High-Level Project Summary
Biological Hero is a text-based adventure game that simulates the hazardous conditions of space travel. It's a fun way for the audience to learn the struggles astronauts face. Many of these hazards get overlooked in favor of more obvious ones, so this project will bring those into the limelight. Here is the link to play the game: https://digital-raiders-nasa22.herokuapp.com/
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
In this game, the player creates a biological superhero for the all-important purpose of retrieving your wallet from Mars. Your character will have 5 stats, based on the 5 Hazards of Human Spaceflight. The game interprets these hazards as these 5 biological superpowers:
- resistance to radiation
- ability to be alone and stay mentally healthy
- ability to survive with little nourishment
- ability to retain bodily health in low/no gravity environments
- ease of happiness in otherwise harsh environments
Once your character has been created, you follow them on a mission to Mars with three chapters: on the way, there, and back again.
During character creation, you will have a pool of 25 points to spread throughout the 5 stats, and each stat must stay between 0 and 10. The game then makes randomly determined tests on these stats to determine how successful the mission is, expressing this in the form of an entertaining story.
The main benefits of this project are its use of entertainment and humor to educate.
This game was developed in Python, with just a bit of Bash in order to use Heroku to implement it into a webpage. We used VS Code to edit our files and GitHub to store them. In VS Code, we used the Live Share extension so that we could edit our code simultaneously. For Python, we used the requests library, the terminal-img library, the inquirer library, and the python-dotenv library.
Space Agency Data
We used 2 APIs from NASA for this project: the Mars Rover Photos API and the MAAS Mars Weather API.
Mars Rover Photos (https://github.com/chrisccerami/mars-photo-api)
- This API is designed to collect image data gathered by NASA's Curiosity, Opportunity, and Spirit rovers on Mars and make it more easily available to other developers, educators, and citizen scientists. This API is maintained by Chris Cerami.
- Each rover has its own set of photos stored in the database, which can be queried separately. There are several possible queries that can be made against the API. Photos are organized by the sol (Martian rotation or day) on which they were taken, counting up from the rover's landing date. A photo taken on Curiosity's 1000th Martian sol exploring Mars, for example, will have a sol attribute of 1000. If instead you prefer to search by the Earth date on which a photo was taken, you can do that, too.
- Along with querying by date, results can also be filtered by the camera with which it was taken and responses will be limited to 25 photos per call. Queries that should return more than 25 photos will be split onto several pages, which can be accessed by adding a 'page' param to the query.
Mars Weather API (https://maas2.apollorion.com/)
- The MAAS2 API is a REST API built to help make it easier and more efficient to build interactive applications that want to utilize the wealth of weather data being transmitted by the Curiosity Rover on Mars. Our API is built upon the REMS (Rover Environmental Monitoring Station) data provided by the Centro de Astrobiologia (CSIC-INTA).
Once the character arrives at Mars in the storyline of the game, the data from these APIs integrates into the gameplay. Each time the player plays the game. it choses a random sol to take data from, then displays a photo from the rover from that sol. Also, the weather is integrated through the use of the UV index to decide how difficult the check for the player will be.
Hackathon Journey
We are a high school programming club, and this is our first hackathon. We're mostly looking for some experience by participating in Space Apps. We learned some new tools, like GitHub, important libraries, VS Code live share, Heroku, and how to use an API. We had a lot of fun doing this project. We mostly chose the Biological Superhero challenge because it seemed like a good entry point for a beginning team like us.
We would like to thank our parents & guardians for being with us to let us participate in this hackathon.