Several of our members are engineers who, growing up, always had a passion for space. However, we didn't find many fun and educational games to fill our space need! Therefore, we tried to create a game that our childhood selves would love and appreciate as space enthusiasts.
What it does
LUNACY serves as a fun gaming platform to teach children about space. While playing as Ray, kids will be prompted with space trivia to test their knowledge of our galaxy! As they continue to travel our universe, they will encounter space phenomena and challenges which they must over come, as they continue to learn about the wonders of our infinite space.
How we built it
We used Python's Pygame library for computer graphics, rendering and physical properties for the game mechanics.
Challenges we ran into
The initial concept of the game was to utilize gravitational concepts to allow the user to swing from asteroid to asteroid to traverse the galaxy. However, we ran into challenges with getting the physical concepts to translate onto python. Therefore, we decided to simplify the game to simply be a platformer, where Ray jumps from platform to platform to get across the galaxy.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our UI. We tried to make the game as simple and interactive as possible to make gameplay easy to learn for all ages.
What we learned
Nobody had experience with Pygame prior to this hackathon. We spent the last 24 hours learning this new library and implementing it to create an interactive educational game.
What's next for LUNACY
We would like to expand development on this project to create levels with increasing difficulty that take into account further space phenomena. For example, we would like to add black holes, where Ray will have to avoid their gravitational pull. Additionally, we would like to add a level where Ray has to avoid over heating from the sun by collecting pockets of water vapor to cool down across space.