High-Level Project Summary
An event-based simulation of a trip from Earth to Mars.Users have to carefully plan and choose the resources they will take on the spaceship before setting out (food, water, fuel, medicine, spare parts).Along the way, they will encounter random events that force them to make tough choices and compromise between using up resources or losing vital stats (health, mental state, spacecraft health).All events are based on the 5 hazards of space (radiation, isolation, distance, gravity, environment).During the game, players can find information about space travel and the science behind it.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Gameplay
Phase 1: Planning
Users have to choose the resources they want to bring on the spaceship to Mars (food, water, fuel, medicine, spare parts, and other miscellaneous items)
Phase 2: The journey
Your journey starts on Earth.
On day one, you leave earth and pass various space landmarks before reaching the Moon.
From then on the simulation accelerates and days start passing by, as kilometers start counting up.
On each day there is a small random chance that you will be faced with a special hazardous event.
When an event occurs, the user must make a compromise between using some of the resources or losing some vital stats (health, mental health, aircraft health). If any of your resources or stats reach zero the mission will fail.
Example of events:
Spoiled food - you lose food and health. you can trade some medicine to avoid losing too much health.
Solar flares - if you ignore them you lose health and aircraft health. You can either disrupt your schedule and wait it out in a shielded section of the ship, or burn some fuel to alter your trajectory to avoid it.
Benefits
An interactive game experience can captivate the young student audience.
During the game real possible space-based events and challenges are presented to the players.
Making hard choices can teach the players about the difficulties of planning a space mission.
During the gameplay, scientific information about space travel is presented in a friendly way.
Tools and coding languages
The project was written in React, on top of the Next.js framework. Hosting and continuous integration provided by Vercel.
Source code available on Github: https://github.com/danmana/lost-in-space
Space Agency Data
https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/hazards
Hackathon Journey
We started this hackathon as a team of 5.
On the first morning, we did a lot of brainstorming to figure out how to implement the game and the mechanics behind it. Each of us did short investigates and then presented our findings during the brainstorming session.
Coding started around noon, and a few of us worked all through the night until Sunday.
During Sunday morning things started to fit together and we knew we had a winning solution.
We made our final touches in the morning, and then prepared the pitch and presentation, which we held around 1 pm.
After we finished the presentation it was finally time to go home and sleep.
References
https://github.com/danmana/lost-in-space
Tags
#game, #trail, #mars, #hazard, #trailtomars
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.