Project Athena

Asteroid Redirection Space Experience

About

Project Athena is a NASA-inspired orbital mechanics playground with the goal of maneuvering the player rocket to a state where asteroid redirection can be achieved before impact. Navigating through space is much easier said than done, and Project Athena showcases some challenges in scale, fuel efficiency, debris avoidance, and timing.

Featuring

Realistic Orbital Mechanics

Inspired by Kerbal Space Program's patched comics approximation of astrodynamics. This model is based on Kelper's laws for planetary motion. It reduces the general N-body gravity problem to 2-body approximations within a predefined sphere of influence.

Advanced Visuals

Using custom shaders to implement bloom effects, thrust particles, a screenspace user-interface, and high resolution skyboxes around the environment.

Used Blender to build custom 3D models for planetary bodies and rocket with detailed textures and realistic lighting effects.

Intuitive Controls

Providing natural 3D camera movement and animations alongside familiar WASD movement keybindings to control the player.

Menu + Checkpoints

At any time, players may enter the main menu and select a range of levels to play, or a tutorial describing the controls.

To save their progress along the way, players have the option to save & load their progress at any time.

The Team

Project Athena was developed by a team of undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon University as a final semester project for the Fall 2022 offering of 15-466 Computer Game Programming taught by Dr. Jim McCann.

The team consists of:

  • Gustavo Silvera - Project Manager & Programmer

  • Henry Du - Lead Architect & Programmer

  • Thomas Carey - Art Lead & Programmer


Installation

Running a pre-compiled binary of Project Athena is available after downloading the compressed archive (.zip) file from the distribution page to unarchive (“unzip”) the executable. There are currently compiled builds for Windows x64, Linux x64, and MacOS (arm64 & x64) and the downloaded file should correspond with the player’s operating system.

Source code is available on GitHub under the MIT license

Questions?

Contact gsilvera@andrew.cmu.edu, henryd1@andrew.cmu.edu, or tcarey@andrew.cmu.edu to get more information on the project