B3 Bachelor Complex Space Adventure

Team

  • Robert Sourmenelian
  • Richard Seidel
  • Nina Weddige
  • Jana El Mouaied El Azm
  • Nell Ehrlinger

Supervision

Martin Steinicke, Adrian Sabrowski

“It’s hard to make predictions - especially about the future.”

—Robert Storm Petersen

Further Implementations

As Robert Storm Peterson said, it’s hard to make predictions, but we’re going to try. What we do know is that there are still quite a few game ideas that we can work on in regards of Complex Zahlen. Since we only had one semester to develop the game, we focused on the parts that were most in demand and put the others on hold - at least for now.

Next features


As mentioned above, we still have some ideas, which we briefly summarize below:

Level 4️⃣:
There should be some improvements to hit the asteroids better. The functionalities have changed a bit. The player no longer enters the angle and the length, but again only a point can be set in the coordinate system. That sounds good, but the data coming from the alien is in angle and longitude. He wanted to take the calculations away from the players, but with the new system, they now have to be converted back to Cartesian coordinates.
Game idea: Longitude |z| = 16 and angle phi = 30 degrees. Later in the level, the data is supplied in Euler form, which in this case would be 16 * e^30j. What is the corresponding Cartesian coordinate or where is the asteroid?

Level 5️⃣:
What was that? It seems that another spacecraft is trying to send jamming signals. They are no longer able to send a missile. To overcome this, you must match your signal to that of the aliens.
Game idea: an animation shows your current signal and the jamming signal. You must first drag and drop it to match the curves (frequencies, amplitudes as well as periods). Later you will be guided step by step to calculate the signal, instead of drag and drop. A third component could be reading the amplitude and angle (represented by a dot) of the wave.

Level 6️⃣:
An army of alien spaceships attacks you. It seems that this planet is not inhabited. The only way to get through is to eliminate the spaceships, but the trajectory of a spaceship is much more complex than hitting a single coordinate in space. Fortunately, your alien friend is able to predict the change in direction of the spaceships. To calculate the final point where the rocket should hit the spaceship, you need to add up their coordinates/vectors (current direction and direction change).
Game idea: In the first minilevels, the idea is to visualize both vectors and then drag and drop to visually add them. Later in the game you have to calculate them (adding two complex numbers in Cartesian coordinates).

Level 7️⃣ ideas:
A point/asteroid needs to be hit, but by changing the impedance 3 sliders for resistance, capacitance and inductance add up to impedance. Still needs some creative work here.

⬆️ Who doesn’t love them….upgrades:
To make the game more enjoyable for the player, we had the idea to implement upgrades. For destroying asteroids or spaceships, reaching a new planet the player could get rewards like an alien currency. The player can then use this to buy upgrades for their ship or another alien friend, or unlock new planets.

📚 Learning is all well and good - but where’s the challenge?:
For players who have already mastered a section, you could unlock two or three star levels later. Here you then fight against time, because after all, fuel doesn’t last forever and exam and work situations often put time pressure. In the third level you could then introduce a high score board, who manages the most hits in the allotted time.

What’s your name?/ما اسمك
Among other things, we also thought about implementing German and Arabic. However, we decided to prioritize the implementation of game components. You may be asking yourself: why German? Why Arabic? Well, our games should be used at our university and at a partner university in Cairo, Egypt, where Arabic is the official language. The middle ground then was English.