Cosmic Armada wins Rep. Summer Lee’s 2024 Congressional App Challenge in Pennsylvania’s 12th District

When asked what inspired the creation of Cosmic Armada, the student said, “I adore board games and strategy games, and some of my favorite experiences with friends and family have involved sitting and laughing around a game that is engaging and visually beautiful. Having grown up in an age where tablets and phones are ubiquitous, I’ve also seen how these devices that connect us with texts and social media can also disconnect us from the people sitting directly next to us. I’ve observed environments where a bunch of classmates are all standing together looking at their devices, but barely interacting with each other.

I wanted to bring some of the interactivity of old-fashioned, in-person games to our portable game boards — our tablet, phones, and touchscreen computers. This game can be played by peers sitting on a bus. A big group could crowd around a tablet, and, in a frenzy of silliness, start a game with as many fingers as they could fit on the screen.

On the more technical side of things, I created the game because I wanted practice working with shaders, low-level graphic design that allows me to have tremendous control and accuracy over the visual components of the game. Using shaders, I was able to engineer really unique visual effects: these special visual effects include the trailing line of light that forms the jet stream of each ship, the undulating screen distortions when a ship explodes, and the illumination of the hexagonal grid in the background.”