Phone-Based Game – Survive to Psyche Mobile Edition Team

INSTITUTION

Pennsylvania State University (ASU)

CLASS

Platinum Class (2025 – 2026)

STUDENT TEAM

Beatriz, Antunes, Software Engineering
Destiny, Cruz, Software Engineering
Mustapha, Boukhalfa, Software Engineering
Rami, Yasin, Software Engineering

ACADEMIC GUIDANCE

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Meng Su (Associate Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Penn State Behrend, and chair of the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department)
Faculty Co-Advisor: Dr. Ibrahim Naseem (Department Chair and Associate Professor, Computer Science and Software Engineering at Penn State)
Faculty Co-Advisor: Dr. Pulin Agrawal (Assistant Professor of Computer Science & Software Engineering (Penn State Behrend))

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The objective of this project is to make learning about the NASA Psyche Mission accessible to a wider audience through a mobile-friendly game. The phone game is an enhanced version of an existing web-based game from the Psyche Mission game portal. Titled Survive to Psyche, the game takes the user on a journey to the Psyche asteroid. During this journey, the user must dodge meteoroids and collect power-ups while answering trivia questions that test their knowledge of the mission. The phone game introduces new features such as different game levels, in-game haptic feedback, and user-selected spacecraft skins. Each user-selected game level varies in difficulty, affecting both the challenge of dodging meteoroids and the complexity of the trivia questions. Fully interactive on mobile devices, the phone version of Survive to Psyche uses touch input and features an on-screen joystick. The mobile optimization, along with the added features and enhancements, expands the original game’s potential to engage users with the NASA Psyche Mission and space exploration.

This work was created in partial fulfillment of the Pennsylvania State University Capstone Course “SWENG 480/1.” The work is a result of the Psyche Student Collaborations component of NASA’s Psyche Mission (https://psyche.ssl.berkeley.edu). “Psyche: A Journey to a Metal World” [Contract number NNM16AA09C] is part of the NASA Discovery Program mission to solar system targets. Trade names and trademarks of ASU and NASA are used in this work for identification only. Their usage does not constitute an official endorsement, either expressed or implied, by Arizona State University or National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of ASU or NASA.