AIM - Space Challenge

Art, UI, Sound & Music

A game for the European Space Agency

At MediaLAB Amsterdam, now Digital Society School, I worked on a project for the European Space Agency (ESA). This resulted in a game for mobile phones, available on Android and iOS.

Result

A mobile game for ESA. This mobile game is about the Asteroid Impact Mission, a mission where research will be done regarding the binary asteroid Didymos. You can read more about this mission on the ESA website.

This mobile game has been made in a team. My focus was on the User Interface and the Sound Design. I also set up the guidelines for the game art, results are visible at the Style Guide. In this team I also took the role of the team lead, which was mostly checking whether our progress was still fitting the wishes of ESA.

The game was placed on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

User Interface

The User Interface (UI) was designed by me using sketching, target group research and different kind of interviews with the ESA designers.

This main focus of the research was usability (does the user understand what each button does, what does the user expect to see, etcetera) and design (does it fit the game and does the theming match how they see and feel what outer space should look like).

The UI colours come from the ESA Corporate Identity, to make sure it stays consistent with the design language ESA uses in all their communication.

Audio

For AIM - Space Challenge I also worked on audio, both music and sound effects. The music has an outer space feel, sometimes relaxing yet also exciting.

For the "Overworld" music I chose an 8 minute loop, where the repetition isn't really noticable. The players spend most of their time here, so it shouldn't be annoying.

The mini game music "Rocks" also has a loop, because this game continues until the player messes up. This is different from the other mini games, they have a time limit.

All music for this game can be listened to in the SoundCloud player.