Guide Star

A retro arcade game designed for the Outer Space: Stromlo to the Stars exhibition at Canberra Museum and Gallery, celebrating 100 years of Mount Stromlo Observatory.

An original Applied Game solo designed and developed by Ricky Vuckovic for Canberra Museum and Gallery.

Ricky’s story

Canberra Museum and Gallery put out a commission to the Canberra game development community to pitch to create an original arcade game as part of its upcoming Outer Space: Stromlo to the Stars exhibition.

My pitch for Guide Star was selected. I based my pitch on the real EOS adaptive optics science and technology used at the Observatory, turning it into an arcade game for players to shoot away space junk before it hits the Earth.

The main level environment was based on photography supplied by CMAG of the real EOS laser facility on Mount Stromlo that the game is based on.

Space junk was a mix of hand-drawn items by me, plus some basic 3D shapes  I made and captured frames of while rotating them, then tracing and recolouring in Aseprite.

I wrote and produced six original synthwave music tracks for the game too.

The arcade table was supplied by CMAG, as was the mini “DreamQuest Pro 2022” Windows PC to run the game. My first deliverable a couple of weeks into production was a basic video, sound, and button testing app to ensure the game I made would actually run on the machine.

The whole project was made in two and half months, from quote acceptance to delivery and on-site testing, delivered a week ahead of schedule.

During the exhibition, one young visitor managed to rip the physical arcade stick off the table. Within a week, CMAG rotated the table to expose the second player’s controls, and I remapped the game and recoloured the on-screen button prompts to match the remaining controller.

The outcome

Guide Star was played by tens of thousands of visitors over its 12-month CMAG exhibition without a software failure. It is now travelling to other institutions around Australia.