- Bryan Emmanuel Duarte Lozano. GitHub Profile.
- Aylin Galindo Acosta. GitHub Profile.
- Maricela Saraí Elizondo Martínez.
- Fabián Eduardo Cruz Amador. GitHub Profile.
In "The Trail to Mars: Can You Keep Your Crew Alive?", our challenge was to develop a game in which players, specifically, middle schoolers, focus on keeping an avatar alive and healthy during a space travel from Earth to Mars and back. The NASA gave us several resources for us to learn about the potential risks astronauts could face in such a long voyage, and how scientists are working to countermeasure them.
We are a group of people passionate about videogames, therefore, we know that gamers could be intererested about the space exploration, but maybe not as much to investigate about the real implications of those travels. Our main goal with this project was to develop a game people could play and learn without getting bored.
We used the data provided by the NASA, specially the information of the Human Research Program of the NASA about The 5 Hazards of Human Spaceflight, to think about how these hazards could be implemented as interesting game mechanics. From there, we imagined a settle and complementary mechanics that in sum, resulted in this game that we named: "Astronauts".
Players of Astronauts can play online using any browser. First, they will encounter a main menu in which they can choose to play a tutorial to learn the controls, motivations and challenges of the game, or to go directly to the adventure. The option of Credits is also available for anyone who want to know us.
Once the players begin the adventure, they will find a spaceship with a tripulation of three astronauts. The player can select any astronaut at any moment clicking with its mouse, and control the character using the arrow keys. Each astronaut has its own statistics: Hunger, Sleep, Medicine, Bathroom, Exercise and Mental Health. These statistics represent the needs that an astronaut could have in a long space travel.
The player's goal is to keep the tripulation alive and healthy. Astronauts statistics decrease with the time depending of theirs conditions. Therefore, the spaceship have a set of stations that characters can use to increase their statistics: a gym for the exercise, a toilet for the bathroom and so on. If any member of the tripulation get any statistic to get zero, it is Game Over. If the player can keep the tripulation alive during all the travel to Mars and back (represented in the top right corner of the UI), then it is a successful round.
The project is a web video game, we use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to make it happen. As for JavaScript, we use a programming library called Kaboom.js. This allowed us to build the game through the HTML canvas. Some tools at the Software level that we use was Replit. This is an IDE in the browser that allowed us to code together in real time. For the sprites (images of the characters, objects, the ship, the backgrounds, etc.) we used 2, Aseprite and Pixilart.
One of the files provided by the space agency with which we worked and based many things on our project, was that of '5 Hazards of Human Spaceflight'. Thanks to this, all the team participants had a very clear vision of what we wanted to expose to the people that the video game is intended for. Even in our video game, we include a small dynamic regarding solar radiation and hostile enviroments. On the other hand, we also use information from the article 'GLDS-345: Mouse femur LC-MSMS upon weightlessness', in this we find very interesting aspects regarding bone loss and immune dysregulation. With this, we decided to include dynamics related to keeping the crew healthy with exercise, food and medications.
Some files provided by the space agency:
- https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/hazards
- https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/bodyinspace
- https://genelab-data.ndc.nasa.gov/genelab/accession/GLDS-345/
Some other other references that help us for the information within the project:
- https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/mars/overview/
- https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/stem-on-station/ditl_sleeping
Some of the Software used: