Cosmic Careers Animated Construction Exoplanets Blueprints to Blastoff Cosmic Cookbook IBACOS Standards Penn Forest Map

Case Study: Cosmic Careers from the Earth to the Moon

Rendered image of three distinct lunar rovers, each with a unique color scheme and fictional branding. The rovers are red with yellow accents, blue with light blue accents, and purple with lime green accents, each featuring different racing-style numbers and logos. This image showcases the diverse aesthetic possibilities for the rover designs in the Cosmic Careers game. — Figure 1. Competitors, backed by fictional sponsors, race through a futuristic lunar settlement and underground lava tubes

We partnered with the Astrobotic Foundation’s Moonshot Museum to create an interactive educational experience, taking students on a journey from a high-tech cleanroom on Earth to the geological wonders of the lunar surface.

The Brief

Figure 2. Cleanroom concept where players will customize their rovers. The final environment features plaques commemorating recent and popular NASA and Astrobotic missions.

Rendered image of the lunar surface environment from the Cosmic Careers game, depicting a desolate, rocky terrain with a small lunar rover to the right. The landscape includes large and small rocks scattered across a sandy surface, with dramatic shadows cast by the objects. This image illustrates the Lunar Surface Kit delivered for the game. — Figure 3. Concept for encountering a lunar resource in a stylized lunar environment.

A comprehensive digital mood board or reference board, displaying a wide array of small images. Categories include multiple photos of cleanrooms with scientists in protective gear, various lunar surface images, space exploration concept art, futuristic vehicles, additive manufacturing processes, and numerous photos of modern and classic racing cars. This visual reference board was used for inspiration and concept development during the project. — Figure 4. Mood and reference board to help discover the look and feel of the experience

The Moonshot Museum’s travelling planetarium dome needed a fresh way to engage students in grades 5 through 8. While animated videos are the traditional choice for planetariums, the client challenged us to create something new: a hands-on, interactive game.

The experience needed to achieve three key educational goals:

Introduce students to the purpose of a cleanroom and the assembly that happens there.
Spark curiosity about the geological exploration of the Moon.
Simulate the excitement and challenge of piloting a lunar rover.

The final game would be projected onto a large 16-foot inflatable dome, creating an immersive learning environment that can travel to students across Western Pennsylvania.

Our Approach

Our primary role was producing the environment art, but we went further by contributing to the core game design to ensure the experience was intuitive for short play sessions. To guarantee seamless collaboration, we established the project’s technical foundation, including shared project management tools and a code repository.

Our creative process utilized advanced techniques like procedural generation to efficiently build realistic and functional environments, from high-tech clean rooms to vast lunar landscapes. A key achievement was our innovative use of the Unity Package Manager (UPM) to deliver all art assets. This streamlined workflow decoupled our contributions from the main repository, ensuring simplified, disruption-free updates for the development team and setting a new standard for efficient collaboration.

The Result

Lyon Ritchie delivered three comprehensive Unity Package Manager "kits": the Cleanroom Kit, the Rover Kit, and the Lunar Surface Kit. These packages contained finished scenes, optimized materials, lunar terrains, and nested prefabs that allowed for efficient asset reuse for Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).

Using our in-house library of custom tools, we kick-started the development of the large-scale environments and created flexible, curve-driven lava tubes. The project not only met the client’s challenge to create an interactive educational experience but also refined a highly efficient workflow for collaborative game development. The final product was a set of game-ready environments, poised to inspire the next generation of cosmic explorers.