High-Level Project Summary
We made a game about JWST, it's not a boring story telling game, or a card game. It's a game that sends you behind the scenes, how JWST is made, how it works, how the team works and how it's possible. People think that understanding space is hard, but when we show them how it's really done, it all connects, it's suddenly not hard anymore.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
It's a 3D game that sends you behind the scenes, how JWST is made, how it works, how the team works and how it's possible. People think that understanding space is hard, but when we show them how it's really done, it all connects, it's suddenly not hard anymore. We hope to show people that these powerful inventions shouldn't go under the radar, by teaching them about one of the most powerful ones yet.
The game is separated in 3 stages:
- The first stage: The launching, the rocket is ready to be launched, one of the greatest inventions is about to start providing miracles
- The second stage: You need to stabilize the trajectory and make sure that it arrives to space safely and reaches space
- The third stage: You control the telescope from earth, from your office in the control room, carefully sending instructions to the telescope
The game is made in Unity using C#, most of the graphics were made in Photoshop and the models are tweaked in Blender
Each aspect of the game is managed by a manager, like the objectives manager that keeps track of the current objective, future ones, about the timer, and how to detect when something is done, or the picture manager that keeps track of the images taken by the telescope. Each manager communicates with other ones.
Each stage is its own seperate scene, the fading animation is played by the LevelLoader prefab that plays the animations when transitioning to scenes.
The software used:
- Unity
- Audacity
- Adobe Photoshop
- MS Paint
- Adobe Premiere Pro
- Blender
- Visual Studio Code
- PowerPoint (in the presentation)
- dnSpy
Space Agency Data
We used data from the website: https://webbtelescope.org
Also data from Google and https://2022.spaceappschallenge.org/challenges/2022-challenges/through-the-looking-glass/details and some youtube videos.
The data is the whole foundation of the game, every single detail in every stage is replicated almost perfectly, If you look at the launch video and compare it to the ingame scene, you will have a 99% match, the data provided by nasa helped us confirm that the information we were using for the game was indeed approved.
Hackathon Journey
Wasn't the best journey, there were many forms to fill and so many deadlines, and my parents couldn't help because they didn't know a lot about what I was doing.
It was a great experience but still was difficult to go through, and that taught me to keep pushing through.
There wasn't a lot of resting and mostly working but hey that's the definition of a hackathon.
At my age I think I'm not supposed to work this much but hey I'm still good.
I met lots of cool people.
The challenge was great in a difficult way.
References
Epidemic Sound:
- https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/GQShuBc5rJ/
- https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/49PmMQpEoZ/
- https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/ro85VFDifb/ (edited in audacity)
Free3D:
- https://free3d.com/
Google:
- https://google.com
webbtelescope.org:
- https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/images
Tags
#jwst #space #game #telescope #nasa