Our Hackathon Journey - lkstanwyck/SpaceApps2021 GitHub Wiki

Our hackthon journey started at a rugby game--at least that's we decided to team up off the field. We both love space and board games, so when we were looking through the different challenges and saw "Space Quest: The Game", we knew what we were doing the next weekend.

When the hackthathon started we knew we wanted our game to impact a wide audience (we decided on middle school and older), have a relatively small time investment (we estimate about 10 minutes to learn and 45 minutes to play), be highly educational (all our cards have real facts about technology, past or future missions, or space research), and most of all to be fun! We started by pulling out all of our board games for inspiration. These are a few that helped us out: Lift Off, Pandemic, Terraforming Mars, Horrified, Cytosis, and Ticket to Ride. It was quite a mess. We thought about what type of experience we wanted players to have. Should players compete or cooperate? Was it going to be a card game? A tile placing game? An adventure game? We decided on a mix of elements, with, of course, a focus on education. We chose to work on GitHub because we were both familiar with it and the Wiki gave us a lot of room to describe our game.

Next came the hard part, where in space did we want to explore? There were so many fun options we couldn't just pick just one! So we didn't; we decided that we would demo with one destination, Jupiter and its moons, but plan to create more space destinations and even consider expansion packs once the base game was finished. Check out our ideas for the future in the Wiki.

After deciding to have multiple destinations, we had to fit that into gameplay somehow. We didn't want to make a game simply about the difficulties of launching rockets, our focus was the research. We designed missions that were detailed and specific to the destination, as well as a few basic mission cards to play with all destinations. We decided to have an Earth actions phase, space events, and a Destination actions phase. We included resource cubes so the players had a reason to go to each location involved in planning, running, and completing a mission. We also wanted to emphasize science communication, so we include an alternate scoring system associated with outreach and education activities. Since we wanted multiple destinations, we had to make that area of the board generic to have space for the different components associated with each different destination. Now that we had an idea of what we wanted things to look like, we needed to start actually creating it all.

We started with paper, notecards and components stolen from our other board games to draft a physical board and move pieces around to determine the flow. Once we had worked out the set up, cards we needed, and other logistics, it was time to start designing the our different components. As you can see in our Wiki site and demo videos, we had many components to draft: the overall board, the Jupiter destination senario, Mission Cards, Space Event Cards, Research Items, Media Cards, and the Rule Book. After checking in with our local mentor on Saturday, we realized that we'd need to draft our components digitally. Having digital components allowed us to showcase the image data sets we were using, and made it easy to write up all the facts on our cards.

Drafting these components was exhausting but also fascinating! We learned so much reading about data sets from past missions and plans for future missions. We learned about how to drill for rock samples on Mars and ice samples on Europa. We learned about lidar--that was Lynn's favorite. Claudia's favorite was learning that tropical storm clouds can be miles high, when researching Jupiter's Great Red Spot. We learned about the Galieo missions, planetary protection, space trash and more! There was a lot to learn, synthesize and add to cards but we loved it! And that's all just the demo cards, there are tons more to make.

We had another check-in with our local mentor scheduled for 6pm Sunday, which helped us plan out the day. We decided to have our 30 second demo video prepared by that meeting to get feedback on it. We had no idea how hard it would be to explain 2 days of work in 30 seconds, but we did it! We were thankful for the extra time we blocked out to work on it. While making the 30 second video, we realized just how little information can be portrayed in that amount of time. So we promptly decided we needed to do second demo video to explain everything we wanted to say in the 30 seconds, but could not. Since we invested time in learning a video editing software, we decided to do a third video. This video would play through game structure on the board. We cleaned up the physical components with a second draft of cards and the board. Finally, we returned here, to the GitHub, to compile everything together so that you could explore our starmazing board game! Thanks for a great hackathon!

Thanks to our local lead, Fig O'Reilly, for her guidance and for answering all our questions. Thank you also to the subject matter experts, especially Henry Throop and Delia Santiago-Materese, for helping guide us to data sets and content to support our game!