jlboyer / galaxybounce

Galaxy Bounce

An adventure through the space powered by gravity and inertia....

Galaxy Bounce is a game built with HTML canvas and CSS animation overlays to create a simple, fun experience with a covert agenda to teach the importance of relative motion to players.

The project was completed as the first major deliverable for the General Assembly Immersive Software Engineering program as way to encapsulate and reinforce the importance of Object Oriented Programming. Additionally, the use of canvas highlights the enumerable amount of calculations that are necessary every second, simply to provide the illusion of a rendered shape sitting still, let alone animated. That is, even static websites are far from static in the way we might be inclined to think of them.

Game Instructions

Just click. Players 1 and 2 alternate “bouncing” their satellites out of their current orbit (starting at home) and into orbit of other planets within the present solar system. The mission objective is to visit all of the planets and then bounce out of the solar system and onto the next.

A players’ satellite cannot return home, but can revisit planets to complete the current mission of getting to the next solar system.

If a player’s satellite misses the orbit, you loose a satellite and when you run out of satellites the other player wins.

User Stories

Indie Game Enthusiast - Interested in simple play experience (single click) and simple graphics (everything is an arc) that comes together in a minimal yet, visually rewarding way. Test- Intuitive play experience without needing instructions, no frustrating elements such as load time or glitches, quality aesthetic

School Student - Interested in play experience and making teacher happy they satisfied the requirement Test - Can they make the connection that successful targeting requires perception of relative motion, and that this can be captured in mathematics

Teacher - Interested in the students success in learning the curriculum and a game that is engaging, rewarding students for learning directly through the exercise.

Below are the initial hand sketch and in-progress render during the debugging phase of the project. It should be noted this project was conceptualized, designed and completed to MVP level within 3 days.