Counting Stars

For my cosmic game, I decided to create an educational constellation guessing game.

In this game, the players have to guess the names of various constellations that appear on the screen. Whoever guesses the most constellations correctly wins.

I created a few digital prototypes in Processing demonstrating what this game would look like. The two prototypes I've created are Big Dipper and Orion. The stars would appear one at a time (starting with the brightest) so the players who guess the constellation in the fastest time get the points. In the final result, I’m hoping that I can have all these programs merged together so that it can look like a game, but I don’t quite know how to do this in processing.

The game can also be played in single-player if players want to educate themselves. But playing multiplayer can be just as fun and adds a bit of a challenge!

This game is meant to be educational. The brightest star appears on the screen first and the dimmest appears last. The size of the stars represents the magnitudes. The stars also appear in their actual colors as well (red giants appear red, white dwarves are white). In a more developed form, there would be 88 constellations with 7 stars in each.

The Processing programs contain data about each star with the magnitude and color. The positions are based on an actual astronomical star map. My program has an incremented timer. I then created a series of if-then clauses stating if the timer reaches a certain point, the stars appear.