Luna's Planetarium

Luna's Planetarium by Derick Ma (itch.io)

When making this project, I thought back to this planetarium I was in when I was a child. I’m pretty sure this location was in Taiwan, and I never saw this place again, but I remember being absolutely mesmerized by the view. There was one room that was a 3D half-dome with a projected ceiling of celestial objects. I decided to build my own planetarium in Unity, just thinking it would be a fun and sweet way to wrap up my college experience with a callback to something from childhood as I enter adulthood. The objective is just to explore the scene and hear the music and see the different planets and stars. For interaction, I wrote my own navigation code. I went with a “movement per click” style navigation to mimic sort of “snapshots” of this place. Most of what I attempted to implement was successful, I learned a lot about texturing, package downloading, and audio in the process. I modeled the base of the game and added spheres for planets and gave them unique textures, and also implemented a starry skybox.

The one thing that gave me trouble was that I attempted to code an interactive click feature based on a tutorial I found that would move the planets when they were clicked by the mouse, but it was unsuccessful. I found that this process was too complicated for my skill level, so I went a different route. I took the suggestion of changing audio depending on location and set up discoverable music for each of the major “planets” I made, so when the player approaches them, they hear unique music. If I were to extend this project, I would just try to implement my original interaction idea. I would put time into learning and debugging the code needed to make it happen.

I'm glad this class taught me how to use Unity. I've wanted to get into it because I want to pursue game design but I never got the chance to self-teach, thinking it was too complicated and I was just starting to learn Blender. I like that this project pushed me to implement code and create scenes in Unity that I could not have done before