I participated in the 2016 edition of the NASA space apps challenge, which has held in many countries all over the world. In Romania, the event was held in Cluj-Napoca.
We had little more than a day for development and we had to choose one of the challenges provided by NASA.
I posted on the event's Facebook group on who would like to work on a few projects that I was interested in. I met the team the next day, a group of four high school students.
We worked on the SimSpace challenge, inside the Journey to Mars category. The focus was on creating a human habitat on Mars:
"Players could build a habitat that could withstand the Lunar or Martian environment while also taking into consideration that its inhabitants need to have adequate power and supplies, be able to produce food, have locations sleep, live and work."
We developed a prototype of a game using Unity, called Thinking Outside the Earth.
The player had to survive as long as possible in order to achieve a higher score. In the figure above, we can see the main elements of the habitat: a green house to grow plants/food capsules to sleep, exercise, live etc (further in the distance) a water drill (for retrieving water from beneath the surface) a rover for transportation
They could check the status of their main resources on a HUD. As you can see above, these were: Oxygen - depleted when outside of a capsule, at a certain rate Food - depleted at a certain rate; regenerated by growing tomatoes and wheat in the green house (which should cover basic food needs); Doing so costs water and energy Water - slowly regenerating through the water drill, as data suggests there may be substantial amount of water under Mars' surface - however, choosing the planet's Poles where the most frozen ice is, might not be the best choice for a habitat, due to the steep angle they make with the sun and the even more extreme conditions for survival in those areas. Transporting the water also wouldn't make sense, unless it is not available in required quantities under the surface of Mars, in other areas Energy - used to power equipment, e.g.: growing food, using the Rover for transportation. Replenished through solar panels and wind turbines.
In addition, we also assumed that the habitat will not be able to survive on it's own to start with, as it would require resources to build and maintain equipment that is required for survival such as solar panels and the like. Therefore, drop pods (pods + parachutes) with supplies are dropped in a random position close to the player, at specific time intervals (which are random between a certain range).
In order to gamify the experience, the drop pods arrive frequently (we assume that the time is greatly increased, in order to show how it would work) and give a random resource bonus to the player (a bonus to any one of the four main resources).
You can read more about the project, and reasons for the food chosen etc in the provided link.
This project finished on the 3rd place at the NASA Space Apps Challenge in Cluj-Napoca and was also awarded the popular vote.