Arctic Argus

Inspiration

Tension is rising in the north, over 15 different countries take part in a treaty claiming that no one country has ownership over the arctic. As the climate changes, much of its ice continues to melt allowing new trade routes and thus greater interest in its ownership. Because of this, it is clear that we need ways to plan missions and simulate possibilities that can occur in the terrain.

What it does

Arctic Argus is a real time gamified simulation of the Canadian Arctic designed to immerse the user in the role of a commander. The user is able to command and control various vehicles with the objective of spending a certain amount of budget to neutralize the most amounts of threats and gather the most amount of resources. With our grading system, immediate feedback is given such that there is always an understanding of how improvements can be made. Moreover, the specialized hardware controller aides in immersing the user, offering complete control of their fleet.

How we built it

Arctic Argus was made using react, Javascript, CSS, and arduino. The react frontend allowed for ease of production as it offered modularity and real time updates making tweaking and balancing convenient.

Challenges we ran into

As this is a real time simulator, many moving parts are involved. As such, balancing spawn rates of conflicts, budget allotted, costs, and different specs of each of the vehicles was quite challenging and took many hours of tweaking. On top of this, the hardware component also proved to be difficult as balancing the necessities of the simulation with the capabilities of the hardware allotted proved to be its own balancing act.