Impostors| Hey! What Are You Looking At?
Hey! What Are You Looking At?
Stellar
Summary
We developed our game using Unity. We decided that the game would be a spaceship shooting game, where the player controls a specific spaceship and tries to fire at an enemy ship. For that, we gathered 3D models for the ships we will use in the game and coded them to operate according to the code we wrote. Every input by the user translates to different outputs in the game, whether it is movement, acceleration, firing, interacting,...etc. After that, we used different data on Nasa’s website (specifically, HEASARC) to simulate astronomical phenomena and implemented them in the game. The game system allows the player to see different game phenomena every time he wins a level.
How We Addressed This Challenge
With all sophisticated electromagnetic radiation data from the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) including those of gravitational wave detections, gamma-ray bursts, and supernovae, it has become harder for astronomy enthusiasts to browse them because their capabilities of analyzing such intricate data do not come close to those of scientists and researchers. Consequently, tons of useful data and information go untouched or become a burden with time. Just the thought of millions of images taken from thousands of telescopes along with other astronomical data generated by cutting-edge facilities getting wasted is unnerving. Of course, they are not completely wasted because scientists use them, but why don’t these data also make it to interested individuals worldwide?
Henceforward, our challenge was to create an opportunity for those enthusiasts to explore what they cannot, in normal conditions, fathom that much. Generally speaking, our solution’s idea was decided to be a mobile application that can visualize these different data forms in an interactive, simple way, and in just one place: your home!
Team Impostors knows exactly how their project’s users are feeling because we are the same age as our target audience. We wanted to engage profoundly in discovering astronomical phenomena like black holes and supernovae, but we found data on NASA’s observatories to be somewhat sophisticated. So, we came up with the idea of the game and knew how it would make a difference for every teenager who was put in the same situation as ours; however, of course, we were not the first team to think of simplifying these complicated data for teenagers, but what makes our solution unique is how interactive it is. Instead of browsing visualizations of data, users can play an indie shooting game we developed to kill the boredom they would find in their search for knowledge.
How We Developed This Project
The main area of concern was how most solutions to the aforementioned challenge are not at all interactive. They may provide a convenient visualization of information but only for the user to view not to interact with. As such, we desired our solution to be directed to teenagers as they constitute the perfect age-range for our solution – they don’t find difficulty in understanding basic visualizations and simple forms of data. So, this was what we worked on improving.
We wanted to design an interactive, exciting mobile game that can visualize these data in a user-friendly interface. This would actually be so encouraging for individuals that don’t even find interest in astronomy or phenomena like black holes and supernovae, allowing them to explore areas beyond their scope of interest or study. We determined that a shooting-based game would be perfect to implement that. After all, who would resist doing shooting missions to get rewarded with exotic visualizations of stunning space phenomena? Also, these teenagers we are talking about will surely find a shooting game addicting.
We started by using Visual Studio Code to code the game, and the game engine was decided to be Unity. We used Autodesk Maya, Substance Painter 2020, and Maxwell Render to create different 3D models and animations needed in the game, and, ultimately, we merged everything together; the result was a 3D space shooting game with visual space animations as a reward at the end of every level.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We developed our game in a way that makes players get rewarded with a visual phenomenon inspired by the HEASARC. The Black Hole Webpage on HEARSEC provided us with fast facts about black holes; different visualizations, GIFs, and short videos; and myriad data of other astronomical phenomena that will be used in the future.
Project Demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wjYcY-MNLk
Project Code
Data & Resources
Data
HEASARC
Coding
Visual Studio Code
Game Developing
Unity
Video Editing
Adobe Premiere Pro CC
Adobe After Effects CC
Animation & 3D
Autodesk Maya
Substance Painter 2020
Maxwell Render
Presentation
Google Slides
Writing
Google Docs