An Unlikely Astronaut

In which Arielle finishes a game in record time only to be waylaid by illness! The game in question? Lunar Lander. What animal could possibly replace a Lunar Lander?! A Barnacle Goose gosling of course!

So, this game was done...Sept 10th, which was just 5 days after I started on it. What's the holdup for this post? The long and short of it is that I've been having serious stomach issues, and though I've been trying my best to power through it like some sort of Terminator, when nausea EVOLVES...well, it's hard to concentrate on much else. I am on the mend, so hopefully soon I will return to normal and can continue to plug away at my projects with much less interruption. But for now, without further ado, let's talk about the game clone I worked on: Lunar Lander!

Lunar Lander is actually a term for a genre of simulation games, though does eventually become the name of an actual game many years after its initial conception (by Atari, Inc. in 1979). The genre was inspired heavily by real world events, more specifically, when the Apollo Lunar Module had landed upon the Moon in 1969. The original iteration of this genre was a purely text-based game published under a multitude of names, but is likely most remembered as Lunar Lander Game, in 1969 by a high school student named Jim Storer. He created the game for the DEC's (Digital Equipment Corporation) PDP-8 minicomputer using the programming language FOCAL. After the game was translated by David H. Ahl into a programming language known as BASIC, there seemed to have been many more reiterations of the game. In 1973, DEC had created a new graphical terminal, the DEC GT40, and wanted a show piece for tradeshows, something that would show the visual capabilities of their terminal. This show piece game would be the next most notorious iteration: Moonlander, coded by Jack Burness. It is thought to have been inspired by Burness's attendance to the launch of the Apollo 17 Moon landing mission. Today, these games are often one of the first ones taught in programing, due to how many important lessons in coding can be drawn from it.

The visuals for my game/clone are heavily inspired by the way Moonlander would have looked on the DEC GT40, as the screen would have depicted the imagery in black and green. At the very least, it was the Lunar Lander game that the project was based off of, and I liked how the visuals of the template played off the history of visualizations in games and technology, so I decided that a tip of the hat was in order. I changed very little but the Lunar Lander itself...

Can you guess what animal I based it off of? No... because this is visually illegible as anything more than a bunch of pixels...but I tried.

If you COULD guess what animal the Lunar Lander was based off of...this frame illustrating "thrust" would be both very concerning and revolting.

The project called for an extremely small Lunar Lander pixel sprite, which would be piloted to land on even plateaus on the surface of the moon. We were given free rein to design the little spacecraft however we wanted...but.... How was I going to make it an animal...? What kind of animal could I even use...in place of a lunar lander...? In truth, the first animal that came to mind, got mixed up with the first one I found. That is...I thought about a couple of instances of footage seen, wherein baby birds (goslings? ducklings?) were jumping out of the nest from a large height. After a quick google search, I was led to the Wood Duck:

Just ignore the search criteria...lol...I thought it would be a gosling but pictures kept saying duck...so then that narrowed the search to baby duck...seriously that's how it happened...

That image became the inspiration for the Lunar Lander. Unfortunately, I don't think it came through in the few pixels I had to attempt to make a pattern that was unmistakably a duckling. Maybe if you squint. I was then alerted to the fact I could make the image bigger than what was originally asked for in the lesson. I decided that for testing and coding purposes, this would be acceptable for the moment. I then proceeded to work on the rest of the coding, all the while something in the back of my head kept saying "I was so sure it was a gosling of some sort...and cliffs instead of trees...". See, the Wood Duck nests in trees, so once the ducklings are strong enough, they jump out of their nests to get to their parents and future feed. I remembered the ducks, if not the species name, but my mind palace kept playing the footage I had seen at some point in my childhood. Something about rocky cliffs...Not that the Wood Ducklings were unimpressive...but the rocks made me think of the surface of the moon and vice versa. So, the creature I was thinking of couldn't be the Wood Duck, as the ducks nested in trees.

But before I tell you what I found that ended up being the real inspiration for the final sprite, let me interrupt with the various things I was busying myself with while I was trying to remember the species I first thought of:

Aren't first milestones on a project thrilling?

Above is one of the first gifs made of the game. At this point, all I really had finished coding was the gravity.

Below is a gif that was made to show the coding for the collision around the ship is working correctly. During gameplay this is invisible to the player, but this collision box is what tells the gameplay camera to change perspective and zoom in, to give better visibility of obstacles as the player maneuvers the ship.

Below was the gif created to prove proper coding for both the thrust animation and the fuel use mechanic. Now the game is almost complete!

I still really don't want to think about what the thrust animation symbolizes if it's a duck...

After finishing the coding which controlled the landing mechanic, scoring mechanic, restart function, and the various failure state messages and win messages, there was very little left to be done. I didn't want to change the look of the game, as it had grown on me while I was working on it. I knew I just wanted to redraw the Lander to look more like...What?

Then I found the species I was looking for! Turns out that the Barnacle Goose nests up on cliff faces so that various predators can't get a hold of their eggs. When the eggs hatch, the parents descend to their normal feeding grounds and wait for their goslings to join them. The goslings are safe in the nest, but if they want to eat, they are going to have to imprint on the parents and leap off the cliff. Their small, lightweight, and fluffy bodies are all that they have in defense against the rocks below, and the species does decently...if they don't die upon impact. As sad as it is, those that don't make it feed the foxes and can be a good snack for polar bears.

I know...I know... if I think of something less morbid to use for a game...well.... you'll know about it.

I then reworked the Lunar Lander sprite, giving it just a couple more square pixels space enough to make the linework more clearly display a gosling. I didn't stray too much from the initial pose, but what I added I think looks pretty good, or at least I'm happy with it!

The thrust animation in this version is frantic wing flaps and motion lines...much better than what we had before.... whatever that was supposed to be in conjunction with a duck...or goose.

I changed a couple of text-based things to make certain messages more thematically relevant. For example, in the original Moonlander, the win message would read "The Eagle Has Landed", but I changed "Eagle" to "Gosling". After that, I was completely done, ready to post and publish!

So that's another project all wrapped up! The next one on the docket is "Tank"...oh boy.... better start thinking on what animal can replace a tank...

I should have the game published shortly, and, of course, you can expect a link drop. You may also see one or two other unexpected things popping up on the blog, as there is the tail end of a lesson I've been putting off until I had some more games and such to work with. I may turn this post into a video for one exercise, and maybe a game trailer of some sort of one or all of my games for another exercise...and I'm not sure but maybe even a stream or something in the future. I may also have times where I upload with random artwork. So, look out for those things in the near future!