High-Level Project Summary
My team developed a child-friendly game where you start off with the Kepler Telescope, and you are assigned a randomized mission. The JWST is the best telescope and can see the farthest and the clearest throughout the universe. Our game solves the challenge by demonstrating the breathtaking capabilities of the JWST because, in our game, the JWST wields the clearest views and has the farthest range. Learning about telescopes is extremely important because telescopes are what make all of humanity's current discoveries in outer-space possible. Bringing attention to the telescopes for young people will ensure better success for the development and future of space research.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Telescope Tycoon is a game to explain how the JWST is the best telescope in the space business. To achieve that, we use Unity2D and C# to create a 2D game about JWST and her counterparts. When the user first enters the game, it will show the main screen with the currently selected telescope and the option to go to the shop or to start a mission. If the user chooses to go to the shop, they will be able to select what telescope they want to use. The five that they can choose from are Kepler Space Telescope, Voyager 1, James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, and Chandra X-Ray. As soon as they choose their telescope, they will go back to the homepage to go to the missions. When they go into missions, the mission generator will pick a mission statement out of 10 preset mission statements. If the user does not like the mission statement, they can redraw it until they like it. When they move onto a mission, an auto-generated star map will appear and they will have to place the cursor on the object based on the mission statement. Every single telescope has its own set of parameters such as resolution, detectability, zoom, and more. These factors make it easier or harder for the individual to successfully complete the mission. If they completed it successfully, a success message will show up. If not, they will receive a failure message. We hope to achieve awareness that the JWST is the best telescope by showing the capabilities in the game against other telescopes for younger children. We used C# to code the script and then Unity for the UI and gameplay. We are using WebGL to make our game playable on the web.
Space Agency Data
Provide specific details about what space agency data you used in your project, how you used it, or how it inspired your project. We used images in both the WISE and Webb Gallery as inspiration for our model of the JWST along with how we generated the map. We also used an image of a black hole in the WISE Image Gallery as inspiration for our black hole, which turned out to look incredible. We also used the image of Jupiter in the WISE Gallery to create one of the variants of gas giant planets. Last but not least, the asteroids in the same image mentioned above served as inspiration for some of our rocky planets.
Hackathon Journey
Our Space Apps experience was very good, and we learned a lot of things. To be specific, we learned C#, Unity, Vector Art, and finally; how to make a good presentation. Our team chose this challenge as it proved to be the one we were the most interested in, and we were up to the challenge of tackling a new language, a new system, a new everything. Our approach to tackling this project was to take it slow and focus on finishing rather than perfection. We knew this is a very daring task, so we immediately organized our team to tackle different tasks. The biggest challenges were definitely errors, as most of the ones we struggled on were on the Unity side of things rather than syntax errors. We resolved these issues by going through the Unity documentation.
References
Camera Zoom Sound Effect (Not fully Implemented): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6eKWTHXMlY
Music used
Voyager - by Jonny Easton
Link: https://youtu.be/HKinw3NqWFQ
Check out his channel
Link: https://www.youtube.com/jonnyeaston
Music: Eric Skiff - Song Name - Underclocked - Available athttp://EricSkiff.com/music
Music: Local Forecast · Kevin MacLeod https://youtu.be/lGCxDStXvdI
Space: a visual encyclopedia by SMITHSONIAN
Image Galleries Webb/NASA https://webb.nasa.gov/content/multimedia/images.html
James Webb Space Telescope/NASA https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/
WISE Image Gallery/NASA https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/images/index.html
Tags
#tycoon #jwst #all_ages #heyguysquandaledinglehere, #hittingthegriddy