High-Level Project Summary
"Decks to Orbit" is a digital board game centered around planning and then launching a space mission where the main limitations are mass allowance and fuel amount. In the planning phase the game showcases the fine balance that engineers have to maintain for a successful mission. And in the execution phase the game emulates the staging of a real life mission. The game is fun and educational and its importance lies in sparking interest in space missions and aerospace engineering.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Game Overview:
The objective in Decks To Orbit is to plan and complete space missions by building card decks that represent the major components of a spacecraft. Cards represent specific parts. Players complete missions by playing cards which have different fuel costs. The game is won when a player completes all of the stages in a mission. These stages have different requirements. The choice of cards as well as how they are played within stages can make the difference between how well missions are completed. This can also be reflected through game stats and leaderboards.
Game mechanics:
When you start the game you will have the option to pick between multiple missions (Lunar, Martian, etc.) with a set of stages that need to be completed successfully to win. Each mission also has a mass allowance and a fuel restriction. After picking a mission the player adds cards to their deck until the mass allowance is reached. The player is then taken to the execution phase where they draw a hand of 5-6 cards and simulate staging a mission by playing their cards. As they complete the requirements of each stage they progress through the level until the mission objective has been achieved.
Benefits:
These game mechanics should introduce players to the concepts of optimization in engineering and staging space missions. It will also introduce them to some of the vocabulary used and names of parts so that it may spark interest and further learning.
Code Description:
For our implementation, we have utilized Python as the main development language and the Pygame library as the game engine framework. Currently we have developed basic implementations for the main menu, mission selection, deck building, and game loop interfaces. Some of the game logic has been developed but it is not yet complete and requires more work and testing to be integrated with the game flow simulation.
Space Agency Data
We were inspired by the basics of space flight from NASA, as it gave us a general idea of the challenges faced to reach orbit.
Other resources (included in the references section) helped us decide on rocket components to implement as cards in the game, and decide their effect based on their real life application, such as ring laser gyroscopes and star trackers.
The resources available have provided us with accurate data which we can rely on to build game mechanics.
Hackathon Journey
As a team of four fresh graduate engineers we came to this competition planning to choose one of the more technical challenges but then "Space Quest: The Game" caught our eye. The more we discussed the challenge the more interesting ideas we had so we decided to dive head first and attempt it. After some time we settled on a couple of core game mechanics these being:
1- The player's deck is restricted by the total mass (adding more cards to your deck/parts to your space craft increases the mass).
2- The player is restricted by fuel when executing the mission.
3- A set of targets that must be fulfilled to complete a mission.
With the fundamentals done we split into two teams. One team worked on game mechanics and design, and the other team worked on coding and developing the game.
After some cards were designed and the restrictions were more clearly defined we started working on the UI elements and the game flow. This involved both teams and a lot of rough sketches both on paper and in MS Paint.
Due to the hackathon's nature and time crunch, the game had to be submitted as a demo just to showcase the main design and game flow as well as some basic game mechanics.
References
Team's miscellaneous work: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1V6mlY4Ccz0HpVElHL7XCqWqSEgLjjq09?usp=sharing
NASA Resources:
1- https://mars.nasa.gov/mro/mission/spacecraft/parts/gnc/sensors/
2- https://mars.nasa.gov/mro/mission/spacecraft/parts/
3- https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190001443/downloads/20190001443.pdf
Tags
#card_game #space_missions #game_development
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.