What's YOUR flight path?

This is probably the last devlog before I ship this project. I finished the last minigame today, which is about Flight Surgeons. The user has to compare pre-spaceflight and post-spaceflight reports of an astronaut and determine if ALL of their health levels are normal or not.

Since the previous devlog, I’ve done quite a lot.

1. I debugged and rewired the game flow to include my info screens about the different aerospace field jobs. One issue I had with this was using the wrong name while coding (ex. using screen instead of scene or vice versa).
2. I coded the 3rd Minigame. It’s based on the career of Space Journalism, and essentially the user has to read an article and determine its reliability based on their own notes based on direct sources.
3. I coded the 4th Minigame. It’s based on the career of Astronomy, and the user has to click the 8 main stars of the constellation Orion within 6 seconds to not lose a life. A problem I faced with coding this game was that I didn’t connect the signals to the right nodes, so clicking the stars didn’t do anything.

A lot of this time was spent debugging, not actually working lol.

Up to this point, I’ve completed a lot since the previous devlog.

I completed the second minigame, which was a clicker game. The user needs to click 4 exoplanets in a certain amount of time to win the game.

I also decided that I would lean into the educational aspect of the project (the whole point of making it space themed) and start creating information scenes that the user should read before each game. The first minigame (see previous devlog)’s information scene is all about being a planetary scientist, and the second minigame is about being an exoplanet researcher. The information scenes outline the mission objective (how to win the game; I noticed when rating in Stardance that many of the games didn’t explain what was going on so I found myself highly confused and wanted to fix that in my own game). Importantly, the scene includes a brief overview of each career that each minigame is meant to highlight.

My next steps will be to attach a signal to the “got it” button, fix the flow in the code to include the information scene, and code more minigames.

Here’s what I’ve completed today!

I created my first minigame, which involves a character (which I designed using squares on Canva) who jumps onto platforms to collect Saturns within a specific time frame.

A challenge I faced was getting the Saturns to send out and receive signals correctly. I also had trouble with animating the Saturns to float, but it worked once I restarted that segment.

I’ve actually worked on this for over 2 hours, but I forgot to refresh GoDot so it never even tracked my time…. I actually almost cried but it’s ok, life goes on I guess.

Anyways, today I created the first scene that users will see when the game opens.

I want this game to be a way for students to learn about unconventional careers in aerospace so they can learn where they can thrive with their specific interests and skills (ex. aerospace x biology -> research space medicine/astrobiology, flight surgeon, etc.)

I also created three buttons on the Start Menu today: START, SETTINGS, and QUIT, and I coded the functionality behind each one (tomorrow I need to create the scene for all of these (besides the quit button because that just quits the game) buttons to open)

On the beginning scene I designed a black background with stars everywhere, a text box saying “Created by Sandhana Rajesh” and my student initiative’s logo (GSAI aka the Global Student Aerospace Initiative).

This game will also serve as a way to let more people learn about my organization that I’ve founded and let them get involved to learn more about aerospace careers and space in general by becoming general members.