Nebula Navigators

Inspiration

What it does

Inspiration

The Intergalactic theme of the AuburnHacks 2024 competition led us to want to create a space based sandbox game where the player can explore the unique features of the planets around them and manage a finite amount of resources such as food, water, oxygen and fuel.

What it does

Nebula Navigators is a two-dimensional space exploration game with realistic rocket movement and planetary physics.

How we built it

We used the python library pygame as a base for level generation and player movement and expanded on it in the appropriate areas. For instance, we wanted to create multiple layers such that the space backdrop appeared to move slower than the planets in rocket who move faster because they are closer. This led us to decide to tie user input to accelerating the movement of the background and locking the rocket to the center of the screen rather than dealing with where the rocket would appear in relation to the border of the window.

Challenges we ran into

Since the background, planets and rocket appeared on difference layers and we had originally had the rocket moving on a screen position basis rather than a game position basis, it was definitely very difficult to merge the different coordinate systems in the end to match up collisions with planets and other thinks like the accuracy of control of the rocket.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the progress we were able to make as a team and how much we have improved and learned not only in the python language itself, but as overall programmers. None of us have tackled a project of quite this scale so we are very proud of how well we worked as a team.

What we learned

Our team, having not been previously very skilled at python learned a ton of python itself but also we learned about the sheer amount of work that goes into making a game. The bulk of our time went into making the rocket and planets accurately react with each other which is not at all what we expected to be stuck on from the beginning