The Last Outpost

Inspiration

Initially, I wanted to create an Augmented Reality Sky-map to help locate space junk, satellites, constellations, and other celestial bodies using NASA's APIs. The purpose was to educate and grow awareness about our impact in space.

While working on the project, we realized that 36 hours was not enough time for what we wanted to create. We were having fun working with Unity, and little by little, our project started to look more like a game. That's how "The Last Outpost" was born.

What it does

It puts you as the last line of defense. You are the only thing that separates the Earth and an immense meteor shower. It is in your hands to prevent thousands of meteors from hitting the Earth and erasing it from the universe. Play through raising difficulties that spawn bigger asteroids. Do you have what it takes to avoid a sixth mass extinction?

How we built it

With some imagination, lots of determination, but most definitely with our hands. We used Unity game engine and Unity's ARCore package to create an augmented game. We also used different space assets from different creators. We took past ideas from space shooters and defenders to create a simple defender game. As player gains more score, it raises the difficulty. With every difficulty, it spawns more bigger asteroids faster. More score also increases the multiplier which is applied to the score. Asteroids also have a chance of spawning in different colors that give the player a bonus. Magenta gives extra life, red more damage, green gives back health, and orange increases shooting speed.

Challenges we ran into

We originally wanted to use Echo3D but we had a hard time getting it to work because of compatibility issues with newer Unity versions and the camera feed would not show in the app. We ended up just using Unity's ARCore.

We had issues with the angle the original missile object we were using was spawning, so we ended up using a simple pill shaped object for the missile. We also had issues with physics and rotations when the missile would spawn. Another issue we faces was getting a sky box to render correctly into the scene, so after looking at different tutorials, we used a different unity camera for the skybox. We also had to increase the render distance of the camera since the asteroids were spawning farther than the render distance of the camera.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting an android build to live test our game. Thanks to Unity's cross platform building, we were able to live test our game as we developed it. Getting asteroids to augment into reality, and a score system that goes with a raising difficulty system.

What we learned

We learned a different array of things on this journey, from discovering that there are more than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris to figuring out how AR works and how to develop an app using Unity and ARCore.

What's next for The Last Outpost

The Last Outpost 2: Into The Black Hole Oblivion We want to add different game modes, missiles, difficulties, homing missiles, shields, money system that would let you put down turrets that you can upgrade to help you. A ship mode where you can control a ship instead .

Built With

• arcore
• c#
• json
• unity
• visual-studio