The Last Team

México City | Space Quest: The Game

What is the right answer?

High-Level Project Summary

The Last Team developed a game in the form of a visual novel using Renpy, a free software which is based on Python. The name of the novel is "What is the right answer?"Throughout its history, the game explains different topics related to space exploration, while asking questions to confirm that the player has understood the different concepts. The questions are multiple choice and range from filling in the blanks or remembering the name of concepts, to performing simple mathematical calculations.As there are different endings, which depend on the number of correct answers, the player is encouraged to make an effort to learn and get to know each of the endings.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1b4Rj3VpKpIDZDCu7yn8GcN_hTlWNMU8h/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=100240630953229437872&rtpof=true&sd=true

Link to Final Project

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1aw8cNIpx3kPHaZNM-slLkxduNExbqYdm?usp=sharing

Detailed Project Description

What exactly does it do?

The Last Team developed a visual novel called "What is the right answer?". In this visual novel you can learn different topics related to space exploration troughout its history.

The story begins with the main character waking up in a desert. Beside him there is only sand and a robot that will be his companion throughout an interstellar journey whose goal is to find life.

How does it work?

Like all visual novels, this is an interactive fiction video game featuring text-based story with narrative style of literature and interactivity aided by static or sprite-based visuals.

Throughout its history you can learn different concepts about space exploration, satellites, telecommunications, aerospace science, astrophysics and astronomy.

Concepts are reinforced by multiple-choice questions. These questions range from remembering the definition of concepts, filling in the blank, to doing some simple math calculations.

The majority of player interaction is click to keep the text and graphics moving, while answering multiple choice questions. Each right answer gives one point, the number of points earned lead to different endings. Those endings are know as Bad ending, Good ending and True ending.

What benefits does it have?

The player is encouraged to replay in order to meet the three endings, each ending counts one of the three possible destinations for the way of life found by the player.

Since the true ending is obtained only with a perfect score, the player is encouraged to work hard to learn to obtain the true ending.

In addition, it has several references to pop culture and science fiction novels or movies waiting to be discovered.

What do you hope to achieve?

I hope that those who play it are interested in delving deeper into the different topics covered in the game.

In addition, I would like the three different endings to generate some doubt or question, both scientific and social.

Lastly, I would like players to be able to discover all hidden references throughout the game.

What tools, coding languages, hardware, or software did you use to develop your project?

I mainly use Renpy, which is Python-based software used to create visual novels.

I use Gimp software for image editing.

I wanted to use Itch to upload the game to a website where anyone can play it, but Itch has size restrictions for free accounts and that caused me to have to upload the game as a downloadable zip.

Space Agency Data

The most important data we use is from NASA's Basics of Space Flight tutorial for information to help us explain and visualize concepts.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/basics/

Some of the concepts were searched in external links to the tutorial, but always looking for them to be part of NASA and ESA. Some pages like NASA History, Earth Obseravtory, JPL, or like ESA Cosmos or ESA Blog

The images used were mainly downloaded from the NASA and ESA galleries.

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/index.html

https://images.nasa.gov/

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images

Hackathon Journey

How would you describe your Space Apps experience?

The experience was quite fun, although a bit stressful in the final moments. I especially liked the fact of creating a project from scratch and that it is conditioned to solve a specific challenge, which was own choice.

What did you learn?

I learned to better organize my time and to search on many pages. In addition, I learned some new concepts as well as others that I already knew but did not remember. Due to the type of challenge, I was also able to learn to use new software (Renpy) that I can use for other projects.

Lastly, I discovered some NASA pages that I had never seen before.

What inspired your team to choose this challenge?

Since I like to help spread science on social media and this challenge is about bringing people closer to space exploration, I decided it was a perfect challenge for me. Also, I wanted to use my love to science fiction novels to create a story that would be interesting to the players.

What was your approach to developing this project?

Since I have played several visual novels, my approach was precisely to create a story with different possible endings depending on the player's decisions. Since the challenge has an educational side, I decided to change the decisions to multiple-choice questions that help to score points.

How did your team resolve setbacks and challenges?

I had never used Renpy so the first challenge was learning how to create a visual novel, this was solved by reading the documentation and watching various tutorials

The next challenge was to find the right image for each moment in history, fortunately I already knew the NASA gallery, which greatly simplified the work.

The biggest challenge was to create a story that was fluent and did not feel as forced to include the questions. The story had many changes as well as the order of the questions, but I am satisfied with the result despite not being 100% finished.

Is there anyone you'd like to thank and why?

First I want to thank my sister Alicia for her support and encourage me throughout the challenge.

Since it is a science fiction story, I want to thank Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, my two favorite science fiction authors. The game is based on some of his novels, as well as many of the hidden references.

References

PICTURES AND INFO

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/basics/

https://www.nasa.gov/stem/foreducators/k-12/index.html

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/

https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/rocket/rktpow.html

https://history.nasa.gov/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/