My Design Preposal

To help assist in brain storming this week, we are all trying to come up with some ideas for a design of our project. Mine are listed below:

Proposal I - Neptune Scanning Mini games:

Summary

The basic idea borrows from the XCOM and Mass Effect games (see screenshots below). The idea is to measure different details of the planet with the probe by making use of various tools. Each tool can be a minigame of sorts. The player needs to succeed in each mini game to reach a good score. Failing in the mini game could lead to less accurate readings and fuzzy data or mission failure etc. 

Concepts from other games

XCOM Look and feel concept:

Mass Effect example – probing a planet for information:

The documentation makes note of using different tools in the Payload section (more on that below). Page 5 lists a bunch of equipment that could be used on a theoretical probe – probing the atmosphere of Neptune in the section titled 1.4.1.4 Probe exploration of Neptune’s atmosphere.

A probe package would contain a main probe:

• ·         GCMS; sensors for temperature
• ·         Pressure
• ·         Acceleration
• ·         Solar radiometers
• ·         IR radiometers
• ·         Nephelometer

And at least three more mini probes

• ·         Species specific sniffers to sample different atmospheric regions
• ·         Temperature
• ·         Pressure
• ·         Acceleration sensor

We could use some artistic license here to make the actual measuring fun in terms of a collection of mini games. Each way of measuring an element of the planet would be a different mini game and the more data gathered the better overview of the planet the player gets. As the player progresses with measuring we could explain the different aspects of Neptune.

We have this information in section 1.5 Neptune Background (Page 6). For example the player uses a Temperature, Pressure or Accelerometer Sensor and we can then unlock information about Temperature on Neptune or the atmosphere there. Information about different payloads can be gathered from the Payload section (pages 44-70). There seems to be quite a few of them so there’s a lot to work with here in terms of data collection minigames!

Some areas we could use these instruments to measure for are listed on page 59, using a HiRISE camera:

Objectives:

• Locate and characterize landing sites

• Cratering

• Volcanism

• Tectonism

• Hydrogeology

• Sedimentary processes

• Statisgraphy

• Aeolian processes

• Mass wasting

• Landscape evolution

• Seasonal processes

• Climate change

• Spectrophotometry [same role as photopolarometer]

• Glacier and periglacier processes

• Polar geology

• Regolith properties

Obviously there’s a lot more data than we need to get into, but these are examples of what we could work with. Since we aren’t all experts at space we can ‘gamerfy’ things like how to measure for Landscape evolution for example.

I was playing around with this idea as I thought it would look cool on the Oculus Rift.  For example my basic rotation demo in my earlier post.

 

Proposal II - Propulsion or Orbiting:

This idea is a bit more vague as I’ve not had much time to think on it. But I have seen how fun Kerbal Space program is to play. I think we could do something along the lines of this game using Propulsion, Pathing or Orbiting. I saw some interesting concepts in a game jam once, where the player would fling a planet past bigger planets and see the effects of gravity.

With this in mind, I think it would be cool to give the player a third person view of the probe, again using Oculus, and have them adjust different inputs. Based on these inputs the probe would continue on its journey to Neptune. If the player misjudged an input the probe could end up anywhere in space. (Well anywhere in the gameworld).

There is a lot of information of path planning in the documentation I think. It’s pretty math intensive but I think we could find a fun balance. If this is to complex perhaps we could make it a smaller scope, like just the orbiting path around Neptune or the Launch of the probe from Earth into space?

Example of Kerbal Space Program – a third person view might work pretty well on Oculus rift as the camera angles won’t appear as aggressive to the player. The object they are focused on is further away from them. This is just a theory however.

Example of Kerbal Space Program – a third person view