StarQuest

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  Green stars have been discovered, blue ones haven't. Can you find some stars?

Inspiration

First, we just wanted to make a fun game about the night sky. The Galaxy Zoo gave us an idea.

The Galaxy Zoo is a project that calls on volunteers to classify galaxies by hand to provide training datasets for researchers to develop models from. Classifying objects in the night sky is integral to astronomy, and hand-labeling training datasets is a time-intensive process. The project, while valuable, relies heavily on the generosity of its volunteers.

Enter StarQuest: a blockchain-supported game that gives users NFTs for the astronomical objects they discover. If you find a star, you own its newly minted NFT on the Solana blockchain. This provides an incentive for users to lend their time to labeling datasets and will hopefully increase the strength of astronomical datasets and models.

How we built it

We used Godot as our game engine. Our basic game functionality, which involves being able to move the rocket toward possible stars, was build on Godot.

Solana was used to mint NFTs for each star discovered by the user. We used QuickNode as our blockchain infrastructure platform to create our endpoint.

Challenges we ran into and accomplishments

Learning how to use Solana was a steep learning curve. We started experimenting with Unity before switching to Godot, which we preferred for its infrastructure for 2D games (helpful for discovering stars in a 2D image). After several hours of hard work, we were to add Solana functionality to our project.

Godot uses GDScript, a coding language based on Python and built for Godot's specific functionalities. Learning a new software under a time constraint was difficult, especially since no one on our team had prior game dev knowledge. Through YouTube tutorials, documentation, and a little bit of trial and error, we made a successful user interface for our game.

What's next for StarQuest

We hope to improve our user interface by adding a few bells and whistles (for example, making the rocket rotate in the direction it moves). We want to connect the frontend and backend so the action of finding a star triggers our Solana script. We also want to give the user the ability to flag areas they think they have found a new space object. Finally, we want to connect the game to a database, so user-discovered, astronomer-verified space objects can be logged into datasets for public research.

Built With

• gdscript
• godot
• quicknode
• solana