High-Level Project Summary
Racing Stars is a single player, third person view, 3D video game that immerse the player in a journey through space. It sets the player in a little spaceship that has to wander in space as it avoids different stars and meteoroids; and if they don’t, the spaceship will crash in one of those leading to a collision with a star such as it happens in outer space once a satellite losses orbits and collide with mater as well.The goal of the game is to involve the player in a journey through space in order to avoid as many collisions as possible.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
The videogame itself is a fun and entertaining way of attracting the young audience into the topics of space exploration and science. We aim for children of the ages of 7-11 years old to be interested in the game. This game is fast pace which means that the player can play as many times as they want and keep learning about the stars which can be once they’re looking for the information in the main menu or once they collide with one, it will show basic information about the star that they crased with. We aim to accomplish the goal of the challenge by having different colors of stars, each ones representing the different changes it has during the time of the day/night.
The project reference can be the game “Temple Run” in where the player has to collect coins and also avoid obstacles and once they collide into an object, the game is over. Racing Stars has the similar mechanics but instead of collecting coins, the player takes a look around with the color of the different stars that the map of the game shows and can look for that information once they’re done playing using the main menu.
Regarding the development of the project, we created the 3D video game using Unity Version: 2020.3.19f1 (LTS) and for coding language we used C#. We also created our own assets using the software Blender and we created the animations using the Animator tool inside of Unity. To work as a team we used Github in order to have a control version of the game and to create a stable version of it; we also used itch.io to help us upload the demo of the game and the build of it.
Space Agency Data
We used the explanation video as a main resource, with this tool we were able to think and develop an interesting and enjoyable game. This was also helpful for use in order to remind us what was the challenge about and how can we approach it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib64cwOJxpo
To create a great database for the recognition of stars we used the following links: https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/gcvs.html and the information of telescope Kepler https://archive.stsci.edu/missions-and-data/kepler to have useful information about stars and that kids would found easy to understand.
For the pitch we used the guide of 30 seconds of glory. This resource helped us to make a decision as a team in order to see which option (either video or presentation) was more viable for us. https://sa-2019.s3.amazonaws.com/media/documents/Space_Apps_2022_Project_Submission_Guide.pdf
Hackathon Journey
As a team, this opportunity was amazing to explore our creativity and skills in such a short amount of time. We also encountered some challenges throughout the weekend that we were able to overcome through good communication and collaboration within the team. Although the amount of work was huge. Each individual is aware of the main aspects that one was good at so we were able to work around.
References
Here's the repository used for the project: Racing Stars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib64cwOJxpo
https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/gcvs.html
https://archive.stsci.edu/missions-and-data/kepler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHCwUMJOFsc
https://nineplanets.org/star/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/stars
https://api.nasa.gov/?search=Stars
https://www.netmentor.es/entrada/diccionarios-csharp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4OHasB1oC8
Tags
#space #stars #videogames #games #nasa