High-Level Project Summary
MIRI Astro's Countdown is a video game that shows the importance of the James Webb telescope, and not only did we stay with the concept, but we decided to go a little further and look for a different experience in the player, that is that's why for this game we decided to adapt the UI to a more retro style in order to put the player in the role of a telescope operator.We believe that our video game solves the challenge since it not only manages to show you how important the james webb telescope is for humanity, but also emphasizes the importance of its operators, putting you for a few seconds in their place, under absurdly difficult conditions, which make this game exciting.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
About the game
Specifically, our video game tries to create a small simulation, which for 60 seconds puts you in the role of an operator of the James Webb telescope, in turn, the challenge consists of 3 instructions that can be given to the telescope.
- A number: With this instruction, the telescope will rotate the amount of degrees indicated, but it is important to know that they are additive, therefore, if for example, initially they are rotated 15 degrees, and then the following instruction is given : "40", the telescope will be aimed at 55 degrees, not 40.
-Abort : This command returns the telescope to 0°.
-Capture : This command is used for the MIRI camera of the telescope to capture an image of the star.
The challenge consists of the following: As soon as the game starts, a window will open where "in real time", you will be seeing the MIRI camera of the telescope, it will indicate that a star was detected in position x° (These positions are random and procedural).
As is known, a circle consists of 360° angles, therefore the challenge is to mentally add and subtract degrees at high speeds, while assigning commands on the simulated telescope console.
Once the degrees you assign and the degrees of location of the star coincide, you have to capture an image with the "Capture" command.
The real challenge is that there are 9 stars, and you only have 60 seconds to do all this.
Are you ready ?
( Image extracted from the actual gameplay ).
This project was carried out through the use of different tools, so we decided to list and classify them...
Software :
- Unity 3D : We use it as a game engine.
- Photoshop : We use it to edit from textures, to the 2D visual section of the entire game.
- Visual Studio : It was our IDE, that is, where we deposit all the code, and it is responsible for encoding it and converting it into low-level language so that the computer understands the instructions.
As far as programming language is concerned, we use C#, which is the default language supported by the graphics engine we use.
Coding :
In all the code we only use about 3 scripts, highly optimized in order not to load our game with a lot of code, since although the 3D section of it requires a certain percentage of computer use, we did not want to load the game even more , so we decided to do the following:
- Script A : Stores all the possible instructions of the telescope, be it rotation orders, image capture, and all the possible instructions in the "console" inside the game, through which the movement instructions are given to the telescope.
- Script B : This stores the interactions related to the countdown and the capture of images, making a count with integers and showing them on another console so that the player can monitor and manage their time in the game.
- Script C : Contain the menu instructions and start of counting, that is, in addition to the instructions to change the scene, play music, appear windows and others, it also detects if the "enter" key was pressed on any console, in order to start the countdown in Script B.
Space Agency Data
For this project, real images captured from the James Webb telescope were used, and not only that, but we also extracted the official 3D model of the telescope from NASA's own website. All the information about the MIRI instrument, which we could find on all the official websites of the mentioned agencies, was also very useful to us.
Regarding inspiration, we also used satellite images captured by different telescopes and satellites, which served as a resource to create the SkyBox of the video game.
In the beginning we also tried to animate the trajectory of the JamesWebb telescope, but finally it was not necessary for us since in 60 seconds its trajectory is not that much, therefore we abandoned that idea, but also the website of the telescope gave us an idea of how the same it translates, rotates and orbits.
Hackathon Journey
Our experience in the space apps challenge was very pleasant, since this challenge put our abilities to the limit, having to capture as much information as possible, in the shortest possible time, therefore, it results in two days in which a lot of knowledge was acquired. regarding the topic we chose, in our case the James Webb telescope, and it really helps you understand a little more how great it is to be contemporary to these aerospace advances.
What inspired us to choose this challenge was the difficulty, since among all the challenges related to video games, this seemed to be the most complicated, since we had to come up with an original idea, which at first cost us too much.
We solved the setbacks thinking only of our objective, that is, ideas were proposed, and from brainstorming we started spinning what today turns out to be this video game.
References
Software :
- Unity3D
- Visual Studio
- Maya Studio
- Photoshop
Fonts :
- Joystix Monospace
- Console
- Arial
Images :
- SkyBox : We use the Hubble Legacy Field Image and turn it into a SkyBox with some edition in photoshop. ( https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2019/17/4492-Image.html ).
- Computer frames : We design them by ourselves, inspiring us from old Mac OS window frames.
3D Models:
- James Webb : We downloaded the 3D model from official NASA website. ( https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/detail/jwst ).
Music :
- "Portal" Mysterious Space Background Music by Gravity Sound ( Is not copyrighted ).
Tags
#Games, #Jwebb, #JamesWebb, #Simulator