Hi, IT guy reporting after the fact. We're excited that we've been honored with the Most Inspirational award for our site. The hours of hard work have surely been recognized :)

Just wanted to say thanks, to the site organizers and my team, for the great time we've spent together.

Also, our game's code is on GitLab, so that everyone can take a look. Just follow the instructions on the README and have a go at it! https://gitlab.com/space.cats/game

Cheers,

Felipe

Hey, IT guy #2 here. We've been hard at work and released a prototype of our app at http://hysteresis.pw/spacecats

It's been quite the ride! We've all had a fun, exciting and very productive weekend - working together and breathing life into our vision, interacting with other hackathoners and sharing a great experience together.

This event has been a great learning experience for all of us, from the more experienced members who have assisted to several hackathons before - all the way through to our members for whom this hackathon is their first.

cheers

Quick Update 00:29AM

• IT Guys: Debugging, debugging, debugging... We are learning new tools for our game. But we got this!
• Design Team: All customizable sets for our user done! Now it's time to make how our screens will look like so Video Guy can put them into his After Effects Video
• Video Guy: I finished the bases! Now we are seeing if there is anything missing, if we are clear on what we are saying, and that kind of stuff
• Science Girl: I'm providing Design Team with information for the design of all of the planets, to match the menus they have made. I've been talking to NASA Experts on the Space Apps Chats so that has been really helpful!

Night has been awesome. We saw some short movies in the rooftop with the other participants. It was really fun! Now, we have a long night to go. We can do this!

19PM CheckIn: Hey Space Cats, What have you been up to?

• IT Guys: Still working on the UI. We are now about to head into a VideoGame Design Workshop for some inspiration for our Game!
• Design Team: We finished designing our little Main Character, a couple of G-Type Stars and an approximation of how our planets would look like. Now, we are designing the Menus and Options our user will interact with. Stay tuned for some photos!
• Video Guy: I exchanged some ideas with the Design Team so we have an idea of how the video would look like. Now we have a timeline set, so It's time to get things done! Getting all of the ideas in 30 seconds is harder than we expected, but I'm sure we got this!
• Science Girl: Reducing the video concept to only G-Type Stars got things much easier! There's a lot of research about lots of them! I've discovered that this NASA topic has his own Slack Team with a lot of experts available to help us, that helped a lot!

It started to get dark outside. The sky is all nice and pink and we are enjoying some mates in this building's rooftop while listening to one of our favorite bands. This is beautiful. We are so grateful for this experience <3

So, key points for our presentation (All of this in only 4 minutes!)

• Who are we? Why is our team special? We are the SPACE CATS! Two IT Guys, 3 Designers and 1 Engineer. A motivated and diverse group from all fields of study united with a shared vision: Making the world a better place for future generations.
• Why is this topic important? This topic is important because it naturally brings up people from different fields together. It promotes a message of union, of getting stronger if we are in community. It's a huge, huge, world, we still have a long way to explore! And together, we get further.
• How does our solution work? Show a video or a demo that can help us understand it better We want to create a playful experience around the "Building Planets" Subtopic NASA gave us. In our video game, the player can create a user gets to choose between a set of G-Class Stars (Yellow Stars, just like our sun!) and then build their own planet, that can reasonably exist in that star's planetary system. You will find a community of people who also chose to live in the star of your choice! But here comes the fun part: There will also be Mini-Games (with NASA-Related topics and Taking Care of the Environment Games as well) where you can play and earn points for your planet to evolve and rank higher between your friends. -> I guess we will show all of this in the video that our Video Guy is creating. We will be not able to develop all of this idea today because of our time limit, but this is an idea for future.
• What is our idea's impact? What do we need to get this done? We, together as humans, have made a huge progress and we still have a long way to go. We've made possible things that a couple of years ago were considered a dream. We believe that our kids will be the main characters on expanding the limits of knowledge of today. We believe they will be the inventors, the scientists, the poets, the artists of a future we can't even conceive today. That's why we have to give them the tools, teach them what we've already found and generate this interest from an early age. We believe in our kids, we believe that kids will save our future. -> We need to finish up the idea of what do we need to get things done

Hey, this is going well!

We should be preparing for our presentation...

After talking to our coaches, we realized that if we are going to sleep here (sleep? mhm...) we should get our ideas for the presentation now that we are nice and awake. I guess we will start to have a checklist now. Communication is key!

What about you, IT Guys? What you've been up to?

Well, we've been experimenting a lot with the UI of the game. We've been talking to our coach about the orbit's mathematics and been playing around with that. Now we are about to create the first screen that our user will see!

Science Girl Update (13:38PM)

I've been searching for information solely on NASA sites, it amazes me how much there is to learn! I've been thinking, maybe we can have a shoutout to some of the NASA projects related to things we are using for our game, to both support and thank all of what the awesome NASA teams have made to keep expanding our limits of knowledge as humanity? That could be great!

13PM CheckIn: How did our team progressed?

• IT Guys: We are learning about the Framework we are going to use for our game. We choose free, open source software available called Phaser 3 for everyone to see and eventually modify. We strongly believe that together we grow stronger!
• Design Team: We are designing both our adorable main character (Fun Fact: Check out his cute Astronaut Suit Later!) and using information that our Science Girl researched about types of planets orbiting G-Type Stars to see how our planets would look like. So far, so good!
• Video Guy: We have been told that it is useful that we have at least a prototype of how the 30-Second video for the Global Instance would look like. I am preparing a galactic model on After Effects
• Science Girl: I've been researching in NASA sites about what kind of stars there are, what makes up a planet, what kind of galaxies there are, and just out of curiosity all of this scales. After talking to one of our coaches, we've decided that we will center our Game around G-Type Stars and the kind of planets that can be found around them.

Welp, that's it for now. We are super focused and super happy. Let's see what's next!