2024 themestars
Proudly supported by2024 themestars
The stars are mansions built by Nature’s hand.

William Wordsworth

What are stars?
Stars are everywhere, but not just in space
SpaceStars are big, bright blobs in the sky, fusing hydrogen and generating incredible
amounts of energy.
Mathematics
Stars are geometric shapes that USUALLY have 5 or 6 points…
but what are the other options?
Our theme this year is stars
We want you to build a game that incorporates one(or more) of these aspects of stars. Or, maybe
you can think of another way you can usethe idea of a star to help get yourgame going.

The starry night
Vincent van Gogh

Breaking down the theme…
building games with stars
Let’s take a look at each of these different ways of thinking about stars, and how theymight help you in building your game.
SpaceAs Douglas Adams once said, ‘Space is big. Really big.’ And when thinking about stars
in space, there are a lot of different things you might consider.
There is the life cycle of stars – the processes that stars go through from birth to death. Star
death is especially interesting. You may have heard of exploding stars or supernovas, redgiants, white dwarfs, neutron stars, pulsars or black holes. Perhaps you could build a game thatfeatures some of these aspects of a star’s life, as a central feature of the game or maybe aspart of the background to the action that takes place in your game.
What goes on inside stars? Hydrogen atoms fuse into other, larger atoms in a process that
leads to the atoms that make up you and everything around you. Gravity and nuclear fusion
combine and fight against each other to create unbelievable temperatures and pressures.
What might that be like? Perhaps you could build a game that travels into a star and find out.
We find stars all throughout the sky, but there are patterns and groupings to their positions.
There are multiple star systems, including what are called binary stars, as well as larger
collections of stars called galaxies and globular clusters. From here on Earth many different
cultures have built pictures from the stars that we call constellations. There are shooting stars,
that aren’t stars at all. And we look at stars through a huge range of different telescopes –optical, refracting, reflecting, radio, infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray, space.
And with all these stars in the sky why is it dark at night? Thisis the dark night sky paradox (sometimes called Olbers’
paradox from German astronomer Heinrich Olbers)
How could you use some of this as a part of yourgame?
And of course, although we can’t get to stars yet,
we can certainly imagine getting to them. Maybe
your game could incorporate exploration ofstars, travelling to stars, navigating your way toparticular stars, or avoiding particular stars.

Pillars of creation
Hubble Space TelescopeMathematics

Maybe space isn’t your thing. Maybe you’d liketo build a puzzle game or a game that focuses onstars as shapes instead of stars in space.
The shape of a star – not the ball in space, but stars that wecan draw – brings us to the part of mathematics called geometry.
Stars are a type of polygon and you might like to consider how you could
include them into your game.
Star shapes can be drawn with 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or many points, and can be drawn with intersecting
lines or not.
Stars can be included as part of tesselations or tiling patterns, which mightform the background of a game, or part of the game’s focus.
Geometrical stars can be described using Schläfli symbols, a way ofdescribing geometrical shapes without actually drawing them. You could
use these descriptions as part of a decoding puzzle game, or perhaps amatching game.
And there’s a whole lot of other stars in geometry, including heptagrams and Moravian stars(also known as augmented rhombicuboctahedra). Could you make one of these as a partof the goal of your game? Or make one of these turn into something else? Or have gamecharacters use these as part of the game?

I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

Sarah Williams

Building your star game
Of course, we’re not suggesting that these
are the only ways of thinking about stars.
Your starting point might be to just let yourimagination go crazy, and if you come up
with something we hadn’t even thought
about, that would be great.