SpaceWrecked

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  3rd person view of the spaceship travelling between planets

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  Sketch of the in-game Programming Challenge

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  The view welcoming the space-farer when they land on an unknown planet

Inspiration:

We wanted to develop a game that could inspire and get school children interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) via virtual reality.

We set out to develop a prototype for this game with the following objectives in mind:

• Make the experience educational: SpaceWrecked revolved around problem solving in the area of STEM
• Transform the perception of space science: friendly, not hostile
• Demonstrate the value of STEM skills

What it does:

SpaceWrecked is a game based on STEM-related problem solving.

As a member of the Space Exploration Corp., it is your mission to travel to different solar systems for trade, mapping and defence.

On your latest mission to a distant and foreign solar system, you have damaged your navigation system and had to vent the fuel and jettison your cargo. You thus only have enough fuel to manoeuvre inside this solar system.

Luckily, there are native sentient civilisations in the system and you can try to trade for the materials to repair and fuel our spaceship to get home.

But what have you got to trade?! "You still remember those classes back at the Academy, right?"

Using the scientific and engineering knowledge that you've gained at the Academy, you hop between planets and assist sentients in the process with solving problems. They reward you in form of fuel and resources required to operate your navigation system.

Your knowledge is your currency and it's the only way to get home...

How we built it:

SpaceWrecked was hastily built in the 24 hours over the course of the SpaceHack Hackathon. It is a very early prototype that utilises existing Unity assets. Additional elements of the gameplay were developed by us.

Challenges we ran into:

Prior to SpaceHack, no member of the team has had much experience with game development in Unity. SpaceWrecked was a combined effort and was fully developed over the course of the 24 hours. The greatest challenge was getting accustomed to the Unity environment. Significant effort was spent on developing the gameplay and optimising the game flow.

Accomplishments that we are proud of:

We are proud to have come up with a unique gameplay and ideated a universe to support it.

What we learned

SpaceWrecked was an excellent introduction to the Unity environment for the whole team.

What's next for SpaceWrecked:

In the future revisions of SpaceWrecked, we hope to:

• introduce more planets into the existing Solar System
• expand gameplay to include additional Solar Systems
• prototype the trade aspect of the game
• introduce multi-player capability

Built With

• unity