Free Space

Celestial Space Ship
Black Hole Celestial (Dynamo)
Sun Celestial Body
Floating Island Celestial Body
Broken Planet Celestial Body
Gameplay screenshot

Inspiration

Being fans of racing we were interested in making a racing game and with the path for celestial theme we wanted to combine the two which led to us creating a space racing game. However due to time costraint we decided to pivot towards a game that we can chill in and was fun to explore.

What it does

It is a randomly generated galaxy where the player controls a space ship with 3 different thrusters that we built a custom controller with 3 slide potentiometers to control (WAD works too). You are able to explore the galaxy until you crash your ship.

How we built it

We developed the game with the Godot game engine using GD-Script. We drew sketches of all of the art for the game with a drawing tablet then traced the sketches to create vector drawings to make scalability easier. For the controller, we used an STM32 Blue Pill microcontroller to make an HID-compatible device. We then wired the STM32 to three slide potentiometers and used Onshape and a 3D printer to design and print a custom enclosure for the controller.

Challenges we ran into

When brainstorming and starting our initial development of the project, we attempted to use the location of the current solar system for our map generation. However, due the vast size of space, this idea became infeasible. Distances were irregular and scaling them down would ruin the game. So, we opted for procedural generation that created a really fun experience. When developing the gravitational pull of the celestial bodies on the player, it presented us with many technical issues such as balancing the gravitational pull of each celestial body. For instance, we had to balance the "Dynamo" Celestial around 5 times from his hitbox to his gravitational pull to make the user experience enjoyable.