Sheldon's Army - Space Apps Challenge

Sheldon's Army| Breakthrough

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.

Space Circuit

Summary

We created a game showcasing the technologies and limitations of some of the most famous rockets that have been part of the United States' space programs. Space Circuit lets you pilot multiple rockets across our galaxy, and takes a shot at answering the question of what potential obstacles a space pilot might find.Space Circuit takes into account the real capabilities of the included rockets to determine the range and speed of the mission they can complete. Newer and more complex rockets will take you farther and travel faster. We try to give players an idea of how speed increases gradually the farther a spacecraft travels, which creates fun challenges thanks to the different terrains.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed an Android game named Space Circuit using the Unity game engine. The goal of the game is to find a fun way to teach those that are not too familiar with the rockets that have been part of the US history (and also those not too familiar with rockets in general) about the capabilities and limitations of these incredible machines. We believe it is important to showcase our history, and combine it with a little bit of fantasy. This lets us challenge the brightest minds to push us forward and allow us to reach new frontiers to prove whether or not our fantasy assumptions were correct.

The game allows players to select which rocket they want to pilot. Then a mission starts and the player must try to reach the next stage by flying through the obstacles one may expect to encounter in space. The obstacles get more fantasy-based the farther the player gets from earth. We try to convey the idea of how a rocket speeds up progressively and requires more precise maneuvering by giving extra physics forces and speed the longer a ship flies.

We expect this game to be a simple yet engaging way of getting the public curious. We want it to serve as a baseline which can be expanded on to showcase more futuristic spaceships and introduce people to new technologies.

How We Developed This Project

As a team of an engineer and an artist, we've always been amazed by the ammount of technology involved in a spaceship. We've also always wanted to learn about game development and how to make a phone app, so this was the perfect opportunity for combining our curiosity for space, make our skills work together, and learn something new.

We started by brainstorming what we wanted our game to be, and discussing how to divide it in smaller tasks that we could manage. First we made hand sketches of the game sections, and a bird's eye view of the game levels. Then used Unity as a game engine, C# as our coding language, Visual Studio for code editing, and multiple Adobe tools for the art, including Illustrator and Photoshop.

One of the biggest challenges was deciding which spacecraft we would include and what information to include about them. We wanted to keep the game simple and engaging, so we selected what we considered to be the most famous spaceships, but there is definitely room for many more, we just couldn't include them all in such a limited time.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used NASA's online articles as well as information found in the different partner agencies to find answers about what made up different parts of the ships, what components are part of their fuel, how do they look like, what is the purpose of each component, etc.