SPACE APPS CHALLENGE

Introduction :

The theme chosen is : Living in our world – One up to Nasa Earth, the project consists of a video game that gives the players the opportunity to immerse themselves in the fantastic space world, where they’ll be able to travel in space and visit some planets while keeping the excitement of a video game.

The Tools Used:

Project Space Explorer was made using the core game making tools that help creating a video game to avoid starting from scratch and easing some of the hardest tasks, we can talk about the main tools that we used during the creation of Space Explorer :

- A 3D modeler software: A software where we can create 3d models that will be added and seen in the game, and also to modify some of the existing models, we used Blender for this as it is really powerful, easy to use and can accomplish all what we need.

- A game engine: a game engine is where we’ll put all of our models and associate them to get a content for the game, this is also where we add all the programming part that will dictate the behaviour of all the components of the game and also the interactions with the world, for this task Unreal Engine 4 was the chosen one, as it is one of the most famous game engines and the most powerful ones, another reason for choosing it, is how It is easy to setup a scene in it and the fancy visual effects that it gives to create a better feel for the players.

The game:

Space Explorer is a game that mixes the feel of playing with the excitement of discovering space, using the data given by Nasa, we were able to make the world as realistic as possible while adding some of our own ideas, the timeline of the game will be in the future where the technology is way more developed then the actual present (in the real world), so that it can makes traveling through space and traveling really far distances (distances between planets) possible for the player, he will have the possibility to drive a small spaceship in space and explore wherever he wants, whether it is plain space or visiting an existing planet,each planet will have its own story and Easter eggs to be discovered and also a different gameplay to suit the environment and to not make the player feel bored, the space discovery is also rewarding, getting to see the beautiful artworks that space has to give is really a pleasure.

In the prototype of the game, the player only has only one planet to explore, which is Earth, a future earth where life has vanished long ago due to radiations, he will have to be careful as he’s discovering as he’s a place that he takes for granted but nonetheless became deadly.

The impact of the game:

The game’s main purpose is to attract people to the beautiful field of space science, but still keeping them attached by adding custom gameplay, an original approach made realizable thanks to the information shared by Nasa, space games have always been pure imagination, but now it’s more of a simulation where players will explore real space locations with accurate information, which is a solid learning source, this way, we try to reach people by showing how space is made and inspire them to into this topic.

The realization of the game:

Space Explorer is just a prototype and therefore is far from being complete, it is the materialization of our idea and how far it can go, we spent a lot of effort on it and a lot has yet to be done, it started by creating multiple levels in unreal engine 4, one for each planet and for the space, the transition between the levels has to be smooth so we added a fading for that, next we filled the levels with the Nasa data, from space to planets, then we programmed the behaviour of each environment including the character movements and abilities, in other terms the gameplay for each level, as they are all unique, for the moment there is only Earth and Mars in the prototype but other planets from within and out the galaxy are to be created in the final version, now that the interactions in the different level are setup, our players can start moving around and experience each environment, then we focused on the visual details to make the experience more satisfying, going from lights, particles in the air, stars, skies .. etc, and finally, some of the animations and a menu with some user interfaces.

Conclusion:

This is our first participation and we’re really satisfied, it was an opportunity for us to get fuelled with new ideas and skills.