Stardata Crusaders| 1UP for NASA Earth

Project Details

Awards & Nominations

Stardata Crusaders has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

The Challenge | 1UP for NASA Earth

Your challenge is to create a new video game that uses NASA Earth data, providing players a novel way to interact and have fun with NASA Earth data. What you create can inform, educate, inspire, or simply provide an enjoyable experience for players – the Earth is your stage!

Icarus

You are a scientist tasked with using orbital satellites to scan the Earth and gather data. You will be given the opportunity to do 3 scans focusing on different locations around the map. Protect the satallite at all costs to ensure the data is clear.

Stardata Crusaders

The Challenge

The biggest problem of today is not the lack of data, but the lack of will for sifting through the data. NASA and others have presented tons of digital data that anybody can go through, from their Satellite Data Resources to the GLOBE data-set, however barely anybody looks through the data unless it is professionally.

This is caused by the data mostly being available in data tables. People often try to use graphs to make it interesting, however graphs can often times be just as uninteresting as tables. We figured that people might just get interested if only the data was presented in a fun and interesting manner.

The Solution

We decided the best way to solve the issue was to make a fun and entertaining game that presents hand chosen data from the data-sets as rewards to the presented task in the game. The way this solves the challenge is that you are rewarded clearer data when you do better. This approach takes advantage of the completionist/perfectionist inside of all of us. The player will want to get a perfect score in game which will have a side effect of wanting to see the data as clear as possible.

The Game

The game was developed using Unity version 2019.2.9f1 and C#. You can download the game in the link below. There are a couple of options you have in the link, you can either clone the repository and compile it yourself, or you can download an already compiled version in the repository. If you clone the repository you can change the game to your liking and re-upload it yourself (it is open source under the GNU General Public License after all). We understand if you don't have the knowledge of how to do this, so we have also included pre-compiled versions of the game for Windows, macOS, and Linux under the "compiled" directory.

https://github.com/PuddingEarl478/ProjectIcarus

The Team

Stardata Crusaders consists of two people: Jack Jones, and Jacob O'Shaughnessy. Jack is the lead developer of the team, he was also the lead developer for the team that won the 2019 NASA App Development Challenge. He has most of his experience from game development in Unity using C#. Jacob is passionate for mathematics, and has used Java for number crunching since 8th grade.


- We'll see you starside.