Stellar Steward

Helping "Humans" one observation at a time

Comment

Inspiration

Have you ever wanted to help scientists study our world in a fun and entertaining game? Well, now you can! Introducing Stellar Steward, the game that takes your photos of nature and shares them with real scientists across the world!!

What it does

Stellar Steward is a game in which the user plays as an alien sent on a mission to observe and collect data highly sought after by the human scientists of the world. The goal of this data collect is to assist scientists in forming trends of local species and identifying the rate of invasive species coming into the area. With cute little quests and rewards to go along with it, you're making the world a better place one observation at a time. The best part is, this data is real and is going to a real scientific community for future research!

How we built it

Stellar Steward was built using JavaScript, HTML, CSS, VueJS, TailwindCSS, and data from the INaturalist API.

Challenges we ran into.

One big issue was GitHub's servers would not let us verify our accounts. We would try to log in and 4-5 hours later we would receive the verification code that had long since expired. Two of us ended up creating a new GitHub account.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that we have a functional game. One aspect that we are particularly proud of is the use of INaturalist user data as part of our game. We are so happy that we ended this hackathon with a fully functioning prototype!

What we learned

Brooke learned how to create sprites for the first time and design digital art on a scale larger than she's ever done before.

Lucas was challenged to optimize audio production using limited resources.

Katie learned game theory and grew more experienced with Vuejs.

Levi learned how to create art assets for a video game and work on a team of designers.

What's next for Stellar Steward

Stellar Steward is so much more than what we've accomplished here in 36 hours. To list just a few future improvements:

  1. Island expansion. With quest rewards, you would be able to excavate and spread out your island over time. Eventually, you could have a garden the size of central park full of all your unique observations!
  2. Leader Board/Online Community. The only thing better than a video game is a video game with player-to-player interactions. The bulletin board already has the slots capable of routing to live data in the form of a leader board sheet and a world map of your observations. The feeling of progress would become much more apparent with this addition.
  3. And, of course, more sprites, textures, and animation! Making a game that wouldn't even qualify as being in an alpha stage is fun, but the final product would look like a whole new game if we had multiple years and a healthy dose of sanity.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates