Inspiration
One day, a friend in biology 151 puzzled over cell transcription, mentioning how strange it was that the course had just leapt from cell signaling transduction pathways to the seemingly unrelated topic of mRNA synthesis. This prompted our idea to create a project that demonstrates the links between four separate processes from signal reception to protein synthesis in chronological order, with interactive gameplay to reinforce the player's understanding of cell biology concepts.
What it does
Our project creates an interactive environment for players to simulate each major stage of protein synthesis from cell signaling, to signal transduction, to transcription, to translation.
How we built it
We learned the Go programming language to allow the usage of this game on the web. We used the Ebitengine game library to render graphics and handle inputs
Challenges we ran into
There was a lack of descriptive errors in Go, and there were few substantial tutorials for game making. We did not have access to useful libraries beyond Ebitengine so we had to come up with the library of functions on our own. Furthermore, Ebitengine is not a well-documented game engine, so we often had to dig through source code and automatically-generated reference docs to use the features that the engine had to offer.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of having learned a new programming language and library independently and also having completed our first hackathon project.
What we learned
We learned the intricacies of communication in software development, game design, debugging, collaborative tools for programming such as VSCode Live Sharing and GitHub.
What's next for Cell Signaling Pathway Simulator
We hope to add better graphics and animations to make the UI of the game more refined and have smoother transitions between stages. We would also like to add more descriptive information pages to better explain the biological significance of each stage.
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