DT Corp

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QNo3WrlhaFCDwKzLO6w_0I3iJN6eVNV2?usp=sharing

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19VLhIa2t2f_FapMbcyHoSW6p-CXhny9bw1F686w2aik/edit?usp=sharing

BACKGROUND :

in the last couple of years almost the whole world and even kids were talking about JWST but unfortunately most of them are not familiar with its capabilities and a huge portion of them are not even interested that much to do some research, and that's what inspired us to come up with a game of our own to try and pique their interest and educate them in a fun way.

Project Description :

we are a small game development team that love to make fun, educational and meaningful games, And we ourselves were interested to learn about "jwst" so when we came across this challenge it only added fire to our fuel to get to know it better.

We wanted a symbolic and memorable name which is "discover" and "telescope" put together: Telescover, Telescover is a quiz mobile game but more fun than classic quiz games, the quizzes are generally related to the space telescopes and more precisely James Webb space telescope and its capabilities. The game has 20 levels, each level contains three questions,in order to pass to the next level you need to get at least 2/3 from the questions right, rewards will be waiting for you each time you finish five levels, in order to make the game more fun we added augmented reality feature that can be used once you finish the 20 levels where you can have a closer look at JWST and other space telescopes, the game also has a virtual museum where you see the unlocked space telescopes and details about them. The game in general was made on four principal steps: brainstorming, prototyping, production and maintenance, the brainstorming took a big amount of time but it was necessary to make a game design that is both fun and educational, in prototyping we tried to make a primary version so we can test the mechanics and the game logic, in the production we started creating the assets and importing them to the game engine, in the final step which is maintenance we send our final project to some game testers who helped us reveal some bugs and fix them, after fixing all the bugs we were good to go and build the final version for the challenge.

After talking about the game generally it's time to dive into the different parts and workflows of our project:

1-3D modeling:

In order to make the game more interactive and fun we added AR to our project's pipeline and as we all know AR requires some 3D assets, thankfully our 3D artists worked together on the 3D modeling, using Blender 3D software to model different telescopes such as WISE space telescope. The first step in making a good 3D model is collecting a good amount of references and NASA's website was more than enough to grab some high quality references of the telescopes, jumping to the fun part where we build our 3D model from the scratch using different tools and modifiers available in Blender. Once the modeling is done we can start the texturing to give our 3D models more realism, since we will be exporting the models to a game engine we decided to use PBRs for texturing rather than Blender's procedural materials, after setting up all the textures and checking the normals for any misoriented faces that need to be flipped we are safe to go and convert our 3D model to an FBX file so it can be used in Unity game engine.

2-User interface:

A user interface is the point of contact between a user and a computer.The logo it self is inspired by James webb space telescope since it's the game's main topic, the main menu has five buttons:

Play: there are 20 levels

Settings: there are two sliders, one for the music and one for the sound effects.

Discover: it has four telescopes unlocked and four are locked with a button that leads to a panel where you can learn more about each telescope.

AR: there's a panel with glass effect since the glass looks more attractive in augmented reality.

Museum: it has one panel.

GUI: there's a background and a panel that contains the question and small panels that contain the answers, adding to that different game buttons such as toggle,next,submit...etc and also the three stars and the game over and menu panel.

3-Programming:

In order to develop Telescover we had to collect resources for user interface and 3D assets, once the 3D models and the UI elements were ready, we started the development of the game which can be separated into three different phases:

Gameplay programming: which includes quizz management, user experience management that means converting the UI assets into interactive elements, AR development which was done using Vuforia engine, virtual museum developement that shows telescopes from the library in a fun and more interactive way where you can walk around freely in the museum and have a closer look at the unlocked telescopes. Everything was done with a combination of Unity game engine, C#, Vuforia engine.

Our Future Plans :

we are currently working on numerous new levels and puzzles to add to the game, and we are also aiming to make a jwst simulator that will basically allow you to use it yourself and get to know it better, and to make it more available to the public we decided to release it for all of the major platforms out there (windows, linux, android, iOS as well as VR headsets like Oculus, magic leap... Etc)

We have only used data from NASA about jwst and some other telescopes as well as some of their infos and capabilities, and also images that were captured by them.

During this hackathon journey we got learn a plethora of new things especially about jwst and also to improve our skills as whole (time management - team work - pitching our ideas and communication).

Thanks to our team members who have pushed themselves and worked so hard on this project to make come to life and have acquired both valuable skills and experience along the way, and also thanks to all the resources that NASA has provided us with to pull off a result we're proud of.

Informations and Images : 

https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/comparisonWebbVsHubble.html#size

https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/james-webb-space-telescope-vs-hubble-space-telescope

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_telescope

https://www.treehugger.com/reasons-why-james-webb-space-telescope-rocks-4864114

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/webb/main/index.html

https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_(celestial_body)#Trojan_minor_planets

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Scientific_results

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-field_Infrared_Survey_Explorer

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/news/wise20110823.html

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/images/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trojan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitzer_Space_Telescope

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GALEX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gehrels_Swift_Observatory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuSTAR

3D Models : 

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/hubble-space-telescope-e668becf33134030ac2de62104cbd23d

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/the-james-webb-space-telescope-dcb95b3193be49e7a60192055df2315d

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/gallery-museum-showroom-banquet-hall-7ab823cde7214b2b98f6672efc2ab34f

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/holo-table-2e97eadc6aed4d3f860e0cfccce52ffc

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/landscapes/lunar-landscape-3d-132614

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/sci-fi/sci-fi-styled-modular-pack-82913

Sound : 

https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/music.html

#augmentedreality #game #technology #art #quiz #XR