Stellar: How Does Your Galaxy Grow?

I was expecting the actual game, not just a video about it, but it does look interesting.

It's also worth noting that much of what is included in the game is still actively being researched. For example, we don't really know, in detail, how vigorous star formation affects the gas in galaxies – is it expelled, stirred up, removed from the system, or some combination? And what processes (supernovae, stellar winds, radiation pressure, etc.) drive that? I think we are getting close to the answers[0, 1], but it's an exciting time.

[0] http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2073

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.5639

Really cool idea, even if it is a bit hard to follow what is going on. Also I see that the game is not out and they don't seem to have published any updates anywhere in the past year.

They probably could have used the publicity a year ago.

It looks like this project had funding for two developers for 6 months. They set up a web page

http://www.stellarsupernova.com/

Which is still up, however the Twitter and Facebook pages appear to have been deleted.

This is right up my street, I'm not sure how the equations for stellar nucleosynthesis could be reduced to run in a browser, perhaps they tried to simplify too far? Or trying to gamify it was too tricky. I can't imagine many people beyond physics students will follow this.

If they've paused I wish them good luck, if the code is orphaned it'd be good to see it open sourced, I imagine there are a few people who'do like to contribute.

I'm involved in some astronomy outreach/teaching activities and this looks like it'd be really useful for that, as it's hard to come up with hands-on activities about star formation and stellar evolution.