INSPIRATION

The COVID-19 disease has seen a rise in positive cases worldwide partly due to people being unaware of effective ways to combat its spread or lacking an understanding on the importance social distancing protocols(where applicable). My team therefore saw the need to address this problem by developing a video game that provides an interactive learning environment so people can better understand what to do to avoid getting infected and to stop the spread of the virus. 

 APPROACH

To  provide an interactive learning environment on COVID-19, the game has to have the following components: 

• The Player
• Infected Nodes (representing people infected with COVID-19)
• Hospitals
• Personal Protective Equipment(PPEs) such as face masks(cloth face cover), gloves, respirators, sanitizers and isolation gowns. 
• Tidbits about Covid19

Each of the components of the game has functionalities as follows: 

• The Player: The player is represented in the game as a white coloured circle. The player must move across the city from the left edge of the screen to the right edge of the screen whiles observing all social distancing protocols and arming himself with PPEs. The player navigates across the game screen via the keyboard arrow keys. The game is paused by pressing the Escape button on the keyboard. A level is complete when the player touches the right wall of the game screen. The game is over if the player's life reduces from 100% to 0% or the player's score goes  below 0. The life of the player is also directly proportional to the speed of the player. 
• Infected Nodes: An infected node is represented in the game as a black(or sometimes purple) coloured circle. Infected nodes move randomly across the screen. Whenever a player collides with an infected node, the player incurs a penalty and points are deducted from the player's score. Collisions also reduce the life of the player based on the kind of PPE the player has at that moment. If the player has all PPEs, there is no reduction in life. If the player has no PPEs, there is a maximum life reduction. The more PPEs the player has, the lower the impact on life reduction. 
• Hospitals: A hospital in the game provides a place for the player to recuperate. Each hospital can restore the life of the player by up to 15%.  However, the player node must be completely in the hospital for the healing to start. It also provides a safe haven for the player since infected nodes cannot get into the hospital. The hospitals are randomly generated at the start of every level. 
• Personal Protective Equipment: The PPEs used in the game are face masks, hand sanitizers, respirators, gloves and isolation gowns. These are randomly generated at the start of every level. The player collects a PPE by colliding with it. The player gets a bonus score for every PPE the player collects. 
• Tidbits about Covid19: Information about Covid19 is randomly chosen and displayed at the start of every level.   

USE OF DATA

We used NASA satellite images of settlements from different countries to create the background for each game level. 

Then we used the CDC dataset of provisional COVID-19 Death Counts by Sex, Age, and State to randomly determine the number of PPEs and hospitals to generate for each level. 

The random tidbit about Covid19 that is displayed at the start of every level was sourced from  https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/prevention.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fcoronavirus%2F2019-ncov%2Fprepare%2Fprevention.html.

TOOLS

From the outset, we decided to create a game that is easily available to everyone. Hence it was vital that the game should be able to run on a web browser. This inspired our choice of tools which are as follows: 

• Vanilla Javascript: We chose ECMA6 Javascript since we wanted to write in a programming language that is easily and widely understood.  Over 90% of the code is written in Vanilla Javascript. 
• jQuery. 
• Twitter Bootstrap: https://getbootstrap.com/. This provided a responsive and customizable user interface for the project.
• Select2 : https://select2.org/. This provided a customizable select box for choosing game levels.  

PROBLEMS AND ACHIEVEMENTS

We were largely able to achieve our goal. However, we were not able to implement sound for the game due to time constraints.

Please view a video demo of the project via:

https://youtu.be/CW6jqOCKIDU

[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images

[2]  https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/multimedia/gallery/iss033e020288.html

[3]  https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages

[4]  https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/

[5]  https://data.cdc.gov/api/views/9bhg-hcku/rows.json?accessType=DOWNLOAD

[6]  https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/prevention.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fcoronavirus%2F2019-ncov%2Fprepare%2Fprevention.html