Alien Exploration

• 

  Opening scene

Inspiration

Originally, we wanted to create something that had a similar vibe to Stardew Valley, but with the Google Maps API incorporated into it. We knew that this would be a very difficult task to pull off within 24 hours, so we simplified it to the bare basics: using a map to collect "artifacts" from Earth, and using pixel art for the characters to reference the art style of Stardew Valley.

What it does

The basic plot of the game is that the main character's alien grandfather is fascinated with humans, and the main character decides to take a trip to Earth and bring him back some Earth artifacts. The main character does this by navigating through the map and clicking on different countries.

How I built it

First, we built the foundations of the game, such as how the character moves, and making pixel art versions of the characters. Then, after spending hours struggling to make it work, we added a map to our game that could zoom in and pan around the globe, so that when you clicked on a geographic location, it displayed the latitude, longitude, what country it was, and what town it was. Then, depending on the country that was clicked on, an image from the chosen country would be displayed. Then we coded it so that every time the played clicked on a certain country, the number of artifacts the player had went up. After that, we set up the prologue scene with the character talking to their grandfather about humans. Finally, we had to manually input the hundreds of photos of different countries that would be shown.

Challenges I ran into

We struggled with finding a way how to integrate a map feature into our project, as Google Maps is not compatible with Java (the language we are the most comfortable with). Although we eventually did find another way to get a map into our game, it was a painstaking process to get to that point. We also struggled with getting our GitHub Repositories to work together.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We're really proud of being able to figure out how to integrate a map into our project. Even if it was not the Google Maps API that we originally intended it to be, the process of finding out how to code a map into Java was a really difficult task that took an extremely long time, so we're so proud that we were able to do that.

What I learned

We learned a lot from this experience, such as figuring out how to integrate a map and using GitHub, to creating pixel art characters from scratch.

What's next for Alien Exploration

In the future, I think that we would like to add more of a story and pixelated landmarks into the game. Although we did make a pixelization program, we ended up not integrating it because we did not have enough time. We were also thinking of adding different planets that the main character could come from, and depending on the planet that the user chose in the beginning, the alien would be a different color that would match their home planet. Another thing we wanted to add was minigames that would be triggered when you clicked on an artifact spot that you would have to complete to obtain the item. We also considered having milestones for each artifact, and different artifacts based on the different regions.

Built With

• java
• processing
• unfoldingmaps