Cosmonauts

The game: http://orteil.dashnet.org/igm/?g=bBm74DrE, Code: https://pastebin.com/bBm74DrE

Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXwFM-obkPw

Our project is a browser game named Stargazer. It is a clicker game that is meant to be both educational and fun to teach people more about stars and stellar variability . It works when the user clicks the white dwarf in the center of the game, each click registers 1 lightyear travelled but slowly you can gain upgrades and different stars that you pass by while travelling to increase the lightyears travelled per second and per click. Each time you unlock a new star you get info about it in a short and simple way. The achievements are based on the life of a star with you forming from molecular clouds and in the end exploding in a white dwarf supernovae eventually reach the black hole where you finally get absorbed which ends the game. The benefits of the game are the learning benefits of it, it helps the user understand more about an interesting topic that is stellar variability. They learn just how unique stars can be and how dynamic the night sky really is easily and without much effort.

We used Idle Game Maker which is a game engine to develop clicker type games and pastebin to store the code in txt form. The coding languages used were CSS and the coding language created by Orteil in Idle Game Maker.

We used the data from the space agency, NASA.

We used the data by first reading it and going through it and then conducting research on it. We took the research and simplified it for both our understanding and the user's understanding and applied it onto our browser app to make it educational and based on the challenge.

The data inspired us by giving us a solid idea of what we were doing for this challenge and gave us everything we needed in a simple and easy to understand way. Once we used the data we felt pretty confident with out project.

Our Space Apps experience was great and informative. We learned a lot both from the challenge and the teams around us. Our team was inspired to choose this challenge because of the book written by Carl Sagan named 'Cosmos', it states that we are all technically made of the same things that stars are made up of along with out interest in astrophysics. Our approach was to first conduct extensive research on the challenge by analyzing the problem and creating a solution for it, once we formed an idea we got to work to make the idea real. We had a few setbacks like searching for the right language and game engine for the game and choosing the design aesthetic but we managed to solve it quickly by working on it together. We would like to thank our parents for allowing us to go for this opportunity and providing us full support on the project and our journey.

Resources (Data and Research)-1

1 ) https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/cepheids.html

2 ) https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/objects/cataclysmic_variables.html

3 ) https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/toolbox/timing1.html

4 ) https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/gcvs.html

5 ) https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/tess/software.html

Programming-

Idle Game Maker: Idle Game Maker (dashnet.org)

A place to store the code in .txt form [Pastebin]: https://pastebin.com

Images-

All of them are made by us except for the James Webb Telescope which is from-

James Webb Space Telescope - Wikipedia

#astrophysics #stellarvariability #clickergame #browsergame #stars