Nuclear Science

Development Time: July-October 2014 (initial prototype), Jan-July 2015
Role: Programmer
Tasks: Set up some of the core systems,
Implemented menu generation and atom creation,
setup transitions between scenes, made 
sure game ran well on iPad.

Nuclear Science (working title) is a prototype the GEL Lab created in association with the National Superconducting Cyclotron Lab in order to explain the ideas behind particle acceleration in the form of an iPad game. The core of the game revolves around discovering nuclides of atoms. The player selects a stable atom, and is brought through the process of "ionizing" the atom by removing electrons, accelerating it through a magnetic tunnel, then colliding it into a stable beryllium atom, and then recombining the atom into a new nuclide. Once the nuclide is created, the player is brought back to the menu and shown what they created. The menu of this game, which lists all possible nuclides (there are, like, 4000, here's a similar chart), is core to this process. My main task was finding a way to generate the menu of nuclides based on known properties of atoms, generating 3d representations of each atom (with an accurate number of protons, neutrons, and electrons), and, importantly, making sure this giant menu actually ran on an iPad. This was an interesting and unique challenge and I really enjoyed working my way through it, and it was great when we finally had a working prototype that fulfilled all those specifications. I also worked on implementing the last two phases, where two atoms collide and explode, and you have to recombine the stray pieces, as well as making sure the transitions between phases were smooth and seamless.

Atom selected

Prototype: Single atom selected, ready to be flung off to do its duty.

Part of the Menu from the Prototype phase. Larger atoms are stable, horizontal rows are nuclides of the stable atom.

Current Menu, single atom

Slightly zoomed out

The Golden atom is the "goal" element that the player needs to navigate toward by unlocking neighboring elements. the pink and blue squares show unlocked elements.

Slightly Bigger atom

Zoomed out full table view

The earlier images are that bit in the very bottom left.

Ionization Phase

New phase added since the prototype, you have to zap away all the electrons weighing down your atom.

Phase 1

Prototype Acceleration Phase: The first phase after the menu has you guiding the selected atom through a magnetic field, building up speed before you get to collide with the atom.

Prototype Collsion Phase

Prototype Collision Phase has you guide the atom to collide with an atom from an array of beryllium atoms.

New Collision Phase

Same concept as before, but the controls are different, and the it feels more like going through an asteroid field rather than shooting for a wall.

Assembly Phase

Prototype version. Once you hit the atom, all particles explode out, and the player re-constructs the atom into a new nuclide. Once this is done, the new atom is shown in the menu.