AIM – Space Challenge is born!
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 🙂
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.
Research Poster
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.
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!