High-Level Project Summary
This is a VR game, set on the planet Mercury, where players learn more about Mercury's topography by exploring and completing missions as robots geared to three environments.
Detailed Project Description
SPACE APPS 2021 SUBMISSION
SPACE QUEST: THE GAME
“ASPECTS OF MERCURY”
FORMAT: Virtual reality
SYNOPSIS: The year is 2050. NASA’s Artemis mission has established both a successful lunar outpost, and a Martian colony. But now, we need resources for the Martian colony. Specifically, players have landed on Mercury, as three robots, tasked with three objectives.
Robot Prometheus has been dispatched to Mercury’s Caloris Basin. It must find three volcanic rocks as energy sources. This robot has been designed to withstand extreme heat, but cannot take cold temperatures.
Robot Khione has landed in Mercury’s north pole crater. Its mission: collect three samples of ice, to provide water. This robot must remain sheltered during the day, as it’s designed to withstand extreme cold but cannot survive in heat.
Robot Argus has arrived in Mercury’s Rachmaninoff Basin. Its mission: retrieve three Mercurian ores, which were discovered, in 2045, to have extremely beneficial medicinal properties. This robot is the sturdiest of the three. It can withstand extreme heat and extreme cold. However, if its outer shell is breached, it can “go rogue”, scrambling signals and interfering with the transmissions of the other two robots. It can even travel to the other locations and attack them, jeopardizing their missions.
Each of the three robots can communicate with the other two, remotely sending them renewing signals when they encounter a problem. Prometheus and Khione can unscramble Argus’s wires, while Argus can warm up Prometheus in cold temperatures, and cool down Khione if it’s exposed to heat.
But each robot has a limited amount of energy, and must “repower’ itself autonomously in its own environment. Prometheus draws its energy through its solar panels. Khione powers itself by drawing in hydrogen from ice crystals, and Argus can find an empowering ore, hermetium, in some of the cliffs of the Rachmaninoff Basin.
Each robot has self-defense mechanisms against an intruder. Which is good, because an archrival country, Rogue Island, has dispatched a “Chaosbot”, and you never know where it will show up!
“Chaosbot” can send an ice blast onto Prometheus or direct flames onto Khione. It can play havoc with all three robots by breaching Argus’s outer shell and commandeering the robot, thus attacking the other two.Players choose which of the three robots they want to play, and begin their missions accordingly. Points are accumulated by gaining samples, and bonus points are achieved if a robot runs over a Roman numeral “X” or drives by a hidden “2021” in the Mercurian landscape. But if one of the other two robots is destroyed, the surviving robots each lose one sample and have to find another one.
After a robot’s mission is complete, it must return to the mother ship and depart for Mars. But watch out for that Chaosbot! You win if you manage to leave Mercury successfully with the three samples intact.
With this project, I hope to interest players in the environment of Mercury and conditions of the planet, so that they learn without realizing they're learning, as they play. I used the Unity game engine to develop the site where the game will be played, and PowerPoint to make my slides.
For this project, I developed my game site in Unity, and used PowerPoint for my slides. Due to a family emergency, I did not get to start until the actual day of the hackathon, so did not work with others but still wanted to submit a project.
Space Agency Data
I used the