The longer human activities are changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the more visible, wider, and longer lasting the scope of environmental impacts may be. Your challenge is to tell a visual story about the impacts of the pandemic using Earth observation data and other complementary information.
"The Exile of Exodia" is a game that exposes the user to the story of a certain Exodia, a billionaire who left Earth when the pandemic first began. The self-centered man was mostly worried about protecting himself, but looking down from above, where time moves much faster, he sees what the pandemic did to his home planet. This experience makes him realize that Earth is our irreplaceable home, and how important the responsibility of protecting it is. The game puts the player in Exodia's shoes, as he walks through his space shuttle, looking down on Earth from its many windows. In the game, each window along the corridor shows one of four different countries, in one of two different timestamps.
We developed a game where the character looks at the effects of the pandemic from a unique point of view: Outer space. It is important when it comes to showcasing the negative consequences of Covid-19, to people who would otherwise disregard the statistics. This project introduces a new and creative way of conveying that important message, by immersing the player in a soothing and relaxing game play experience. What we are hoping to achieve, is building a new and fun way to check on our planet's state, which would be accessible to anyone, including children. This, of course, is not limited to Covid-19, but something that could be expanded to global warming and other issues, as a step forward when it comes to sensitizing the public and raising awareness.
We chose this challenge because it is the one where creativity is involved the most. We wanted to bring something new and interesting, and visually attractive. When we went through the datasets at the beginning, we thought of the possibility of having a medium that is more appealing to a larger demographic, and story telling fits that goal. Our approach began by choosing to build a game, which is a great medium for story telling, then we came up with a concept that aligns with our vision, and gradually built around that. We wrote the background story, and started dividing tasks, though we often helped each other, which resulted in a healthy team dynamic. We used Unity to build the game, and used many assets that are offered for free on the Unity Asset Store. We consequently coded our scripts in C# on Visual Studio, and had no need for any other hardware or software other than our personal laptops. We also used the Unity Collaborate feature in order to work and code together in a harmonized and organized manner. The main problems we faced were due to inexperience in the field of game development, but we got through it by helping one another, and our main achievement is the fact that we managed to wrap up the project nicely, just as we envisioned it.
When the character in the game looks through a window, the view contains statistics concerning the number of Covid cases, and the effects of Covid on the economy. The number of Coronavirus cases are taken from the dataset provided by "ourworldindata.org", one of NASA's partner agencies, and the economy statistics are taken from an outside source. Of course, the project is built in such a way that any data can be visualized, so it is expandable to potentially use all the datasets provided, assuming there is time and interest.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14hKTAIRIT7QMvPyZJ4WPtisyyCQvV-8HBTkxpI7NNtw/edit?fbclid=IwAR1L2rA8afBCGkQpXuMxfSnlR7j6QFhRa9mSTza7LlrVgdkKgCuJxAvVG5k#slide=id.g9dcbea6a36_12_78
After making a webGL build, this game can be embedded on the website.
Source code: https://github.com/HamzaAit/The-Exile-Exodia
Game play: https://gamepipe.io/@hamza-aithssayenezhqx/exile-of-exodia
From the Data resources provided: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
Additional Data Resources used: https://www.statista.com
Lonesome Journey by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/
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Atmosphere by Naoya Sakamata | https://www.youtube.com/c/NaoyaSakamataPIANOmusicChannel/
Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/
Licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
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Reaching Out Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/
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#economic impact, #Storytelling, #health
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.