Breakthrough

Faster-than-light travel is the key to humanity’s dreams of inter-galactic space travel. Your challenge is to create an app, tool, game, or other interactive application that showcases both existing, as well as next generation/theoretical, breakthrough spacecraft propulsion in an engaging way.

Galactic Tycoon

Summary

Galactic Tycoon is a game that places the player as a space agency administrator. He must launch missions to different parts of the universe to earn money and use it in the development of new propulsion systems. Aside from launching missions with different propulsion systems, we added the functionality of starting projects that give the player passive money. These projects go hand in hand with the technology of the player. The game gives the player the opportunity to explore multiple and interesting destinations.We aim to raise awareness of the need for breakthrough propulsion and make it understandable for everyone. Perhaps we can all be rocket scientists, with the right motivation.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed a video game that teaches the player about space exploration and how the different types of propulsion systems can make it easier and more achievable. We researched different types of propulsion systems and made calculations of the time it would take to travel to some destinations in the universe with each type of propulsion system. All the data is scientifically accurate to raise real awareness of how different every system is with its pro’s and con’s. With this game we hope we can make it easy and fun for people to understand the importance of breakthrough propulsion and how far it can take humanity. 

The game is to administrate a space agency and develop new technologies that make it easier to travel and at the same time the player can launch projects that will enhance earnings that will then be used to develop new technologies and advance further in space exploration and travel. 

How We Developed This Project

We decided to take on this project for the simple reason that we believe that space exploration is at a critical point in which it's going to start developing quickly so it's imperative that we start getting our heads on this matter. We used multiple tools to make this project, for starters we used our computers in order to research and compile data that we found for example the data sets that we were given in order to complete this challenge. In order to develop the game we used 2 particular applications. 

The first application we used was Unity which runs the game on C# coding language. We also used Photoshop CC 2020 in order to develop the visuals used in the game. We had a few issues when it came to investigating the engines used in the rockets as some of the data that we found did not match or was simply missing, extending the search considerably. But we managed our way through this issues.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used a couple of documents from nasa in order to properly establish some of our space transport options, the documents we used were the documents in relation to warp field physics and also the helical engine. We used these two in order to properly establish them as endgame transportation due to their incredible capabilities. So in order for us to include them in the game we had to research them in detail and be able to simplify them so they could work in game. We also used NASA archives in order to decide which planets and celestial bodies would be destinations so we turned to this data to decide interesting and logical locations for the game.

Tags
#space exploration, #propulsion, #warp, #Lightspeed, #game, #stars, #planets
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.