High-Level Project Summary
We propose a simulation game - Survive for Mars, where you will create your own avatar and be a captain of the crew of other 3-4 avatars. The main goal of the game will be to keep your avatar and your crew alive, checking up on their health bars; all while maintaining the tasks on the spaceship (which will be in form of mini-games) and create bonds with your crewmates. You will have 6 health bars: Brain, Eyes, Immunity, Muscles, Bones and Mood (mental health state). Various tasks and events will affect these stats differently, and your job is to use these observations to keep your crew healthy. The calculations of health impacts are made-up based on scientific data provided by NASA.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
What makes our solution special?
- Challenging, while educating. The game provides you, the player, a challenge, asking you, daring you to keep your crew alive. This challenge will keep you, the player, engaged and excited throughout the game; hence the education process will be seamless.
- Initial low health settings. You can create yourself even more challenge by setting the health settings low in the very beginning – this way you can start your journey of space survival already ill, and then see and experiment if you can cure your illness in space conditions, and also observe how low health bars will impact your productivity, gameplay and the spaceship.
- Accurate representation. Our calculations on the tasks, events and environment’s impact on human’s health are based on scientific publications, provided by NASA.
- Characters are various - like in real life. We tried to make our game realistic. All people are different, hence our crew members will be designed all different too – with their own skills, roles and habits. We do also simulate avatar's movement in microgravity.
- Educate and inspire. We believe that a pleasant “by-product” of our game is to inspire. It can make you, the player, get interested in science behind this game and fuel your ambition to become a part of space exploration.
DEMO
This is a screenshot from the demo.
As you can see, here is our avatar, Salem, in the bottom-left corner.
In the bottom-right corner we see our health bars: Brain, Immunity, Muscles, Bones, Eyes and Mood. Mood is very important – as an astronaut in a long space travel, you are far away from your home, from your family, you are isolated; which all can have a great impact on your emotional well-being, and all other aspects of your life.
You can also see that atop of my avatar, there are other avatars’ icons: Sara, Paul and Vicky.
Right now we are assigned a task to catch the rabbit that has escaped. This is seconds before we catch it 🐰
TECHNICAL DETAILS:
We used Unity Engine, and due to lack of time (hackathon-style) we used lots of public Unity assets, such as UMA mixamo and Yuma for character appearance generation.
FUTURE PROSPECTS:
We sure did bite off more than we can chew :) For now we have a demo of the game.
If we had more time, resources and hands, we would realize lots of our ideas:
- More realistic impact on health. The numbers that we used in our game are already based on the scientific data; but with a bigger team to work specifically with that we can increase the accuracy of our calculations and give a clearer and more realistic representation of what an astronaut’s organism goes through in a spaceship on a daily basis.
- Detalization. We think it is important for a game to be based on scientific data on all aspects – not just in their primary goal. Hence, adding details like accurate trajectory of Solar System planets’ movement, spaceships designed from real-life spaceships would be great.
- Complex characters. When you are isolated for a very long time with only around five people, bonded by a common mission – you become a family. It is important to add complex characters with their own stories and character arcs – to make the game more realistic, and to make you, the player, more emotionally invested.
Space Agency Data
We used mostly the data provided by NASA GeneLab. Using heuristic analis we designed our very simple health system and divided astronaut's general health stats into 6 distinct portions, each of which can be affected individually: Brain (+eyes), Immune System, Muscle, Bone and Mental or Mood. They also can affect each other to simulate general impact of the most common health issues in the space. We analysed these research papers, ISS experiments and adapted the obtained data to our games' system. Surely, our health system doesn't have any options to indicate its state such as exact disease, but we have estimated to the best of our. However, we've made a try to put accesseble statistics into game numbers and to adapt information about health issues and treatment for such sophisticated (in real life) parametres as Brain or Immune into game numbers as well.
We have also watched Five Hazards of Human Spaceflight educational videos - specifically "Isolation" which inspired us the idea of astronaut's mental health being in a somewhat vulnerable state in spaceship's isolated conditions, and hence an astronaut should work harder on this aspect of their health and body, than one normally would on Earth.
We designed those six health stats to represent major points of health risks as well as the list of possible interactions that crewmates could have during the trip and their impact to health. We also heuristically and partly statistically calculated the health points that avatar is loosing by just being in the spacecraft in the open space.
We believe that given more time and bigger team dedicates specifically on research of human impact, we will be able to make the game more accurate and educative!
Hackathon Journey
This was our first time in Space Apps challenge, and we have enjoyed it a lot! We formed an international team, working from all countries, all timezones, all having different backgrounds; but we have worked productively nevertheless. We worked on Jira, contacted each other through Telegram and Slack, and collaborated through Git.
We chose this challenge because it seemed fun - while reading the description, some of us wanted to play that game immediately, and some had a clear vision of how this game should look like. Along the way we have learned a lot about how actually hard it is to be an astronaut - not that we've thought it is easy before, but now we have clearer picture of everyday struggles of these brave people.
References
NASA Gene Lab publications (all publications about Brain, Immune system, Muscle and Bone)
ISS experiments reviews
Five Hazards of Human Spaceflight
Recent publications on the Biology of Spaceflight
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/stem-on-station/ditl_morning_routine
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/stem-on-station/ditl_working
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/nasa-knows/what-is-a-spacesuit58.html
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/stem-on-station/ditl_free_time
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/benefits-for-humanity_third.pdf
Solar system OpenData (le-systeme-solaire.net)
Unity
UMA, mixamo asset
Git, github
Slack
Jira
Unsplash
Flaticon
Thank you for your attention, we hope you loved our idea and already can’t wait to play the game 🌟
Tags
#game #mars #simulator #unity3d #spacecraft
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.