NASA Black Box

devlog 3 — the game actually has an ending now

a lot happened. here’s the short version.

the campaign is real

12 missions now, split into a lunar program and a mars program. not all of them are launches. some are planning phases, like calculating your transfer orbit or sourcing hardware, they just run on a timer and unlock the next step. after you finish sample return, mars opens up. mars missions are brutal, incident rates are 2-3x higher and the missions take way longer. you need to actually prepare.

something is out there

two new incident types: unexplained signals and trajectory deviations with no thruster activity. crew dialogue doesn’t explain them. one just says “something pushed us. i don’t know what else to call it.”

there’s also a new UNKNOWN PHENOMENON hypothesis in every investigation. diagnosing it correctly pays more rep than a normal case.

three mystery cases land on your desk automatically as the game progresses, no mission failure needed. a lunar probe that physically moves with no command. a deep space relay that picks up a prime number signal on the hydrogen frequency. a survey satellite that detects a 240,000 ton unregistered object in a perfect retrograde orbit. writing those was the most fun part of this update.

you can get fired

reputation drops below 8 and you’re done. your career title is in the top bar now, goes from PROBATIONARY up to CHIEF INVESTIGATOR.

other stuff

trajectory selection when launching: conservative route reduces risk but costs more and takes longer, fast burn is cheaper and faster but incident probability goes way up. pick wrong and you’ll feel it.

investigation files are partially corrupted until you research the right equipment. the worst sensors are always the ones you can’t read. you unlock the equipment by solving supernatural cases, so there’s a loop there.

next

want to eventually make the whole thing investigation-only. cases come to your desk, no launches. the supernatural stuff escalates. also want a soundtrack someday.

ok day 1 update. keeping this separate from day 0 since that one covered the whole backstory.

since then I’ve actually added a bunch of stuff that makes the game feel more like a game.

1. You actually have to investigate now.

I replaced the old “here is a list of information, pick the answer” investigation screen with a file browser. There are three files, EVENTS.LOG, TELEMETRY.DAT, and COMMS.LOG, and you can’t even submit a hypothesis until you’ve opened at least two of them. Small change, way better feel.

1. The crew actually talks now.

COMMS.LOG has real crew dialogue. The commander calls Houston saying “we heard something, like someone knocked on the hull.” None of it says what actually happened, you have to figure it out. Different incidents have completely different conversations, so a solar storm sounds nothing like a thruster malfunction. This is my favorite thing I’ve added so far.

1. You commit to a hypothesis before seeing anything.

This was the most important fix. Before, recommendations just showed up. Now you pick one of five categories based on what you found in the files, and only then does the verdict come back. Get it right and research unlocks. Get it wrong and the root cause stays unresolved, meaning the next mission has the same vulnerability. The game actually has stakes now.

1. There’s a goal.

Added a campaign objectives panel. Comm satellite, weather satellite, lunar flyby, lunar landing, in that order. Each one unlocks the next. You can see your progress the whole time and you know exactly what you’re working toward.

1. Fixed a bug that made the game unlaunchable.

You could spam the same mission type until you ran out of money and then sit there confused. Now each mission type has a one-active cap. The launch button turns into an ACTIVE indicator while something’s already up there.

1. The game has a demo now.

Set up GitHub Pages. There’s an actual playable build online. This required me to learn what an orphan branch is. I did not enjoy that.

Future ideas (not adding yet):

I want to completely rethink the core concept. Instead of launching missions and waiting for failures, you’d be the new head of investigation for NASA and cases just come to your desk. The investigations would take 5 to 10 minutes each instead of like 60 seconds. With bad equipment some transmissions would be corrupted or missing, and you’d have to upgrade your gear by closing cases well. Reputation would actually matter because if it drops too low you get fired.

Also want to add supernatural cases. Aliens, the moon spiders from Apollo 18, mysterious ships showing up on radar with no launch record, crew going silent for 11 minutes with no explanation. Stuff that couldn’t happen in real life but fits the vibe.

And a soundtrack eventually.

Signing off on day 1
~ Vihaan

PS. Attached below is the interface

changed my project from MoonFall, which was like a moon landing/base colonization simulator after the vision i had for it fell apart when i realized i was a 13 year old working off a 2018 MacBook Pro that’s on it’s last legs.. (that was a run on sentence but we aren’t in middle school anymore).

Now introducing…… NASA Black Box, which is like a murder mystery indie game except there’s no murder and the mystery is solving cases about failed missions. These failures include onboard fires, solar flares, meteorites, human error, rocks that turn into spiders (apollo 18 reference????)… no seriously that movie horrified me and i had nightmares for a solid week of third grade. anyways, right now i working on the basic concept of you starting a mission, something fails, and you have to find out what happened based on the info given.

Unfortunately i was tragically sidetracked into making this flyer so i completely forgot i had to actually make something. I was only able to get the basic concept working today and here are some things that are bugging me.

1. There’s no real purpose to the game. I found it extremely boring debugging because i was sitting there for like 3 minutes just spamming launch until i got something and then i would go to the investigation tab and all the information was in front of me and i would just read it and select the correct option and go back to spamming launch.

solution; or part of it:
I made it so you had a budget and you couldn’t spam launch or you’d run out of money. I still don’t know what to do with the objective of the game so if you’re reading this, I would greatly appreciate ideas. I also added like “files” into the investigation tab so you have to look through them to find the information.

1. its a 2d game right now and i really want it to have some parts that are 3d. not anything fancy like a sophisticated fps style 3d, but something small. again, any ideas to make this somewhat 3d would be greatly appreciated.

2. It was too easy…. the logs used to be like “Radiation damaged the solar panel;” It was obvious that the correct diagnosis was loss of power due to radiation.

solution: now the logs are slightly less easy for example, “Radiation flux anomaly detected across primary power bus.”

Adding next session:
I kind of wanna add like crewed missions and like the voice recordings of the aircraft before the failure. It would be also nice to make it an audio based voice recording so I could add that a person would have to hear their voices and maybe deduce that a commander was sleepy so he accidentally careened into a crater (just a hypothetical).

any feedback would be greatly greatly appreciated

signing off on day 0
~ vihaan
P.S. attached is the cover art which i think is totally awesome