 And welcome back to tomorrow. My name is Benjamin Higginbotham. Now before we get started, I want to give a huge shout out and thank you to all of the patrons of tomorrow. These are people who've contributed $10 or more to this specific episode to get access to absolutely everything. We've also got our Patreon producers. These are people who've contributed $5 or more to this specific episode. If you'd like to find out how you can help crowdfund the shows of tomorrow, head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O. All right, let's go ahead and get started. We've got Justin Park from Intergalactic Education here to talk about an upcoming Kickstarter called Spaceworld. Justin, thank you so much for joining us this Saturday. Yeah, thanks for having me, Ben. So tell me, first off, who is Intergalactic Education? So we're a game company. We've been building a game called Spaceworld for a while now. I originally started the company when I was living in Switzerland. I had a couple of interns from the International Space University, that's where I went for school as well. And now we're located in downtown Washington, DC area. I've got a couple of interns from American University and the University of Baltimore. The students are in school for game design. And so, yeah, we're building a game about the space industry. So I've been watching your show now for many years. And yeah, you guys were actually one of the inspirations I had for getting to this industry to begin with. And so I wanted to build a computer game about the space industry because it seems like things are always about two years from now. And so the game itself goes into the future 24 times the speed. And so this is important because if you play the game for a year, you're 24 years into the future. So you can have lots of cool things. The game also, this helps put a perspective on how long it takes to do a deep space mission. So if you want to send something to the moon, for example, normally it takes about three days. So in the game, it takes about three hours. So you send your rocket, you come back at three hours, and it's there. But if you want to do a Mars project in advance, it takes about a week for your payload to get there in the game. And so, yeah, Space World is one of these games that actually plays even when you're not playing it. The information is stored in a database offline or online. And so, yeah, the game just is always playing. And so if you want to do a deep space mission, you better be prepared with the resources and make sure that your astronauts aren't getting too much radiation or they're going to be in trouble. So if the game is true to life, does that mean it will always be two years out and you'll never actually be able to buy it? Yeah. So yeah, one of the things you do in the game is you collect research and development points. And so you do those by answering math questions. And then there's also a series of mini games that you can do. And so you use your research and development points to help NASA do analyses. You help SpaceX unlock the Falcon heavy. You can help Blue Origin unlock the new Glenn and the new Shepard. You can help Virgin Galactic unlock their space plane. And so, yeah, we're focusing on real companies. And so there is also the opportunity to do contracts for the DOD. And so that's another one of the things that you have to balance out. So the DOD contracts are worth a lot of money, but then they take your reputation points down. And so that's actually you don't want to go below zero reputation points or the world goes to war because you did too many military contracts and you have to start over. And so you counterbalance that by doing space exploration contracts and building things on the lunar surface. So describe for me a little bit of the point of the game. So it's based on for reals-y space and actual space agencies and all of that stuff, but there's got to be a story or an end game. What am I trying to accomplish while playing the game? Yeah, so you start the game out in January 2017. There is a new president coming into the office, and he tasks you with putting the first female on the moon by the end of the decade. Something that hasn't been done before. I think that's something that we need to do. I think it's something that NASA could do. If we did it in the 1960s in a decade, we should be able to do it now in about half the time. One of the things that you want to be able to do is have enough reputation points so that if you do manage to get enough people there, you can start a new government and become the president of the new country that you start on the moon. That's kind of one of the more distant goals. Other more immediate goals is you pick out which Google Lunar Express team you want to back. And so winning the Google Lunar Express is one of the first goals of the game even before getting a female to the moon by the end of the decade. The game also allows you to do other things if you want to try and do a Mars Direct. You can certainly do that. It's not easy. But yeah, there are a lot of different paths into the future that the player can take. So we're watching some of the gameplay right now. And early on, we saw some math equations being solved. Is that part of what the gameplay is? There's an educational component here as well? Definitely. So in order to get your research and development points, you have to answer algebra questions. We picked out algebra questions because we're also marketing the game to schools. We're testing the software out at middle school in Southern Maryland right now. So we've got about a hundred students who are playing the game and getting a feel. And yeah, we're also getting feedback from the teacher because the questions that the students are answering are actually real questions from their textbook. And so the teacher can grade the software a lot faster because we have a separate application that allows them to do that. We kind of, I wanted to build the game, but at the same time, I wanted to build a company. And so a lot of investors aren't so interested in building a computer game, but if you tell them we're an ed tech company and we're trying to improve the math education system in America, then they're a lot more inclined to listen to what you're trying to do. And so yeah, we've just been trying to get as much traction as we can from teachers because I feel like this is a game that students should see if they see all of the cool things that are going on in space, it might inspire them to go into one of the STEM fields and who knows, they're going to be the engineers that are going to be taking us tomorrow someday. How's that traction been going? What's the response been like thus far? Pretty good. A lot of schools don't like to pay for this software, but for now we're just trying to get traction. One of the other things that I've been doing recently is applying for grant money from the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation. They also have opportunities for small companies like ours to develop this type of software. NeuroPilot has an interesting question, which is what happens if you goof the metric unit conversion? I assume the game uses metric as opposed to imperial units. We don't use feet because it just, yeah, it doesn't make sense. I mean, I remember you guys doing a poll on your show as to whether or not to use feet and yeah, we're not going to use pounds or any of that. It just, it's kind of silly. So you do ask one of the things you have to do in the games, you have to figure out how to speak metric. So if you're in the United States and you're used to the imperial units, that's not going to help you in the game. I mean, obviously with the basic algebra, you're fine, but if you're trying to do like actual speed conversion, you'll be both basically meters per second so forth and so on. Yeah, kilometers per second usually if you're in space. But yeah, I mean, that's just something, we might have it as like a tool tip if you hover over it, then you can see the conversion to miles per hour, but it's really something that, yeah, I don't, don't, yeah, I think it's time for the United States to understand what it is to be in kilometers per second. Good luck, good luck with that. We tried that ones before, did not go over so well. All right, Minnesota is asking, do you plan to bring this to Australia, our Australian correspondent, of course, asking? Yeah, so in the beginning of the game, there's a region select. Right now we're focusing on North America, but we'll have stretch goals in our Kickstarter campaign that will be for the other regions. And so Australia is part of the Eastern Pacific region. And so they get lumped in with India who has a very strong aerospace program in Japan. So yeah, we definitely don't want to exclude any particular country from space world, but this space is now something that is accessible to every country. Dariachi asks, you talk about working with schools, is it gonna be available outside of schools? So if one of the citizens tomorrow wants to play, can they grab it? Yeah, we're gonna have a commercial version. The school version will be focused a lot more on the algebra questions. There's things in the storyline that we wanna do that are a little more controversial that we won't be able to have in the student edition. For example, you get contracted by the Catholic Church to build a church on the moon. And so that's not something I think we can have it in the school. There's parents that are gonna knock on like that. So yeah, that'll be specifically in the commercial version. Yeah, other things, birthing the first child in the space, that's something that's kind of controversial as well. And I think it's something that will be important. If you think about it, eventually there's gonna be a baby that's born in space and that baby's, people are gonna know the name of that child for the end of time. It's just, if you look at the reaction of what happened to when John Glenn passed, everybody knew about it. And so I think when the first child is born in space, that is going to be a major milestone. And in space world, that's something that you can try as soon as you have the research and development points. You might wanna be careful because you do lose reputation points if people die in space. That's one of the ways we balance the game out. You're talking about the points. And I think this question from space Kyle kind of talks to that, which is do you have to answer math questions in real time to successfully launch? Yes, their math questions are built into the Lange and landing processes, mini games I guess you could call them in the game. The one that doesn't require you to answer math problems is the Falcon 9 first stage landing game because it's already kind of hard. You have to maneuver your first stage back and land on the barge. And yeah, we've been testing that out and the students only have about a 50% landing rate. So watch, I guess it's kind of accurate if you look at the record that SpaceX has had so far. But yeah, and that'll be something that if you use enough research and development points, you'll be able to automate it so that it's successful more often and you won't even have to do the mini game. But in the beginning, yeah, we wanna make the game as fun as possible. So there's all of these different games that add to the entertainment value of space world. Speaking of the difficulty level, Cameron's asking, can you choose a grade level or is it all just kind of one level of math and... Yeah, well we decided to focus on algebra first because we're only a five-person team. We'd like to add more educational, a range of educational content, going up to calculus and maybe down to simple math. Like addition and subtraction. But for now, you come in and it's algebra level, which most kids start algebra in their freshman year of high school. We're testing with the eighth grade because they're the honors students and we thought we might get better feedback from them. So Joe Buu asks, with the game featuring real companies, how involved have you been with those companies in the development of the game? Yeah, so I've been talking to some people at Blue Origin just last week. I shook hands with Jeff Bezos and I told him I'm building a computer game about you. He was in DC for the Arthur C. Clark Awards. And so yeah, he said that sounds exciting. He likes games and he introduced me to some people at Blue Origin that I actually knew from some previous space conferences that I had been to. But yeah, I go pretty far back with Will Pomerance. I've known Will for about 10 years. And so, yeah, I'm hoping Virgin will be one of our premier partners. And then yeah, I know a few people at SpaceX too, I guess. So speaking of some of those, will you be including speculative or future planned missions like the European Space Agency's Moon Village, Mars One's plans to go to Mars or SpaceX's, what is it, the interplanetary transport system? It's- So yeah, we're already, we have the Moon Village built into the storyline already. The Mars One, well, they just had to delay this week, but yeah, the Mars One people will definitely have a little bit about them. They haven't released any specs on the hardware that they're intending on using. We have been modeling a lot of the rockets that exist now already. We have the New Glenn already modeled in stages as well because there's an animation where when you're launching into space, you can see the individual stages drop off when you put payloads into space. We've got a lot of different space modules too. We've modeled a lot of the Bigelow Aerospace Modules. We've got the ISS. We've even got a Skylab, if you wanna go back and put a Skylab module on one of the new heavy lift rockets that you can unlock with enough research and development points. Does it fail when you first deploy it and then you have to go and rescue it as well? There will certainly be a probability that you can, that it might fail and that you might have to fix it if you don't put enough research and development into it in the beginning, so. That'd be awesome. Bring giant space blankets. Try to keep it cool. Space Cookie has more of a comment than a question, maybe a feature request as it were, which would like something like this, but also with the ability to run your own rocket and vehicle designs fully custom CAD, not just like modules with Kerbal Space Program. So basically they wanna build their own rockets from scratch, not just from modules. That'd be kinda cool. And a really neat learning technique. We wanna be able to do that. I think 3D modeling is a tool that kids are gonna be very good at and that by the time they become seniors in college, they'll have 10 years of 3D modeling experience. I think that's a skill that we really wanna, yeah, start teaching kids at a young age. Yeah, I wanted to put a function like that into the game for, since it's an inception, but it's hard, we're a five-person team. And so to build a 3D modeling application like an AutoCAD, it's quite a challenge. We might have it so you can upload 3D models from AutoCAD or from some 3D modeling tool and then we take it from our website and then if we put it through the approval process or we'll have maybe some kind of online voting, we could stick those modules into the game because we're developing with a tool called Unity 3D and Unity 3D allows you to build computer games. You can import models from all kinds of different environments. We use Blender a lot because it's an open source 3D modeling tool, but yeah, Unity can take 3D models from lots of different environments. And so yeah, that's one other option that doesn't allow, it doesn't require us to do so much development in terms of the in-game 3D modeling. Johnny Boy asks, what platforms are supported by the games? So right now we're focusing on PC, we'll have the game on Steam, but because we're building the game with Unity 3D, that allows us to very easily export the game to iOS and Android. We actually just had our first alpha version. We started, that's running now on iPad. We got that working yesterday even. It was Tuesday, yeah, we started on Tuesday and yeah, now it's finally working. There's a few glitches where the videos won't run properly, but everything else pretty much works. It connects to the database and the game runs, that's the important part. All right, I'm gonna combine two questions for this last one, which is from Anonomin, Anomin, basically like Anonymous, and Space Mike, which is basically, when is it gonna be out and how much? Yeah, so we're gonna be doing the Kickstarter in January. We're probably wouldn't be asking $20, $15, we haven't decided if it's gonna be $15 or $20. And then we're gonna have kind of a low bar, but then we'll have lots of stretch goals because we wanna build this game, but we also wanna make it really awesome if we're able to raise the money to do that. And so yeah, I would say we already have a working version obviously that we're testing in schools right now, but we wanna have like a commercial version. The commercial version is really gonna, it's gonna take some work, we wanna make sure that it's polished. And so I would say probably the middle of 2017 to the end of 2017, if we do raise a lot of money from this because there's a lot of mini games that I have ideas that I wanna include into Space World and they'll take development time, but at the same time, yeah, the game itself should be ready in the middle of 2017, relatively bug free, not relatively, we want it to be bug free. For people who are interested, where can they get more information on the upcoming Kickstarter and what you guys are working on? Yeah, if you go to spaceworld.us, that's our homepage, it'll redirect you to intergalacticeducation.com. We found that a lot of people were typing in intergalactic wrong because it's kind of a tricky word to spell. And then if you click on our news, it'll take you to our Facebook page and that's where we post pretty regular updates about every other day with new content, videos. Yeah, we'll be redirecting people to the Kickstarter as well. We're intending on having videos every day featuring the different companies that are going to be in the game and that way people become aware of all the cool stuff that these space companies are doing. All right, very cool. Now, before we go into break, I have six quick questions. Just first thing that comes to your mind, no wrong answers, kind of just a way to get the different opinions from different guests. All right, are you ready? Yep. All right, first one. Moon or Mars first? Moon for sure. Liquid or solid propellants? I like liquid. What should be the name of the first vehicle going to Mars? Shoot, I already wrote this down because I knew- No cheating! I knew you were going to ask me these questions when I actually prepared, but then I forgot the sheet that I prepared so that I didn't have to be here. Yeah, I don't know. Let's see here. Be like, I don't know, something not too philosophical, but I don't know, like the arc or something. Why the arc? Why would- That's kind of philosophical, I guess. It has to do with Biblical times, you know. Yeah, I don't know. I should have probably found that sheet that I prepared, but yeah. No, no, I like this better. I like this better. No preparing, just like right off top of your head. It kind of, it gives you a really good insight into, I'm gonna have to start- Yeah, that's the one that I thought about before because yeah, I don't know. In space, you can name it whatever you want. We're allowing you to name your rockets and your robots when you build or procure them. And so yeah, you can name your rockets whatever you want. When do you think humans will first land on Mars? Mars, you know, there's cycles and so there's certain times that you can get there a lot easier than others, but probably in the early 2030s. Mars is really hard. All right, so then- When do you think humans will first land on the moon? No, we know when they first landed on the moon. Let me actually ask the correct question as it's written, which is, when do you think humans will set foot on the moon again? Yeah, I'd like to say before the end of the decade, that's the kind of the point of the game. And hopefully, someone in Donald Trump's transition team sees the game and says, oh, maybe that's a good idea. I would say realistically, probably in the early 2020s, maybe 2022, we'll see, you know, there's gonna hopefully be a new goal for the administration. And so yeah, I hope the moon is high on their agenda. And why space? I think space holds the next market, you know, there's people out there that believe, people like myself who believe that there's a trillion dollar industry out there, you know, we've built essentially nothing, you know, and if you think about all of the value that could come from, you know, oxygen manufacturing and the entertainment if you were to build, you know, a space superdome, you know, that's one of the things you can do in space world is once you've built this superdome, it unlocks a game called space ball. And space ball is, you know, something I think a lot of people think is cool because you can take another person and you can throw them three meters into the air. That's kind of entertaining. And so yeah, it's just important. I think it's gonna be a stepping stone for us politically as well. You know, the governments of the world now, they're pretty good, but they definitely have their shortcomings and I think creating a new government in space is something that will be a big stepping stone for humanity. Yeah, it inspires us. It's just very important. I think people sometimes they get too concerned with what's going on in their day-to-day lives and they forget, you know, that there's, the Earth is just a very small place. And yeah, we're going to reach a point in our future where we'll look back and it'll be hard to imagine being stuck on Earth for as long as we've been here.