Bombardier's Guild is a fun steampunk-like mobile game app that I used to play a lot. Basically, you have to shoot a projectile from one planet to hit another, while navigating a static, 2D n-body problem inbetween. It's a simple setup but a highly nonlinear four-dimensional system with two free parameters. For certain configurations of the n body obstacles, trajectory designs are very hard to intuit and figure out because of chaotic parameter regions (exponentially high sensitivity of final outcome to small changes in parameters). Hence the interest in visual diagnostic tools to assist a player in deconstructing and eventually solving the game.
I was inspired to recreate some of Bombardier's core gameplay as part of a demonstration of innovative new model exploration and algorithm diagnosis tools (see screenshot demo_shot.png below)
Here, you see a trajectory that successfully hits a user-defined target, with heatmap color coding along the line segment traj
