Meteor Shower (itch) (Happy Mallards)

This is a minigame meant to share a cool property of meteors as they ablate (burn up) in the atmosphere. It was designed, prototyped, playtested, redesigned, and polished over the course of three months by our team's three members.

Art: Ryan and Jordan

Sound: Jordan and Edgard

Programming: Edgard, Jordan, and Ryan

Because we want to share the beauty and awesomeness of nature as it is, we've based the physics on current papers in the field of meteor astronomy. We've adapted simple models of meteor ablation in Campbell-Brown et al. (2013) to determine how the meteors ablate as a function of mass and velocity, and done some rough checks against measurements made in Ye et al. (2013). For more information, the papers are linked below:

Campbell-Brown et al.:https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2013/09/aa22005-13.pdf

Ye et al.:https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.1733v1

We also want to give a grateful shout out to our playtesters for helping us iterate and get our game to a presentable state. Thanks to Steve, Michelle, Alex, Yuri, Chunchen, Nicole, Sean, Ryan, Dan, Sara, Silvia!