CS 426 Senior Project in Computer Science
Spring 2023, at UNR, CSE Department
Sara Davis, Vinh Le, Devrin Lee, David Feil-Seifer, Zach Estreito, Erin Hanan
University of Nevada, Reno, Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Science
University of Nevada, Reno, Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Science
Project Description
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NviroQuest is an RPG style educational game about climate change, specifically in relation to, and using real world data from, watershed environments. This game is being designed to be used in classrooms to teach high school students about nitrogen deposition and how watershed restoration can be a great tool for mitigating and reversing environmental damage. In the actual gameplay, the player will be moving an in game character around the map to collect soil and water, which they will drag and drop on a plant or group of plants on the map to adjust those plants’ water and nitrogen levels, until a sprite change is triggered, when they will read the water:nitrogen ratio of that plant and report that in the player UI in order to level up. Higher levels will include challenges like wider responsibility and climate change effects which will push them forward or set them back depending on what kind of effect is triggered and how it influences the environment. We are building this game in Unity, using built in Unity APIs and C++ scripts for functionality. Since this game does not rely on internet connectivity, all logs will be saved locally on devices and no usernames or passwords will be necessary, making this game secure in that it cannot be used to collect data from users. We intend to make this game reliable through regular and rigorous testing of code as we go and handling any edge cases that we can think of and may come up during testing. We also intend to ensure this game is safe to play by ensuring all animation is as smooth and/or slow as necessary to avoid any visual triggers for players, and by focussing the main gameplay on positive improvements that can be made to the environment despite the depressing subject matter it will be covering. These will be a focus for us to avoid causing any harm to our players, keeping their data secure, and keeping their game working to the standard expected of any computer application.
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