Geoscape

Inspiration

We were inspired to make geoscape by other popular web games such as Wordle and Geoguesser. We really liked these games as due to their simple and addictive format they made learning feel like a game.

What it does

Upon opening Geoscape the user will be given a world map and given a hint about what country they need to select. With each failed guess an additional hint is given up to 5 hints/guesses where if the user has not guess correctly then will be shown the correct answer. With a successful guess the user will be congratulated and prompted to continue. We designed this as a fun, addictive way to learn more about the world.

How we built it

Geoscape is built through Unity and ran on webgl. To start we created a world map with each country being its own object. Each country has a name, a latitude and longitude, and 5 facts hinting to the country. All of the data for each country was stored in a text document that a script read from and created a list of countries on the document. Then the project was exported as a webGL file and added to the website.

Challenges we ran into

One of our major challenges was figuring out how to host our website. We originally planned on using Domain.com but we couldn't figure out how to host there. From here we decided to move over to using firebase to host and (hopefully) host to our Domain.com domain geoscape.tech. Unfortunately we couldn't figure out how to verify ownership of geoscape.tech on firebase so we have been unable to use our domain. Additionally gathering unique data for our hints was more time consuming than expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Created the ability for our project to read country data from a .txt file allowing for the easy addition of countries and updating our data on our current countries. Currently we have data for over 50 countries! Additionally simply running the game on the web was not something we were sure we'd be able to do as none of us have had any previous experience with web development.

What we learned

One of the biggest things was that we should have planned/slowed down. There were several times we rushed into doing something that was either not useful to us in the end or something we could have done much more efficiently had we taken more time to plan.

What's next for Geoscape

One of our planned features was to include an indicator on how geographically close a guess was to the correct answer. Due to time constraints we were not able to add this but it would be something we would still like to add. Additionally adding functionality for more countries would also be a goal. Finally adding a zoom feature to allow for easier access to smaller countries would be essential as well as generally improving the user experience.