The Final Frontier - Space Apps Challenge

The Final Frontier| 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.

The Final Frontier: Space Explorer Game

Summary

For our project, we decided to create a video game. Since our goal is to get people interested in space travel, we decided the best way to hook them in to the topic is with a game they can play. For each new level, you get a faster rocket, and before the level begins we display some information on the rocket, and show them the model. We have 5 rockets, 2 that are real and 3 theoretical concepts for rockets. This is so the gamers can learn about the history of rocket technology, and some of the most successful rockets ever created. We included theoretical rockets so they can witness what the future of space travel could look like, to channel their imagination and interest.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our project addresses this challenge by creating a game that showcases both existing as well as next generation/theoretical breakthroughs in the form of rocket technology. We developed a game to showcase this. This way the player is more engaged than if it was just a powerpoint presentation. The reason this project is important is because it engages the player in a fun interactive way where the player learns about propulsion technologies and thus creates more awareness for this type of technology.

The game basically starts the player off with the least modern rocket with information on it such as its height, weight, speed etc.Then the player avoids obstacles such as black holes, gamma rays and asteroids. There are 5 levels in the game. As the player progresses through each level, the rockets get better and more modern to the final being 3 theoretical. Every new rocket is provided with a description of it. As the rockets get faster so does the game thus increasing the difficulty of the game. This makes the player more engaged in a fun and interactive way.

This entire game was made and programmed in Unity. Images were either used or drawn for the game and put into unity. Finally, what we hope to achieve is to create a fun game that allows players to have fun, be engaged and learn of new propulsion technologies that are being released and as well as the ones that currently exist. All of this too therefore creates awareness for the need of breakthrough propulsion that could revolutionize how humans explore space.

How We Developed This Project

Our team decided to choose this challenge because we have a great interest in space travel. Humans have already expanded on earth and are slowly starting to run out of resources. In order for humanity to continue to thrive, travelling to other planets/systems that may contain life will have to be the next big step. In order for this to happen, we will need much better and faster spacecraft that can allow us to get to nearby earth-like planets much more quickly. Modern spacecraft is not capable of doing this, as they would take thousands of years to reach an earth-like planet light years away. Instead, humans will need spacecraft that can at least exceed the speed of light in order to get somewhere light years away in a much shorter timespan. As a result, this inspired us to create a fun simulation game that would allow people to visualize and maneuver modern and future spacecrafts. Through the process, they would also learn valuable information about each spacecraft, and understand that there are possible solutions for a much faster method of space travel. We want people who play our game to know that achieving warp speed is not totally impossible.

In order to make a game with high quality, we decided to use unity. In the game we would build assets and scenes that would make a very fun experience for the user. We also used C sharp to code the spacecrafts and obstacles so that players can maneuver the spacecrafts and avoid obstacles.

In the construction of our game, we had a variety of different problems. Since this was our first time using unity, we often did not know how to do things. Whenever we wanted to create something in unity (such as sprite movement), we often had to watch a YouTube video. However, our lack of experience with unity did not stop our determination to create a game that will change the view points of various people. We worked hard as a team to solve every possible issue we faced.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

The Space Agency data was used primarily from two agencies: SpaceX and NASA. The data from these agencies and other sources provided a model of the ship and its properties, such as height, material, mass, speed, etc. The data also provided how each particular ship worked. For example, for the Orion Momentum Limited Spacecraft, we had collected data from NASA, which helped in providing us with convenient information on how it could possibly function and work in space. For the Falcon Heavy, its functional properties were retrieved from Space X. Since the models of the spacecraft were from these agencies, we used them in our game. As a result, our whole game depended on the research and data we had received from these agencies. This data allowed us to show people information about each spacecraft. This data also helped in simulating the spacecraft maneuvering, as the speed of the game corresponded to the speed of the spacecraft. Therefore, without the the space agency data, we could not have built our game as it helped in providing spacecraft information, and speeds/theoretical velocities.