Intro: (slightly over the top :-)

Humanity has the incredible mission to detach itself from this cosy Earth and start fearlessly endeavouring the final frontier and thoroughly investigate real deep space. To engage in this immense journey you have to make the first important but at the same time insignificant steps to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
To realize the potentially infinite rewards you will start mining a few relatively small celestial bodies consisting of some metals, rocks and polluted ice. Some pionering companies have come with the unimaginable profits which could be YOURS if you would be brave enough to start your life time adventure. We have produced a game to capture the attention of the generation which will be the first to take this step not only to knowledge unknown to all former human beings but also to richness unseen by the totality of the human race of the past centuries.

Goal of the game

This game provides an easy way to get familiar with some properties of our solar system which are just coming within the technical possibilities - More common space voyage and harvesting other bodies in the solar system. The game visualizes the asteroid belt and gives an impression of a journey for mining.

Brief gameplay description.

The game is very easy to play and made for quick and easy entertainment. After the splash you get a short mission briefing. After the briefing the player has to choose her color and can start mining - the asteroid indicated with marker is where you start. At an asteroid you can either mine fuel (from ice) or profit (from precious metals). As you travel from asteroid to asteroid your fuel depletes and your range (indicated by the transparent circle) decreases. You travel by clicking on an asteroid or other body. You can mine these too, untill your cargo space is full. Then you have to catch the cargo ship which is in an eccentric orbit from the asteroid belt to the Earth. To get money (indicated top left) you have to reach the Earth to sell the precious metals.. In order to win you have to be the first to reach one trillion. This means a few harvesting journeys back and forth. You can play on your own here:
The multiplayer feature is added here:-multiplayer instructions, see below- Playing against a machine opponent is not implemented yet.

Driect Links to gameplay and Youtube demo movie

On this link you can play the game yourself.
On this link you can play the game with friends (multiplayer).
On this youtube movie you can see an expert play the game.

Technical Description

The game is programmed in Processing, Javascript and PHP, a server is used for the multiplayer feature.
The game will be a multiplayer game and have some AI for a machine opponent.
For the data of the asteroids the API of Asterank is used:with a filter on the highest profits - we have used the top 38 asteroids for the game.
The orbital elements of the asteroids are used to get the orbits. Site used for getting the orbital formulae.
The cargo ship is an artifical body, having an orbit with a high eccentricity, you see the speed is highest near the sun in the middle.
Without using Github (or similar) which allowed for parallel working on the files, the current state of the game would not have been possible.
Some sounds are already added to the game. Graphics should be refined and/or restyled.

Team description

-Martine Kea, media design, project management, social media content
-Jos van Egmond, concepting, github, programming, social media content
-Bart Enklaar, programming, server management
-Beam Contrechoc, concepting, programming, media design, story telling, presentation management
-Bob Zadok, sounds
-Peter van Vliet, programming guru
-Wendy Mensink, media design
-Arie van Ziel, provided some asteroid pictures

Way forward, planning the future

A multiplayer version is made working this last week after the NASA weekend. But a lot is yet to do. Diffeent sets of asteroids from the database would give another look to the playfield (eg more eccentric orbits. Gameplay could be made more realistic, eg the orbits jumping from one asterods to the other. We would like to give the design a more unifed look. We would like to integrate the start up (naming teaming) page inside the game itself. Some parts of the engine will be revised The sound will be made more specific. to name a few items on our wish list!

Thanks to the great team, NASA, ESABICNOORDWIJK!!!!
We had a great time!

PS:

Multiplayer instructions (there is not yet a checking of the insert fields)

Open the page
Click through the intro
Fill in a name (select a color, optional)
Hit Create Game
Then either you or someone else somewhere else needs to also have clicked through the intro and filled in a name and then hit join. However, the Start Single Player should work irregardless of all of that (Except that your player color is black, which is annoying)

Project Information

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