Stargazers

Inspiration

As children, we were all fascinated by space and what it could hold. We wanted to help youth become as interested in space as we were. This led us to our game centered around asteroids and how they move in our solar system. Our planet is protected by the planets in our solar system which move these deadly asteroids away from our home. This discovery inspired us to develop a game that explores the hypothetical scenario of what might occur if some of these planets were no longer safeguarding Earth.

What it does

Our project allows the user to take control of a player and protect the earth from asteroids. We planned that the asteroids is going to earth can afterwards it will be affected by other planets around it as the game progress.

How we built it

We utilized Unity in conjunction with C# in order to create our project. We use Newtonian physics in order to create the gravitational pull that influences the many objects inside our game.

Challenges we ran into

Version Control: Beginning our project was especially difficult as our version control, Git & GitHub, caused many errors and stopped us from coding. This led us to start far after the Hackathon had already started.
Unity: Although our group members do have coding experience, we wanted to use the Hackathon as a chance to learn something new. This resulted in our project being constructed in Unity and conjunction with C#. This however, resulted in many challenges as we begun coding as we weren’t familiar with the environment.
Physics: Although we understood how Newtonian physics could be applied to objects, interpreting the data received from our game objects throughout the creation process of our game was especially difficult. Due to our beginner experience in both C# and Unity, we didn’t know when bugs were caused by coding or mathematical errors. This resulted in many bugs that took too long to diagnose and fix, resulting in less time to continue advancing our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The brainstorming process went really well, we were able to plan out most out most of our game before coding. The original scripts worked well, but it got more complicated the more features we tried to add. Despite all the problems we learned a lot since we are all beginners in coding and we worked well together as a team despite never knowing each other beforehand.

What we learned

Many of our project members were unfamiliar both with C# and version control with Git & GitHub. Throughout the project, we learned how to use git to our advantage in order to help our workflow.

What's next for Stargazers

We have learned a lot from this hackathon we'd like to take our newfound knowledge and use it to add new features we weren't able to create during the Hackathon. Specifically, gravity and its acting force on all objects within the game.