Mom I Wanna Be An Astronaut
Mom I Wanna be an Astronaut is a 3D simulation game created during USC MEGA Game Jam 2023 using Unreal Engine 5, where the theme was "Space." The beginner jammers of our team ultimately decided to set the scene in an outer space bubble tea shop. Players take on the role of a shop employee, preparing drinks by adding the correct ingredients based on customer orders and loading the completed order onto a spaceship. To make the ordering system more engaging, we also decided to replace paper orders with real voice recordings played through a radio.
After the player completes an order, the system needs to verify whether the final drink includes all the ingredients listed in the order. instead of using multiple boolean variables, I used masking techniques to make the entire verification process simple, efficient, and accurate. To be more specific, by assigning every ingredient to a single binary digit, a recipe can be easily converted into an unique 8-digit binary number, or a decimal number less than 256. Simply comparing the number of the recipe to the number of the drink, one can quickly determine if all the ingredients are correctly added to the drink.



