We built a game that uses NASA satellite data to simulate being on a spaceship. [TO ADD TO THIS]

Background

Inspiration:

In a time where the extent of the impacts of climate change are becoming fully realised, we wanted to create a game which had the potential to raise awareness in an entertaining and innovative way. Through our game we hope to highlight the importance of prevention where possible when it comes to climate change and to draw attention to the very real risk of climate change causing serious harm to and potentially destroying human life as we know it on Earth.

We wanted to find a way to make NASA's data accessible and easily manipulable for people of all ages, especially for younger people and the elderly. In addition, we aimed to use NASA's data to show the importance of documenting the Earth's changing climate.

What it does

Game Setting:

You (the player) wake up onboard a very high tech spaceship/space station that is in a low Earth orbit, which allows you to walk around and interact with features such as side view, the use of the arrow keys to move and clicking on objects to interact with them.

The spaceship has a glass floor through which the Earth is visible below (integrating satellite data) and has a tablet screen which can be used to view heat maps etcetera. Next to the tablet there is a piece of strange-looking technology which, upon inspection, reveals itself to be a "time travel telescope", which enables you to view the Earth from multiple other points in time. However the "time travel telescope" is broken so that you can only see into the past.

A skylight gives you a live view of the sky from the location of the spaceship.

To one side of the spaceship is a control panel with one seat, which is used via clicking. The arrow keys change the latitude and longitude of the spaceship and there is a throttle which alters both the speed and the altitude of the spaceship. As well as dials and readouts, we would like the control panel to display the spaceship's position on a globe.

On the other side of the spaceship there is a massive touchscreen which displays information about the app, setting and the current missions and/or objectives.

Plot:

You are from a post-apocalyptic future, where climate change has led to the total destruction of the Earth. The spaceship that you are on managed to save you and successfully transport you back to a time that was deemed safe (where you are now), however, due to the impact of travelling at light speed, you do not remember any of this.

All you have is a USB stick that contains corrupted Earth environment reports: your duty is to fix these reports. Examples of these reports are things like "The hottest place on Earth in 20&9 is n):&z2£æ" and "The image of London shown here is fr@m 1&87".

As time passes you start to remember the past... and that the purpose of the reports is to work out where the environment changed in order to save it in the (your) future.

You fix the time travel telescope so that it shows both the past and future. When you look through it it shows the post-apocalyptic Earth that you remember, but then the USB glows and the Earth changes to be healthy and full of life once again (thanks to your data).

The game "ends" with a message about climate change, but you can stay onboard the ship to explore.

Problems and achievements:

Poppy: Initially I couldn't use pygame because I didn't have the necessary pip software on my laptop needed to install it. After downloading pip I then couldn't install pygame because I did not have permission to install it (despite being the admin). To solve this problem I installed pygame onto only my user account, using the MacBook Terminal command: python3 -m pip install -U pygame --user

Trisha: Pygame was a bit temperamental! I eventually got it to work though... it was such a challenge to draw AND code a whole game in 2 days! (Over 800 lines I think...)

Nasa Resources:

We used the NASA LANDSAT API to get satellite images to display on the spaceship floor.

Future Plans:

We wish in future to expand the game with further data so the challenges become more complex and it takes longer to complete. We hope to at some point maybe even make it into a fully made 3D adventure game!

Built with:

This game was made using PyGame and uses the NASA LANDSAT earth imagery API.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1E2yNrSxku1...

Above is a link to our whole game so you can try it out. We put a lot of effort into this and would really appreciate it!

Tags:

#Earth science #Satellite #Spaceship #Climate change #Videogame #pygame #python