Play Super Planet Crash

♥ If you enjoyed playing Super Planet Crash, please consider donating to the Science Education Fund at McDonald Observatory. Every little bit counts. Go support science!

Update 2: 2,000,000 systems were created!

Update: Systemic and Super Planet Crash were featured on io9, Space.com, GlobalNews, Motherboard, Huffington Post, The Verge, and two press releases by UC Santa Cruz and McDonald Observatory. Thank you!

Super Planet Crash is a little game born out of some of my work on the online version of Systemic. It is a digital orrery, integrating the motion of massive bodies forward in time according to Newtonian gravity. It works on any recent web browser and modern tablets.

The main goal of the game is to make a planetary system of your own creation be stable (i.e. no planet is ejected, or collides with another body). This is of course exceedingly easy when your system comprises of a few Earth-mass planets, but dynamical instability can quickly set in when adding a lot of heavier bodies (from giant planets, all the way to stellar companions).

The challenge is then to fit as many massive bodies as possible inside 2 AUs (twice the distance between the Earth and the Sun), teetering close to instability but lasting at least 500 years. Accordingly, the game rewards a daring player with more points (proportionally to the mass of each body added to the system). A few simple rules are listed under the “Help” button.

The game always starts with an Earth-mass planet in a random location, but you can also have fun overloading known planetary systems! Clicking on the “Template” dropdown brings up a list of planetary systems to use as starting templates, including the compact system Kepler-11 and the super-eccentric planet HD80606 (more systems to come). You can even share your creations with your friends by copying the URL in the “Share” box.

The game is open-source, and still under active development. The entire code will be downloadable from GitHub (as soon as I get a bit of work done!).In the near future, I will be adding integration with Systemic Live, a longer list of template planetary systems and smartphone support. In the meantime, have fun crashing planets!

Credits

The game was made possible by the wonderful paper.js library, which let me quickly prototype the app despite having little experience in web gaming. The palette draws from the base16 color set.

Many many thanks to my wonderful testers: Rachael Livermore, Mike Pavel, Joel Green, Nathan Goldbaum, Maria Fernanda Duran, Jeffrey Silverman, Angie Wolfgang, and other cool people.

My work is funded by the W. J. McDonald Postdoctoral Fellowship. If you enjoyed the game, please donate to the McDonald Observatory fund to support science education.