Caciques

Salvador, Bahia State | SuperpowEARTH

SUPER BEARTH

High-Level Project Summary

Have you ever imagined a Super Hero who has the power to decompose organic waste and create creative solutions for the reuse of plastics that pollute the environment? If so, our Super Bearth was created for you! And if your answer is no, embark with us on this adventure in our 2D game. We'll teach you several cool strategies the earth has to turn pollutants into benefits, in a natural way. Through our hero you will learn about different recycling systems and learn best practices to take care of our most precious asset for life on earth... nature!

Link to Project "Demo"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eMA_G3qhgJAkWlYZEvPTz85VnbEohhIq/view?usp=sharing

Link to Final Project

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MPD7LUQd_hTB6_VZJ_qce6aULcg8xgAX?usp=sharing

Detailed Project Description

Created by the Caciques team for the project.

Detailed Project Description

After the 1st Industrial Revolution, the introduction of machinery and expansion of industries became the key factor in the degradation of nature. Over the past 260 years of the 1st Industrial Revolution, we can see the consequences of the unrestrained use of raw materials. Consequences so serious that they afflict the ecosystem as a whole.

Thinking about it, we from the Chiefs team, elaborated the Super Bearth. He is the Super Hero contained in a 2D game that generates an identification and a feeling of empathy for the planet through a character that aims to alert people about the importance of preserving our environment.

According to NASA research data, Earth has its own means of reversing damage to the environment. The Hero that we developed has attributes that include characteristics that are already known to our planet, but not highly valued by most individuals.

We, from the Caciques team, understand how it is necessary to show paths to be followed to avoid a tragic future. And that's why we chose to have children as our target audience initially, because we believe that, if we enlighten our little ones now, they will make a difference in the not-so-distant future. And as a means of greater dissemination, the game will have the option to be made available in the user's language.

As already reported in scientific studies, the core of our earth has a lot of energy. And according to research by Englishman James Lovelock in 1960 for NASA, the Earth would have a certain chemical combination of gases that differentiates it from other planets like Mars and Venus. This would be a behavior between the biosphere and its living organisms to achieve a stability that leads to the existence of life. Such theory became known as the Gaia Hypothesis.

From this premise, our team produced a story where the Earth, tired of the hostility of human actions, created a being formed by a biomass that uses electromagnetic waves to manipulate a transformation of organic waste and attract plastics to convert them into other materials. We consider these powers very important to our hero, due to Earth's urgency to have less polluting materials on her. Hence, we name our super power as the Conversion Power.

Conversion Power

We subdivided the power of our hero into two parts, one would be the power of natural transformation, for the decomposition of organic waste such as food leftovers, animal feces, and others of the type that make up this class, and the other facet of our power it would be the unnatural transformation eg recycling processes of plastics contained in the land and waters that surround our character's map.

- Natural Conversion: In this facet of power, our hero after going through exploring and collecting materials, would use his ability to decompose organic waste and transform it into other things. For example, the soil would potentially become more fertile for growing your food, and it would turn this decomposed material into an energy-producing gas. This in-game energy is used to earn points and prevent potential pollutants from degrading the planet.

After actions like these are performed in the game by our user, curiosities about nature and how the reuse of gases such as methane can unleash the destruction of the ozone layer will appear on your screen.

- Unnatural Conversion: Already in this facet of power, when our user is exposed to situations of creations of houses, furniture and buildings, we will use a different perspective from the existing games so far.

Because, instead of sawing trees to build real estate, our hero will use super recycling to attract plastics that are around him, transforming them into microplastics and soon after obtaining bio wood.

As when super decomposition is performed, when super recycling is used, captivating and fun cards will appear, informing our user how transformation processes occur, providing knowledge about new technologies.

Created by the Caciques team for the project.

eatures of our game

Our Super Hero seeks to create in our users affection for nature in an educational way, so we seek to create it as a biomass produced by nature itself. To attract the children's attention, we tried to draw him in a very charismatic way, with a human physical shape, but with plant qualities, such as his hair and skin texture.

We seek not only to benefit game users, but also to make an impact on the environment where they live. Therefore, we do that, when our player reaches a certain amount of points, in order for him to unlock a new Skin, he needs to do a good deed, such as planting a beanstalk, collecting garbage from his street or recycling the trash from your house.

After that, accompanied by an adult, he would record or take a photo performing the action and post it on digital platforms, marking our profile. This way, we could follow a little more closely what our users are doing and share it on our profiles.

Created by the Caciques team for the project.

Our project also aims at teamwork, however, due to the short time of the marathon, we could not develop more levels that incorporated the interaction of several users at the same time. But, we leave as a suggestion that, based on new updates, Super Bearth includes challenges that incorporate multiple users who interact with each other and who are virtual neighbors, thus creating an online community united with the purpose of saving the planet. We left a mission to NASA, the inclusion of new maps and exploration of more forms of education about recycling processes.

Why express powers through a game?

Created by the Caciques team for the project.

To better exemplify our hero, we thought it would be more fluid to explain him through a simple 2D adventure and exploration game, because we've had this style of play that's been widespread all over the world since the 80s.

For the creation of our scenarios, we use files in PNG format, which is of great resolution, does not weigh the game system and has transparency. Also applying the Sprites creation process, to give a simple movement to our character, graphically using the x and y axes to represent the game environment. And as this type of game only features images, the processing used for its execution is infinitely smaller than in 3D games, thus facilitating the dissemination of our Super Bearth on smartphones, as these devices do not yet have such advanced processing and have the bonus not to demand from our user a larger space of their hardware.

Space Agency Data

Our team used the following NASA open data to create our Super Bearth:

NASA's Earth Observatory Glossary - The words that inspired this glossary were: Decomposition; Biomass; Electromagnetic radiation; Increased greenhouse effect; Gaia Hypothesis; Greenhouse gas; Methane CH4; Pollutant.

On mission Podcast - Season 1 - Season 3: Planet Earth/ Episode 9: Life Bound from NASA website: Through this podcast we extract information that supports the personification of the Earth as a being.

Podcast Blog: DIY: Tag : NASA Recycling - Kind of like Earth: Through this blog we had the insight to use recycling as our character's super power.

Blog: NASA Earth Observatory Field Notes - Tag: Plastic - Pollution: From this blog, we had a way to address the problems our hero will face.

Hackathon Journey

One of the great challenges that our team faced was to produce the graphics of our game and develop a pitch that could involve the most relevant parts of an idea as inspiring as ours. But, we cannot forget the great learning that this marathon provided us. We are grateful for all the support and guidance received by our mentor Lílian Dutra. We also thank the Caffeine team for all their support and our teacher Isabel Sartori who introduced us to this very revolutionary NASA hackathon.