We are Team StarStruck and we made a solar system building game called Plan-It.

Background:

We are a team of 4 friends in college studying computer science with backgrounds in art, game development, and astrophysics. We chose the Build A Planet challenge because we thought it would be an engaging challenge that we could build professionally and have fun with. As we were creating Plan-It we realized how much we could teach people about space, and implemented many ways to do so. We hope to take astrophysics, a very complex yet enthralling field of study, and break it down in a fun way. To achieve this, we used various resources across the Internet as well as our own studies of Astrophysics in college.

What It Does:

Plan-It is a sandbox game with the goal to educate its users in various astrophysical concepts. Currently plan it teaches about the life cycle of stars, composition of gas planets, and different atmospheres of rocky planets. Plan-It targets people with the desire to learn more about space but don't know where to start by breaking down hard concepts throughout the experience.

We achieved this by starting the user focused in on the star of a large solar system. The menu around the star shows the user the stars characteristics and allows the user to alter its properties. We also provide links that the user can go to whenever they want to learn more about the star. We have a similar menu around the planets that the user can explore on their own.

Future Plans:

We have goals of adding in education of different types of stars and odd solar systems, such as binary systems and young systems. Further we hope to create a more in depth experience for the planets by making them more complex and reactive to user input. Lastly we hope to make the educational aspect more animated and interactive with the user, taking their input to tailor each persons experience with their knowledge level.

Built With:

We used Unity and C# to develop the game, as well as Adobe Illustrator to create the various artwork within our game.

Try It Out:

Play our game online at http://livartly.com/plan-it.html. To view the instructions you can press escape.

Space Apps Offers:

We would like to thank various Space Apps volunteers and mentors for helping us with our several questions and problems. These people include but by no means are limited to Darwin, Andrew, Bobak, Jack, and so many more.

NASA Resources:

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2011-15
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/82-the-u...
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~ryden/ast162_...
https://www.solarsystemscope.com/textures/
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/textures-...
https://medium.com/@peter_winslow/creating-procedu...
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/jovian-clos...
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/news-article...
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/ov...
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1606/discovery-al...
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/news-article...
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/sun-compare/en/

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/in-depth/
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/overview/
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/alien-worlds/exoplanet...

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/436/10-things-pl...