High-Level Project Summary
Our game follows a bee named Jackson as we explore the night sky through different telescopes, from a basic compound telescope on Earth to the Hubble and WISE in Earth's orbit, making a final stop at the James Webb Telescope, or Jackson's so-called honeycomb home. Through the use of a friendly mascot and limited use of written words, we wanted to make this game understandable and playable by all, from little kids to non-English speakers. Our aim was to provide a comparison between the James Webb Telescope and others before it, inspiring wonder in those who might not have been aware of the amazing potential the telescope holds.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Our game is an educational one to compare the images taken from several different telescopes to the James Webb Telescope images. It follows around a bee named Jackson, who shows the player the different images. Basically, the player just has to guide Jackson around (who follows their mouse) and tap on the telescopes, which would then show the images that correspond to the telescope. We used Processing, a code that both of our team members are familiar with. Although it was limiting, it was a good learning experience to find ways to overcome the challenges that the limited code gave us. At the beginning, we were a bit more ambitious, not taking in account our other commitments and time restraints. We wanted to make the game a bit more interactive—Jackson would’ve been able to speak a bit more, the telescopes would be labelled, and when you tapped into the telescope images, you were able to see facts about the telescope. As well, Jackson would’ve been able to tell you about the James Webb Telescope in comparison to the other ones. However, we opted out of Jackson’s voice lines because we wanted it to be accessible to all people, not just English speakers, and as well due to limited time constraints which prevented us from being able to translate speech depending on what language the user chose.
Space Agency Data
We mostly used images and surface-level data to help create our game. Because we wanted to limit the number of words in our game in order for it to be equally understandable to everyone across the globe, we planned to use quantitative data for most of the project. Information found on the NASA website and other online references, such as the distance of the satellite from Earth, type of camera (NIRCam or MIRI, etc.), and the year it was launched, for example. However, due to time constraints, we could not implement this information into the final version of the game, and instead settled for the usage of images taken by various NASA telescopes.
Hackathon Journey
Both of us are aspiring video game developers, and this challenge specifically asks participants to make a game. We saw this as an opportunity to put our skills to the test! Through Space Apps, we learned a lot of soft skills and general knowledge about space, from the amazing potential of the James Webb Telescope to how to best represent the information we had through an interactive program. The most important skill we worked on through this hackathon was our ability to problem solve, not get frustrated and persevere until we had a solution, as well as how to distribute workload, communicate, and manage our time wisely. We had very ambitious ideas for what we wanted our solution to look like initially, but we also realized halfway through that these were perhaps too ambitious and had to give up on some assets in order to end up with a program that runs.
References
Images:
G. (2015, March 19). Sky view from Stellarium software. Stack Exchange. Retrieved October 1, 2022, from https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/10209/sky-view-from-stellarium-software-vs-sky-view-with-naked-eye
NASA (2022, July 12). Webb's First Deep Field (NIRCam). Webb Space Telescope. Retrieved October 1, 2022, from https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/035/01G7DDDR3P8ZW10HD8MKXGV8MJ
NASA (2022, June 24). Hubble Captures a Galactic Menagerie. Retrieved October 1, 2022, from https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-captures-a-galactic-menagerie
NASA (2015, November 3). A Giant Gathering of Galaxies. Retrieved October 1, 2022, from https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia20052/a-giant-gathering-of-galaxies
Tags
#JamesWebbTelescope #Game #Space