Cpe KMUTTian to NASA

Bangkok | Space Quest: The Game

OH MARS GOD!

High-Level Project Summary

Space exploration is a risky mission. Nowadays, exploring planet far from earth is extremely and impossible challenging. But we predict that in the future technology will allow us to explore this planet. So we wanted to show difficulties and challenges in space exploration through our gameWe made a game "Oh Mars God!" which is a game about resource management and completing mission. In this game, you will be taking 4 college students on a field trip to Mars. During your time there, you have to complete 3 missions with limited resources. There will also be obstacles based on real occurrences on Mars. Keep your crew healthy and finish as soon as possible!

Link to Project "Demo"

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1ZjnmNVKiNCTfHsQwk9deCvHqAi3MhHD9

Link to Final Project

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/578477302/

Detailed Project Description

About Our Game

Our game simulated that concept as a resource management game. It focused on the most efficient resource management, daily routines, and space missions. We hope to make this game educate the difficulties of space exploration, especially what the challenges are if you want to go to Mars. Using mission system and daily activity management, we wanted the player to feel challenging and enjoying the game.

Playing the game

To play, use the link we provide in the final project. Click the green flag to start the game.

You can also press fullscreen icon to play in fullscreen as well.

The Goal

Complete 3 Missions while managing your limited resources to keep your crew healthy.

The less days you take and the more resources you have left, the better your score will be.

Story

In the future where traveling to Mars is possible, four college students are taken on a field trip where they will learn more about life on Mars. The teacher left by saying "Complete three missions as soon as possible to gain the best scores, my dear students!"

With limited resources, they will have to find a way to survive while doing missions. So that they can come back to Earth safely with great grades!

Characters

There will be 4 characters that you have to manage during your time there. Each character will start off with 10 health points and 10 hungers which you will need to maintain

Food System

Each character will start off with 10 hunger. Things that could make the hunger decreases are

As each day passes by, hungers of the characters will gradually decrease.
Sending characters on missions

So you will need to keep checking if they're hungry. If their hungers reach 0, it will also decrease their health point daily

You will start off with 10 food to manage. Clicking the 'Food' button will take you to the kitchen where you can choose which crew members you want to feed. In the kitchen, the students will also tell you their status if they are full, OK, or hungry. You can only feed each character once a day

Health System

Each character will start off with 10 health points. Events that could make the HP decreases are

Random event after each day ends
Hunger reaches 0

There will be a graphical change that tells you if the character is injured. If they are, they would not be able to go on missions.

If one of the crew's health reaches 0, it will be game over.

You will start off with 6 medicines to manage. Clicking the 'Medicine' button will take you to the med room where you can choose which crew members you want to heal. In the med room, the students will also tell you their status if they are OK or hurt. You can only heal each character once a day

Missions

There are three missions that you need to complete (referenced from NASA past and future missions for Mars)

Each mission will require different amount of team members and days to complete.

Collect Rock Samples: Rock samples are very useful for studying Mars' geological profile. This mission will require 2 people and 1 day to complete
Find Water Traces: A very important finding that could lead to finding life on Mars. This mission will require 3 people and 2 days to complete
Explore past landing sites: Take our students to an insightful journey to see the past success of rockets that have been to Mars. This mission will require 2 people and 3 days to complete

In the main menu of the game, you can choose to add people to the team. After the requirements are satisfied, you will be able to click 'Send Team To Mission'.

Each time you send the team, it will decrease the days required by the mission by one. The characters you sent will also get hunger decrease as well.

Random Events

As we know, Mars is a dangerous place which is why we haven't been able to explore it yet. In this game, there will be random occurrences after each day ends to simulate the natural disasters on Mars. Each events could affect your characters' health points, so you have to carefully take care of your team members. If you're lucky, you could pass a day without any disasters as well!

Ending

Completing all missions with all of your crew members still well will give you a good ending. Your scores will be based on how many days in total did you use and how many resources you have left.
Letting one and only one of your crew members' health to reach 0 will result in a game over

Benefits and Our Hopes

This game aims to educate players about how difficult it is to go to space. While most people are aware about the cost of rockets and how hard to become an astronaut, not a lot are aware about actual dangers that could happen in the vast space -- especially on Mars.

We hope that this game could visualize the challenges and problems that astronauts face during their space exploration. Right now our game only has examples of natural disasters on Mars, but we hope to add physical and mental challenges and more detail about surviving in space in the future. We also hope that, from the challenges demonstrate in this game, it could encourage players to be more interested in space exploration, and even motivate them to contribute to the solution! So that we can really travel to Mars and other planets in the near future

Space Agency Data

We use NASA as our main source of data. Additionally, we use other websites related to space and wikipedia as well.

During the research and brainstorm phase, we use our data to decide what challenge we would choose and what the concept of our game will be. We see that we haven't been able to send humans to Mars as of now, only robots and drones have been sent. We imagine how great it would be if we could be there, and used that as the base of our game.

Then, we continue to research about the natural disasters on Mars to implement the events in the game. We used data about difficulties that astronauts face to decide about our characters stats. Also, we researched on what resources are required for the astronauts. Lastly, we researched about NASA past and future missions on Mars to decide on the missions in our game

We tried to keep it somewhat realistic to convey the challenges of being on Mars, while trying not to overwhelm the players to keep the game entertaining

Hackathon Journey

What and why?

We all had passion in coding, arts, and astronomy, which is why we think this challenge is right for us.

As first-years students, we seek to find new experience and improve ourselves. This was a great opportunity that fit our interest, and we certainly learned a lot during this short period of time. We learned about teamwork, time management, space, and Mars. This was a very good experience that we can use to improve ourselves.

Setbacks and Approaches

TIme: We had exam in the first day of the hackathon. So we have to plan ahead and organize our time in a way that we would be able to complete the project on time
Communication: We are a first-time team working online. It was a bit quite and awkward at first but after a few meetings we were able to open up
Ideas: There were so much possible concepts, and we each have different ideas. It took a lot of research and brainstorming until we were able to finalize what we want to make
Tools: Developers in our team are used to writing code, but not using code block. Due to the time we have, if we want to fit the concepts into our game, we thought we have to use scratch, a code-block game development platform. So we have to learn the program during the hackathon in order to make our project
Online Collaboration: We can't work on the same project at the same time on Scratch. So we have to delegate our work efficiently to make sure that both our game and presentation are done on time

Special Thanks

First of all, thank you for the organizers and NASA for this hackathon because it is the first project that we have done together as first year students.This was a good opportunity to allow us to get hands-on on project and presentation to further develop our potential after this.

Thank you our team members for pulling through until the end. Even we have exam and face many challenges, we didn't give up.

Thank you :)