High-Level Project Summary
Final Destination X: Mars Outlast is a role-playing survival game with the main player as one of the astronaut crew members set to land on Mars. Starting from the launch from Earth, the player is tasked to pack up enough supplies for the trip. Within the seven-month journey, the main player needs to keep his health and sanity stats in a high level by accomplishing tasks around the ship (i.e. eating, exercising, sleeping). Stages are divided into months, each with challenges to resolve, like radiation or a crew member getting sick. The game challenges a player's strategy and resource management, being familiar also with the tasks and risks involved in a long-term manned space flight.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Final Destination X: Mars Outlast
The game simulates the preparation of the crew and the needed supplies, learning to live in space inside of the space ship while maintaining its good condition and managing hazards of space travel.
What It Does
The game provides a simulation of the set of problems and challenges that crew members can encounter in their journey to Mars. We have based the events surrounding the game on existing research and data to provide a game story that is aligned to what we know so far on this manned journey to the red planet.
Benefits
As the game is presented in a game, middle-schoolers, and anyone who is, will be challenged, in an entertaining and educational way, on how it will be like to be one of the crew members aboard a journey to Mars.
Our Goal
The game's mission is to present scientific-based challenges, of astronauts bound to Mars, in a way that will be appreciated, not just by kids actually, but anyone who are interested in the subject of manned space missions, without overwhelming them with jargon or concepts that might be intimidating for them. We hope that through playing this game, player's curiosity will be piqued to learn more about space flight.
Gameplay
Prelaunch Preparation Minigame
⭐Within the time limit, the player is tasked to inspect the ship if there are malfunctions. The Player also needs to pack all the necessary supplies for the trip.
💡Player gets to appreciate the thorough planning that is involved in a manned spaceflight
Space Travel Phase
⭐ The estimated time to reach Mars from Earth is 7 months. Based on this, we divided this part of the game into 7 stages, representing each month elapsed during space travel. Each month, a specific challenge is presented to the player that needs to be resolved in order to continue their journey to the red planet. Throughout the 7 stages, there are also basic tasks that needed to be accomplished by the crew member player, to maintain a good level of health and sanity stats.
💡 The player gets to hone his strategy skills with every move and decision that he will be doing in the game. This is the foundational skill needed by every crew member on the ship -- to do sound judgments to resolve the challenges that they will be encountering on space travel.
⭐ - Goal
💡 - Benefit
Future Enhancements for the Game
If given more time, these are the features that we want to add to the game:
- Make the game a multi-player game, each player having the freedom to choose his role in the game. With this functionality, all players will be able to practice their coordination and cooperation skills with fellow human players in resolving the problem.
- For each crew member, specific tasks are assigned based on their specialty, i.e. Botanist: need to monitor the greenhouse, Doctor: make sure fellow crew members have healthy stats, Engineer: monitor the fuel and the ship's temperature
- Create difficulty levels for the voyage mode. Players can choose which destination they want to set, and the number of stages and challenges will depend on their chosen destination. For example: Level 1: Moon (5 days), Level 2: Near-Earth Asteroid (3 months), Level 3: Mars (7 months), Level 4: Mars and back to Earth (14 months)
Supporting Documents
Space Agency Data
The specific data that we used are the information about the lifestyle of the astronauts, the risk that may occur in space, and managing the resources that will be needed for the travel. This inspires us to formulate the game around this data, through the references below:
Hackathon Journey
Space Apps Experience
Our space apps experience was truly memorable because we learned a lot from our teammates. We have different talents and expertise and we were able to highlight our strengths throughout the hackathon. Most of us are first-timers in this hackathon and we can definitely say that this was an experience to remember for quite some time!
Learnings
We are so thrilled on the experience because even remotely, we learned to communicate with each other. From meeting and collaborating with new colleagues turned friends, we learned a lot about what it means to work as a team and we felt all the effort each and every one of us put into this project.
We learned a lot from the research we performed to make sure the game was as accurate to real life as we could, and overall just had a fun time with the coordination between the various aspects of our game.
Inspirations
We chose this challenge mostly because the concept itself intrigued us, we all talk about terraforming and moving people to Mars, yet what WERE the dangers on the journey itself? As people with a heavy interest in biology and chemistry, as well as game development and creation, we knew this was what I would pick as a challenge.
It inspired us to understand the probability of a manned space flight to Mars.
Our Approach in Developing the Project
When it came to conceptualizing our project, we tried to view it on the perspective of our audience (middle schoolers) and see what are their likes and dislikes as well as what they have not yet been exposed to or are not yet familiar with in the gaming world.
In working on this project, we split the workload between us in the team depending on where we excel at, and as people whose had tons of experience with every genre of games, we were quite confident in our abilities to create an engaging and fun gameplay loop and mainly focused on that!
We spent the greater part of the first day in brainstorming ideas before we transformed them into realistic and fun game mechanics that were in line with what the storyboard team was making! In dealing with setbacks such as time limit and conflicting ideas between different parts of the game, we simply talked it out together and created a unified plan that all of us could work on together as a team.
Our storyboard writers' approach were to be as imaginative and creative as possible while considering facts and scenarios that could occur in space. This method allowed us to learn more about the hazards in space, together with proposed solutions from scientists around the world. Since it's not a usual topic that we would encounter daily, especially in school, it was also fun learning about the lives of astronauts in space and how they manage to be prepared for all disastrous scenarios.
We also splitted our goals into subgoals to make it easier to come up with the mechanics and then incorporating them all to the bigger picture of the game.
Setbacks and Challenges
Given the time constraints, we had to limit our scope and focus on the features that would really help us come to our goal of educating kids about space flight.
Acknowledgment
As we reach the end of this journey, we express our gratitude to NASA for conducting this wonderful and inspiring event.
We would like to thank each other for showing up and helping each other throughout the entire process. Thank you to every one of the teams members: Joelle, Rain, Kath, Daniel and Stacy for all their hard work!
Mikhail specifically would love to thank his dearest girlfriend, Delia, his friends, and parents for all their support while he went on and accomplished this challenge while meeting new people!
Rain wants to thank her friends who also joined in my first hackathon journey, Joelle and Xander. She thanks them for always supporting her in anything that she loves doing. Both of them never fail to help bring out her best self, and she'll always be grateful for that. She give her thanks to Kyle, too, for always serving as her inspiration to do better in many things. She knows he would've been proud of her for going out of her comfort zone and working with new people outside of her circle. Lastly, she gives thanks to Justin Phan, Arthur Nery, Olivia Rodrigo, Pamungkas, LANY, and many more for always giving her the energy to work long hours for this project.
References
Resources:
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/stem-on-station/ditl_eating
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/eclss_diary5.html
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/home/F_Living_in_Space.html
Living in Space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouDKD9G9jOE
https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/hazards
https://earthsky.org/space/human-health-dangers-mars-travel/
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/en-route-mars-astronauts-may-face-big-health-risks
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41526-020-00124-6/figures/1
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/preparing-trip-mars
https://www.space.com/10694-human-spaceflight-dangers-infographic.html
https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/elements/radiation/risks
https://www.nasa.gov/content/growing-plants-in-space
https://www.nasa.gov/analogs/what-are-analog-missions
https://www.space.com/10694-human-spaceflight-dangers-infographic.html
Tags
#game, #spacetravel, #mars, #spacehazards
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.