Procrammers II| Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History
Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History
GAIA Guardians
Summary
Tackling the challenge, Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History, Procrammers II developed an interactive and collaborative 2D game to educate and raise awareness on NASA’s Earth Science.GAIA Guardians is a 2D game that is created to spread awareness of the different problems that our planet is currently experiencing, and what we can do to resolve them.
How We Addressed This Challenge
The Problem
NASA had observed the different conditions of our planet using their various satellites. The data collected showed that previous environmental concerns are aggravating in an alarming rate. One problem that can be given is Global Warming. According to vast majority of climate scientists, the planet is heating up and it is cause by increased human emissions of green house gases, especially carbon dioxide. That is just one of the problems that our planet is currently experiencing. NASA has collected other data concerning Earth's Biodiversity, Our Ocean, Biomass Burning, The Arctic and even weather concerns. However, many people are still not aware of these studies and that is a growing concern for our planet.
Our Solution
According to Ibrahim et. al (2011), more than 80% of the students are interested in using games for their future learning. With this data, we thought that by making an interactive, multiplayer game about NASA’s Earth Science, more people will become more aware on how NASA study, observe, and monitor our planet. Our game will also inform the users—kids, teenagers, or young-adults—about the global problems occurring in the earth, especially on the environment.
How We Developed This Project
Inspiration
Due to the rising interests of the public surrounding various fast-paced and challenge oriented games, we had decided to create a game like this that mainly focuses on completing different tasks that can help in resolving the different environmental concerns our planet is currently experiencing. All the challenges present in this game was based on the different documents provided by NASA, particularly the Understanding Earth documents. We read the documents they had provided and decided that we would use this information to serve as an inspiration for our game.
Approach
We mainly focused on creating scenarios/tasks that shows the different problems our planet is currently experiencing, and what we could do to resolve them. Each solved task will result in a better earth and the goal of the game is to complete all tasks to finish the game.
Our Team
Our team is composed of 4 people, we divided them into two. Two people focused on game development and coding while the other two were assigned to game design, creating characters, and writing the documents.
Game Development:
Jon Errol Damias - UST BS Computer Science
Jens Elbert Damias - UST BS Computer Science
Game assets/documents:
Joshua Sapalaran - UST BS Information Technology
Juan Miguel Aquino - UST BS Information Technology
The tools we used are the following:
- Unity 2D
- C#
- Piskel
- Photoshop
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We used space agency data to serve as an inspiration for our different challenges and tasks. NASA Space Apps 2020 has provided us with various documents (Understanding Earth) that focuses on the different environmental concerns our planet is currently experiencing. One example of how we used the data in our game is how we used the information present in Understanding Earth: Biodiversity and Ecological Forecasting to create an environment which is experiencing deforestation due to human induced reasons. And in additional to that, we had researched about the different ways to address these problems and it served as a way to resolve one of our in-game challenges.
Project Demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8JZVMCABDo
Data & Resources
https://eospso.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/UnderstandingEarth-BiodiversityUPDATED_508_0.pdf
https://eospso.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/UnderstandingEarth-OurOcean_508_0.pdf
https://eospso.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Icy%20Arctic%20Final_508_0.pdf
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/upsDownsGlobalWarming.html