Mission Redspot - Space Apps Challenge

Mission Redspot| The Art of It All

The Art of It All

What have you learned about yourself or the world as a result of living through the COVID-19 pandemic? Your challenge is to express your experience of living through this historic time through a work of art.

Mission Redspot: Fight against COVID-19

Summary

Mission Redspot was born as a dynamic representation of COVID-19´s impact in Mexican lifestyle. This game, targeted to all folks with internet access, illustrates the psychological and socioeconomic disturbances of a society in which more than 50% of the population depends on the daily income they perceive from informal job practice; and how they interfere with Public Health policies that establish a quarantine to guard their physical health in the middle of a 21st Century Pandemic.We hope that this Black & White 39 hour endeavour embarking two designers and a Med Student provides a better understanding of our actual landscape, while enjoying gametime, and learning Epi 101!

How We Addressed This Challenge

Mission Redspot´s goal is to fully develop a videogame that closely represents the former mobility of Mexican Citizens and the changes the COVID-19 brought to our daily basis. Instead of putting in motion 135 million citizens around a virtual developed "Chilli" shaped map, the game shows one single city with 135 poeple (1:1000000 scale). People are divided in 3 age groups: Youth (0-19), Adult (20-64), Elderly (65+). Besides, the city contains 9 places to which different persons will make daily, weekly, one in a lifetime or afterlife visits: Home, School, Work, Market, Park, Entertainment center (All in one place) , Liquor Store, Hospital, and Graveyard (With a Sundays Open Catholic church).

The game also has a timelapse with a speed of 3 hour per second (adjustable), which will run from Patient 0 appearance to the vaccine discovery and complete national immunization. As the clock runs, infected will appear on the screen as Redspots, which you may tap to gain money and stablish a budget. There are 3 indicators you may take care of, on the top you must monitorize people´s Economics, Hapinnes, and Disease´s Progression. If economic situation gets under 50/100%, low income workers will start breaking quarantine and thus increase disease spread. On the other hand, if the happiness indicator goes under 50%, they´ll start going out, protesting, increasing alcohol purchase, and visiting Entertainment Centers, increasing contagion. Also, if you don´t shut down School, Work and Economic activity, the Epidemiologic curve will rise.

Your objective is to find a balance until you buy enough research points and time to develop a treatment or create a vaccine. You may work to flatten the curve, tapping on Redspots and prioritizing actual needs to take the right decisions. As you go through the 4 phases of a Pandemic, you will perceive the pressure of Public Health Officers as they take calls on the go, the psycological impact on your population as they stay quarantine, the economic concerns that worry a 3rd World citizen with an unstable job, and the grief of increasing the lifelost of fellow citizens due to poor choices. The project is intended to show different perspectives about people living a Pandemic and encourage a self-reflection about hate and anger that spreads daily on fake news and social media, and how it doesn´t improve, but instead worsen the situation for everyone.

How We Developed This Project

We decided to focus on this Challenge as we are no expert programmers, but could contribute to the project with basic epidemiology concepts, a socioeconomic and psycological perspective based on our own experiences and the passion to perform story telling through videogame development.

We approached it mainly through a socioeconomic, psycological and epidemiologic view and decided to create an entertained way of spending the rest of the quarantine time that shows a simulation of the actual National situation that enhances self reflection, as you put your mind to work. The curve increases based on a 2.5 R0 and a 7 days average incubation period.

We used Unity, wich is based on C# coding, NASA´s SEDAC: COVID-19 viewer, INEGI´s Data (Mexican National Statistics and Geographical Institute), CDC´s epidemiologic resources, NASA´s research on Isolation and Local scientific articles that gave us more data

We mainly struggle to create a videogame in 39 hours, so our main goal was to develop a fundamental idea and create the objects and scenes that compose the games interface, in order to develop a final product as we work on details through the summer.