Please feel free to attend even if you didn’t make it to our first meeting.  Every participant should bring from home one item that they would like to use as a game piece or token, because we’re making interplanetary exploration into our own DIY board game!

NEXT MEETING: Saturday January 26th at 10am!

In our recent adventures with Raising Makers, we have explored cool ways to make things, new technologies that we can use to help up create, and had fun playing creative games that people have invented and shared with the world as an open-source idea.  At our last meeting, we voted on what to do next, and in keeping with our rocket making project, our next program for Raising Makers is Interplanetary Exploration!

Imagine having landed your own robot on Mars, but something went wrong, and you’ve crashed at an unknown location. Can you use your resources and brain power to navigate tough terrain and find the elements you need to create a colony on Mars? Can you do it before your equally competitive opponents find everything first?

That’s right, we’re gonna get to it and tackle the big one. But how? I mean, our resources *are* sort of limited when compared to the Space-X and NASA programs.  Not with the power of multiple minds, I say!  What could be more fun than immersing ourselves in the search for life and new discoveries on another planet, following the missions that are out there, and even simply celebrating these too often understated human achievements?

We’ve got our robotics explorers covered as well, thanks to our team of telepresence robots turned wayfarers of the great cosmos (hacked roomba vacuums) we have some great DIY platforms to use for our lessons in robotics and exploration.

Dec 1st: We’ll be focusing on our challenge, and begin creating the pieces of the game we will play. We will also be discussing the type of robot that we’ll be making for the game, and why it maybe isn’t so fundamentally different than the robots used now for space exploration.  Please come down and have some fun with us!

There are some great examples of home built and indy board games out there, and in order to build our own, we’ll need to find our terrain. Since we’ll be exploring a another planet, why not use the real thing? You can find many great images online at NASA and on other astronomy websites. We even stumbled across an amazing online atlas of Mars by a very cool astonomer in Moscow, Idaho!

For now, We are going very DIY (as we should), and will be building our first prototype using scotch tape, foamcore or poster board backing, and scissors.

For true Indie gaming experience, we also played lots of Seej.

We also developed our gameplay and some interesting ideas for challenges to tackle while competing to win the game.  We also polished our rough draft of a tabletop game board that we’ll   be using to prototype our robots and other aspects of the game.

At our next Meetup, you are encouraged to bring any small object or game token that you would like to use to play Interplanetary Exploration and help us work with some of the basic rules of the game.

Hey does this sound like fun to you?  Well then, feel free to come down and participate! Raising Makers is a free, community driven group of young makers, scientists, future world record holders and changers of the future. Young people and their families are all encouraged to come out and participate!

If you would like to stay posted on the schedule, check out our Calendar.

Dec. 15 Was Indie Gaming Day! In my recent studies, I’ve been working to capture snapshots of terrain features and make them into 3D models. *Notes to be added.

Dec.28th- We went straight back into the lab after the Christmas Holiday and developed just about every feature of gameplay we wanted to try out. We invented action items and challenges that seemed like fun ideas to take on.

Jan. 12th, 2013-  I followed up on an idea and made cool card backs with some awesome Mars Art  from Ludek Pesek: Space Artist (we are also huge fans of his work) and made decks of cards representing every Sol you spend on Mars, drawn every turn, and a deck for Challenges in the game, called Crater Cards.  This first time was all write in’s, and we had a lot of fun making up actions, experiences and bonuses to the game.  Having a few blank cards in hand for each time the game is played is great!

Photo Gallery!