000 playtests. A lot of the early feedback was telling us that people didn’t understand the game. They didn’t know what to do or how to do it. We put a lot of time and effort into making the game more accessible. Our later feedback showed that we succeeded – at least to a point.

You’ve been able to take on a pretty aggressively iterative approach to Aurora’s development. How has your team been able to manage that?

Chris: Having two amazing programmers on our team was what really made us such an agile team. We were able to prototype several concepts a week, constantly adding to and improving on our core idea. We could explore multiple avenues and quickly see what was working and what wasn’t.

David Millar: Constantly prototyping new features allowed us to confidently move on from tested ideas that may have looked better on paper but in reality didn’t fit the game.

Aurora has a pretty unique mechanic at its core. Could you talk briefly about how the idea came about? What were your team’s goals at the outset?

Dustin Kaban: First and foremost, we wanted to get an emotional response from the player. We wanted to inspire wonder and spark a curiosity in space, even if we dressed it up a bit. Scope was also an issue for us because we didn’t want to just create a five-minute experience for Industry Night, but rather a complete game as it’s intended to be received.

Likewise, the tone of the game is a bit out of the ordinary – you’ve got this mellow music, and when two planets collide – millions dead! – it still retains the glowy, almost peaceful feeling. Was that there from the beginning, or something you developed later on?

David: That tranquil feeling was there from our first prototype. There were several times when, through constant prototyping, we lost that feeling and had to fight to get it back. It was a battle between our initial prototype, which was very much a fantastic-looking toy, and a more structured game experience.

Why start drumming up Aurora hype before Industry Night?

Jarrett McKenna: It was important to us to create a full game. So while Industry Night is a big deal and a great time to show off our game, we’re not going to let it die afterwards.

Dustin: We really wanted to develop something that could stand on its own and have the potential to succeed after school.

Do you feel ready? Lots more to do?

Jarrett : There are a lot of things we would like to see get into the game in the future. But between now and Industry Night, we are busy promoting Aurora, through indie game contests like Kongregate’s, on Facebook, or on our own website. We are all really excited to finish our year and take the game outside of VFS – but it’s been good to us and there’s going to be a lot we’ll miss.

Thanks, guys! The game’s meteoric success – sorry – continues, and we really can’t recommend the game enough. Readers, check it out and rate, rate, rate!

Update: We caught up with the Aurora team in the days leading up to Industry Night, as well as soon after the successful event. You can read about the process, the nerves, and the relief here.