Koala Space Program

Koala Space Program was a hackathon project that I did with a few of my friends, Stephani Diep, Ryan Tanaka, and Aditya Kumar. The idea was to simulate what life would be like on Mars, should we ever build a colony up there. However we also saw a funny video of Koalas fighting so at the heat of the moment, we decided to make it koala themed. I was in charge of developing the game logic/flow and game mechanics (building, resource generation, koala names, etc). Stephani was in charge of developing the UI, menus, creating the assets/images for the UI and menus, designing how it should look, and also helping me debug. Aditya was in charge of map creation and environmental stuff, such as setting up the ‘spacey’ texture for the skybox, the hills/mountains, and the martian weather set up so I could use it for game mechanics. Ryan was in charge of other forms of asset creation as well as animation.

We never expected our project to take off, partially because during the entire development of the game, we were having such a blast making jokes like “we are going to koala-nize Mars!” After we heard we were nominees and then top 25 semi-finalists for the people’s choice competition, we decided to start our tea campaign, which got featured on Hawaii News Now, at school for some koala-tea iced tea to fetch some votes.

After some time we learned that we finished at #7 internationally. Even though we couldn’t make it to the finals, I’m still surprised that this game we scrapped together made it this far and was able to achieve as much as we got to.

If you wanna check out the source on github: Koala Space Program

Link to news article: Koalas in Space! UH Students’ Whimsical Mars Simulation Game Tackles Real Problems

Link to our hackathon page: Koala Space Program - NASA SpaceApssChallenge 2016