Amnesia on Mars| Can You Hear Me Now?
Can You Hear Me Now?
Amnesia on Mars - Immersive survival game
Summary
You wake up to the extremely loud sound of an alarm and red lights dancing on the walls of a strange cabin. Experiencing a terrible headache, you sit up and realize you don't remember anything. While standing up, you hear a lady's voice calling out to you. She is MArgaret, the Mars Assistant AI, from whom you learn that you are on Mars, and there has been a huge marsquake (the first one ever recorded) right after your crewmates left the surface with the mars shuttle - RedOne - to investigate Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars. You need to relearn everything and fix things in order to reconnect to the shuttle and earth, as comms are down. No worries, MArgaret has your back.
How I Addressed This Challenge
What did you develop?
I developed a platform independent prototype of a game (currently in the shape of a mobile app) that puts you in the role of an astronaut that suffers from amnesia and needs to relearn everything about Mars, space travel and communication technologies to be able to progress in the game and survive.
Why is it important?
With the growing interest in discovering (and later colonizing :)) Mars we need a huge number of scientists, engineers, astronauts. The game I develop aims to catch the attention of young people of age 12-18. The target group will see that this is not rocket science (well, it actually is, but you get it:)) and they might get interested in choosing a path to work on the field later. Also it will contribute to generally raise awareness and get more supporters on the side of space and mars missions.
What does it do?
The game acts as an interface that is responsible for transformin resources/datasets provided by NASA and co. into enjoyable puzzles and challenges in the game. The game itself offers an exciting, enjoyable adventure while it teaches the principles and fundamentals of communication technologies and challenges on Mars.
How does it work?
The game is going to be a free app in the App Store, Google Play and later Oculus Store to reach the most players possible. Once the app is downloaded the user can start playing right away and learn about Mars and communication technologies while playing.
What do you hope to achieve?
I hope to come up with a great story that really "pulls in" the players to make it really easy to learn about Mars and Communication technologies. I'd like to get 50k downloads of the apps at least.
After the Space Apps Challenge...
First I want to develop the Android version of the game and finalize the story line and in-game challenges, based on the feedback of players and I will start working on the VR version of the app at the end of 2021.
If I had more time...
As I had really limited time to work on this (~15-20 hours) I decided to go with ProtoPie to create a simple interactive UI.
If I had...
-3-5 days: I would have created a native Android app in Android Studio. Google offers a nice set of libraries called jetpack, which allows developers to develop faster before. I would have used coroutines for the network layer and databinding in the popular MVVM design pattern.
-2-4 weeks: I would have gone the Unity way. Unity is great to develop cross platform application, meaning that you have one codebase that is compiled into the wished package for the targeted platform (for example: Android, iOS) As I have far less experience with Unity, development in it might take a little bit longer, but in the long run, you gain a lot by having only one codebase. As Unity is also one of the platforms to build VR applications, part of the codebase could be reused when building the VR version of the app
-6 months: I would definitely go for the VR version, as VR offers the most immersive gameplay ever
Afterlife...
I really want to build Amnesia on Mars. In order to get the best experience, I will look for people with the following skills/professions:
-Graphic Designer - The prototype only uses pictures under creative commons licence, but to make it look great and unique we need someone with the eye and hand :)
-Space/Mars Research Advisor - Someone with the knowledge to validate the content of the app
-Translators, proof readers - I plan to release the app in the top 3 most spoken languages: English, Spanish, Chinese
How I Developed This Project
What inspired your team to choose this challenge?
I am an Android Engineer and also a Mars enthusiast. I just think it's amazing that we are becoming a multi-planetary species and that we have the chance to do better on another planet.
The idea of this game has been floating around my head for a while now, and I thought the Space Apps Challenge is a great place to validate my idea.
Based on the feedback I get I definetly want to publish it as an Android App in the next phase and as a VR game for Oculus Quest 2 in 2022.
What was your approach to developing this project?
I wanted to create a game that I would LOVE to play.
Being an Android developer it was a very obvious choice to let my idea manifest in the form of a mobile app. Both iOS and Android are great platforms to reach out a lot of people, and thank to the notifications system it is really easy to keep the users engaged and come back to the app.
What tools, coding languages, hardware, software did you use to develop your project?
I realized that the time I had was not enough for me to come up with a viable native prototype, so I used Protopie to create an interactive MVP that can show what I imagined the game to look like.
Protopie has iOS and Android apps that can be downloaded to open the Protopie project and get a close-to-native-experience.
The version to be published will be probably done in Unity to support both Android and iOS and make some parts of it reusable for the VR version of the Amnesia on Mars.
What problems and achievements did your team have?
- For some personal reasons I had very little time to work on the project, but I feel that I still did a lot, so I am proud of the team :)
- data.nasa.gov was not working for me - but I found a lot of other resources
How I Used Space Agency Data in This Project
General approach
Whenever the user faces a new challenge/puzzle/task, he has the possibility to learn about mars or the technologies used. In these cases we reflect the official NASA documents and data through MArgaret.
Api usage
MArgaret (Mars Assistant AI) is going to be hooked up with the public APIS to gather and show real (not live) data of Mars in the game (for example the outside temperature or the wind from the previous Sol through InSight: Mars Weather Service API)
Based on the current distance of Mars from the Earth (we can use https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi to get the ephmeris data of Mars and calculate it) the communcation windows between Earth and Mars will be simulated in the game, meaning that when the player sends a message to earth he needs to wait the calculated time until he/she gets a response.
Other open data/public datasets
The open data portal has been down for most of the time of the hackathon, so I did not have enough time to consider what other datasets we could use.
Project Demo
A 30 sec video on the project 🚀 (https://youtu.be/AepwAYOD9Ss)
To play around with the prototype you can use the link below. Note that the prototype is not optimized for all mobile screen sizes. You will definitely have no problems using a web browser. For an almost native experience you can try downloading the protopie app from Google Play and App Store, but as said, minor UI related issues might occur, as the prototype was built for the screen size of the iPhone 11 Pro.
Project Code
Data & Resources
InSight: Mars Weather Service API
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/scan/services/networks/deep_space_network/about
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/tdm/dsoc/index.html
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/mathandscience/research/Prob_OGS_Chem_detail.html
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/scan/communications/outreach/funfacts/txt_antenna.html
https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi
Images in the prototype not owned by NASA fall under the creative commons licence and were downloaded from freepik.com