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Space Challenge

Team

Tarun Bhandari tarun_b@nid.edu
Lisa Greuter lm.greuter@gmail.com
Brun van der Horst brun@brunvanderhorst.nl

Commissioner: European Space Agency

Description

How can understanding and engagement be increased in broad audiences in the processes involved in space missions? Together with ESA we are designing a playful method to create awareness about the challenges that a space mission encounters.

AIM – Space Challenge is born!

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Good morning Spacelovers,

We are beyond happy to announce that our mobile tycoon game AIM – Space Challenge (on what we have been working on for five months) is there! These past few weeks were insane. There was so much work to do from sprint 5 to sprint 6. But luckily we made it!

Let me fill you in with the things that happened this sprint…
The most important thing was the implementation of all the graphics, UI and copy to make the game “complete”. We held a Game Jam a few weeks ago, where we kept working till ten o’clock in the evening and ate pizzas on the side 🙂

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One other thing that needed to be done was the intro video (the player gets to see when starting the game for the first time). The video tells the story and objective of the game, it shows the problem and is a brief introduction about the AIM mission. Tarun and I asked a really cool (British) teacher of mine to do the narration for the video. He did an amazing job and we had a lot of fun recording it. Yuna made the awesome visuals for the video, Brûn provided the video with music and Tarun edited all bits and pieces together.

You can watch the video over here:

While Michel was working on fixing the game (which he did great btw.) Brûn was busy with making cool music and sound effects for the game. This sprint his title was: the Audioman. I was mainly working on the copywriting for the game. Tarun was doing balancing. This is about the pointing system in the game. When the player accomplishes a Quest, how many Coins or Research Points does he or she gets? It’s extremely important to think this through. Yuna on the other hand, was finishing up all the buildings, which look stunning, right?

Apart from all the things for the game, we also had to make a Research Poster, write a Research Paper and create a (teaser) video about our end product. The poster and video were being presented at the Final Presentations on the 22nd of June, here at the MediaLAB. This was a really cool day where friends, family and work relations were invited to see all the MediaLAB projects. All the teams had their own Exhibition booth. Our booth was provided with iPads and iPhones on which people could play the test version of the game.

You can read the Research Paper over here.

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Research Poster

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Us on stage during the Final Presentations 🙂

Today is our last day here at the MediaLAB. I think I can speak for all of us and say that it has been an amazing experience. It wasn’t always easy though, to be honest. But we didn’t give up, we sticked together and developed a really cool product. I still can’t believe that we actually made a game. Who else can say that?

Last Tuesday was our final meeting with Linda and Paolo from ESA. We showed them the game and talked about our further involvement in the project. So that’s that. Today is Asteroid Day! ESA was preparing for this day for months. They posted an article on their website, they write things on their Social Media channels and our game will be presented at the ESTEC.

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And that’s basically it. If you are pretty curious about the game (which I can imagine ;-)) you should visit the App Store or Google Play right now. Download the AIM – Space Challenge game now, start building your own Space Centre and collect research about asteroids by playing mini-games. Become the hero of the future and the example of today.

On behalf of the whole ESA Space Challenge team (Brûn, Yuna, Tarun, Michel and (me) Lisa) I would like to thank the MediaLAB: Gijs, Pavel and Tamara, our coach. Special thanks to our contacts from ESA: Linda and Paolo and the other people from ESA who were involved in the project. A big thank you to Charlie Mulholland and your voice and awesome personality. Thanks to all the experts who participated in the translate sessions. Thank you for the feedback you gave us. It was really helpful.

And of course, thank YOU dear reader. I hope you liked reading about our process and that we made you enthusiastic about our game. If you are, please spread the word! Make AIM great and us proud 🙂

We will drink some beers now.

Have a good one,

Cheers!

 

Getting there…

Hey! 🙂

Here’s a new post from us. Let’s talk about what we did this sprint – the fifth one, which means: only one sprint left! The most important things for this sprint were the decision-making in both story and art. Also the framework and GDD (Game Design Document) are improving and the UI gets more and more shaped as well.

But let’s start from the beginning. One remarkable fact is that the mini-games has returned. (I know, a bit shocking right?) But let me explain why. At first, we thought that the mini-games were not the best fit, because of the ‘humoristic’ tone of voice and the users didn’t understand the actual goal and importance of the AIM mission. But after a few talks with ESA, we realized that throwing away the mini-games concept that instantly could be a pity because it definitely has some potential.

Our contacts from ESA thought that the tycoon game itself was not enough to tell the whole story about AIM and that there was too much focus on building your space centre. By implementing mini-games you can let the player experience the breakdown of the AIM mission. From building the satellite to researching the asteroids in space and using the laser communication.

This doesn’t mean that the tycoon game is out of the picture though. We’re still going for the tycoon game but with a few mini-games added. Also the whole idea of building your space centre stays in place.

 

Testing the Art Style

Brûn and Yuna tested the art style of the game this sprint. They made four digital prototypes of the four different art styles. After that, the participants gave feedback through an online survey. They also did a small test in person. This test was basically showing the four art styles on a A3 paper and let the people pick their favourite. This was to confirm the assumptions they had. The test results are included in a research document.

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#AIM 1

#AIM 2

#AIM 2

#AIM 3

#AIM 3

#AIM 4

#AIM 4

 

…and the winner is: #AIM 3 !!

 

Testing the Story

I tested the storyboards (from the previous blog post) with the target group. I used an online survey and I tested in person too. The results were conducted in an infographic, which you can see over here.

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..and the winner is: HUMANS : 2nd Story !!

 

Now let’s show some buildings Yuna made this sprint. They look awesome, don’t they?!

 

Buildings

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UI (user interface)

And finally the UI. Brûn was working on this a lot this sprint. And if you ask me, this looks great as well. Oh, and not that you guys think Tarun and Michel didn’t do any things, they worked really hard too! 😉  Michel worked on implementing everything in the game (framework) and Tarun was busy with balancing. Balancing is about the progression of the player in the game, with other words the scoring system. Let’s have a look at the UI:

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Alright, these were the most important things for this sprint. Next sprint won’t be that different. We’ll be working really hard on finishing the game on time.

Hope you liked this post.
See you in a couple of weeks!

Ciao!

 

“Shaping” the Product

Hello guys,

So, we’re half way through. How time flies! (Wait, that’s an other team, sorry) But seriously, we’re not there yet. Let me fill you in with what we did this sprint (the fourth sprint).

Let me first say that it feels like we did do less than previous sprints. This could be right, when you think about it, we didn’t have many days as usual cause of all the National holidays (which are also nice, don’t get me wrong ;-)) Okay, let’s go!

Like any other sprint, this sprint the framework was still in development. Michel worked really hard on this and the game gets more and more “shaped” (ha, there’s that word again!) which is good 🙂

Also the art style has been improving a lot. Brûn and Yuna have been working on defining the graphical elements like buildings and the overall UI (user interface). Soon they’re going to test the art style with the target group and see if they like it. But this probably will be happening within the next sprint.

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ESA SPACE CHALLENGE Pitch 04.001

As if for me and Tarun: we’ve been working together on the script for the game. So, the amount of levels, quests, tasks, flow etc. First, I finalized the story concepts and showed them to ESA. After that Tarun and I made a couple of documents like the script for the tutorial, the cut-scene (video before the game starts) and the MoSCoW diagram, which is a table document with “Must haves”, “Should haves” and “Could haves” for the game.

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Storyboard 1st concept

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Storyboard 2nd concept

 

In order to test the stories with the target group I made an online survey where people could fill in their preference for one particular story. Next sprint I will be testing the stories again but then in person, instead of online.

Okay almost there! Are you still awake?
Last but not least; we made a document with all the key information that’s important in case of our project. Think of a clear problem statement, the target group, ESA’s goal, our goal and a few limitations and needs when it comes to the product we’ll be delivering. This document is also pretty valuable for our own personal theses.

And that’s pretty much it.
Thanks again for reading and see you next sprint!

Cheers

 

Big Step ahead to the Space Challenge

 

Big Change  😮 (Uh,oh…) → 😀 (Yay)

Spring has come already!

Leading you straight to the news, we made a big change on our game. Last 3 weeks (the 3rd Sprint) was about finding a better/best solution (genre) for the game and researching on other mediums as a suggestion, to promote our game the best way.

When it comes to game, beforehand, we were going for ‘mini-game’ as the main structure of our game, since our research was focused on playful and fast/short-pace game to encourage our target user play the game as much as possible. However, it turned out that it was not the best solution to create ‘long-term’ engagement to the space mission.

 

Tycoon game

A ‘tycoon’ is one of the game genres, which is the best viable option for our client ESA because it triggers the long-term engagement we seek, it can incorporate a story and/or quests and the player is being rewarded for coming back. Thus, our game goes, as the player establishes a space centre to perform a series of missions in order to lead the space centre to perform the AIM mission.

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Other mediums

We’ve looked into other mediums to deliver our game with the best way. For example, screen media such as film, animation and exhibition.

 

–Film & Animation

Researching on film and animation, we found out that ESA has a lot of experience with creating informative but beautiful (and also sometimes) fun videos to watch. They have a YouTube channel which we used as a source. A pretty successful example are the Short Videos about the Rosetta mission. We could manage to make this as well for AIM. What all the videos had in common was that they trigger emotion, give valuable but yet understandable information and they have beautiful graphics. We made a distinction between live-action and animation videos and designed them both on a mood board (see image). An important conclusion is that a film is not a replacement of the game (which we still see as our main medium) but a proper secondary medium as a marketing tool.

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–Exhibition

The advantage of an exhibition as a medium is first-hand experience. It gives you more immersive, and engaging experience than looking at the screen since you walk around in the (surrounding/enclosing) space yourself. To create more playful/ engaging experience, we developed a prototype of interactive-exhibition with game on mobile.

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Meeting with ESA

We were excited to let ESA know about our plan and suggestions. It was nice that they liked our new idea and we adjusted/moderated our understands on specific target group. We agreed on our main focus is the game, and we have to make a trailer of the game so we could drag attention of the public (before actual launch of the game). Now we have a much more clear direction on our project, we look forward to the fourth sprint, which will start next week.

 

Creative Session at ESA

Creative session (brainstorming / writing session) is a design method to get ideas from outside of the team who has different backgrounds. Engineers and Scientists from AIM team took part in the session, and we gained very creative and inspiring ideas.

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Next Sprint Plan

Now we got a clear idea of game and direction of our project, we are going to get started on developing actual assets of the game. (Framework, Story, Graphics, Game Design Document) We will develop prototypes and test them with our target group, so we can get closer to our goal. I’ll keep you posted within our next sprint!

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All about Research

Hi there! It has been 20 days since our last post, but finally, here’s an update on how things go. So, we just finished the second sprint which was (the title might tell) all about doing research. Tarun was doing research on Game Mechanics, Brûn on User Interface a.k.a UI, Yuna did research on Graphics, Michel on Game Engines (programmes to build a game with) and I did research on different types of Storytelling.

Next to these five components we did also research on how ESA works, what they do for the earth (Space for Earth) and the actual space mission AIM. With all the gathered information we made several mind maps and infographics to have a clear overview of the research.

In the first sprint we created a few paper prototypes of the mini games we have in mind. During this sprint we actually tested them with participants. Brûn and Michel were taking care of this. They recorded all the tests and collected the data which consists of interesting reactions, opinions and insights on our game.

Also, Michel made a basic framework for the game. You can see a framework as a skelleton, where we’re going to build the game upon. Having a good framework is very important for Games Designers and Developers. Our main job right now is to fill up this framework with graphics, mechanics and UI.

Next to building games, something that simply can’t lack when it comes to Game Development is a Game Design Document a.k.a. GDD. A GDD is basically the bible of a game. It’s a document which contains the whole game play, each and every single level, being described in one book. Tarun has experience with writing GDD’s for his study, so he did ours last sprint. Of course not the entire document, since we’re not that far in the project yet, but you can’t get started soon enough right?

These things combined form our sprint goal, which we’ve reached this time, so that’s great! Yesterday, we had our Sprint Review session with ESA. Again they were very satisfied with the results and they are looking forward to our next meeting, which will be in three weeks.

So, thats’s it! I hope you got a clear idea of what we did this sprint and keep continuing on following us within our next sprint. See you then!

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ESA coming here

Yesterday was an exciting day. Our contacts from ESA (Paolo (Engineer of the AIM mission) and Linda (Communication manager)) came to the MediaLAB to look at the things we made during our first sprint. We held a presentation and showed them the paper prototypes (which they also tested). Paolo and Linda were pretty amazed by what we did in those first three weeks. They thought it looked great and gave us lots of positive feedback. This gives us extra motivation to continue our process this way.

So the first sprint is finished. Next Monday starts the second one, where we have to formulate a new sprint goal and make moves on what we want (and going) to do. We’re all really looking forward to this. Soon we’ll give you an update on how things go, so keep following us 🙂

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Paper Prototyping

Good to see you’re still here! We haven’t been posting much new things on the blog since we were quite busy with developing our ideas for the game. This went really well. After the ideation phase, we made certain levels of the mini games we want to implement in the game, in paper form. This is called paper prototyping.

Next week we are about to test the paper prototypes with participants falling in our target group. We’re very curious on how people will react on the mini games and if they get the game mechanics. Here are some photos of the paper prototypes:

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Visiting ESA

In the early morning of Thursday 11 February, we went to Noordwijk to meet our partner and client ESA. First, we had a meeting with people who are featured in the AIM-project. We showed our user scene video, the prototype we made in the tinkering workshop and we were able to ask questions about the project. This meeting was very useful and it felt great that the people from ESA were so enthusiastic and confident about our working agreement. After the meeting we got a tour through the building and other areas of the ESTEC. It was so inspiring and fascinating, we all enjoyed this day very much! Take a look at the photos we made during the day.

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Wave that flag

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Tada! Here’s our team flag. It represents all five of us and where we were born. Yuna = Seoul, South Korea, Brun = Delft, Tarun = India, Lisa = Purmerend and Michel = Lelystad. We looked at our country/city flags and took some colours and symbols out of them. All these things combined visualises a satellite. Do you see it?

 

Hit the asteroid!

Tuesday 9 February, we had a tinkering workshop. Tinkering is a nice way of prototyping with many different tools. We worked with littleBits, this platform consists electronic modules that snap together with magnets. We created a prototype which represents our project: the space challenge. The idea is that you try to hit the Didymoon asteroid which is twirling around Didymos. You can make this process as hard or easy as you want, depending on the speed level. It is a fun way of gaming and tells the story of the AIM-project.


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