Low Earth Orbit

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/
An image of the game in dark mode
An image of the game with a real globe

Inspiration

There are 1.2 million pieces of space debris that are so small that we can't track them. This past year, the world launched 37x as much objects into space than in 2010. Even a single collision between two objects in orbit can scatter into thousands of bits of debris, creating a cascade that will ground humanity for decades to thousands of years. Our friends sometimes play "Overcrowded." on Roblox. It is a game that is fun to play and we wanted to redirect their attention to an important issue with the goal of raising awareness and inspiring a cascade of action.

What it does

Our game is a simplified simulator of the challenge of managing satellite trajectories. You speed up and slow down satellites so they don’t collide. The longer you survive, the more cash you earn for abilities that clean up debris. But you must watch the Kessler meter. It shows how close you are to Kessler syndrome: the point where there’s so much debris that crashes keep causing more crashes on their own. Every crash adds debris, and at 1,000 pieces the meter hits 100% and you lose.

How we built it

We built it using p5.js, javascript, and Github to coordinate changes across two people.

Challenges we ran into

We had the challenges with calibrating the difficulty of the game, where depending on the settings, we would either always win or always loose no matter how skillfully we played. We've fixed it by playing it many times and tuning the frequency of rocket launches and collision probability.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to make a fun and addictive game that simultaneously raises awareness of an issue that is important to us.

What we learned

We learned how to merge using Github, one of us learned how to use mapbox, and the other learned some p5.js.

What's next for Low Earth Orbit

In the future, we want to expand end game options to allow people to play for longer and include even more educational content. As our graphics demands increases, we may want to migrate to a GPU-accelerated framework for web rendering.