unTrap

A platform built to improve awareness & make people take initiatives for wildlife conservation motivated by a game.

Comment 1

Zoohackathon 2017 (New Delhi) project submission by team Rhino.

Live Demo: https://sidvishnoi.github.io/zoohackathon-2017/ (please view in a mobile, not on desktop)

About

We attempted to solve problem statement 3 (Your idea!) although we created a game (inspired by problem statement 5).

Purpose

A platform built to improve awareness & make people take initiatives for wildlife conservation motivated by a game.

In game: unTrap the trapped animals. Use the touch to move the player to traps before time runs out!

Two main purpose of our website + game are:

  • spread awareness (through game world)
  • implementing ideas (in real world)

How it works

The users play the game individual level. They can reach higher levels by playing games a lot, or they can use the 'work-to-win' concept. The game is a motivator to do social work. There are games which let you earn bonus points by purchasing in-game currency. We don't do it. Instead we ask you to do some social work related to prevent wildlife trafficking, spreading awareness etc. You complete some tasks (like writing articles/social media posts, reporting wildlife crimes, helping us improve databases) and send their proofs (like hyperlinks, verifiable data sources) to the community for review. Based on community reviews, you can additional points and bonuses.

To motivate people to write articles, we can gift the income earned from those articles (through affiliate networks) to the people who wrote them.

The other tasks which we can provide incentives upon, include:

  • organising and participating in wildlife related events
  • providing information about subsitute (fake but realistic) products to reduce the usage of real animal parts
  • helping in identifying legal and illegal wildlife products
  • bug fixes in game

When a person unlocks a new species, he can take it's avatar and have it's strengths and weaknesses. On each unlock, he is provided with some information about the species to improve his knowledge and awareness.

Effects

  • awareness
  • educating its users
  • endangered species
  • their contribution to ecosystem
  • animal products being sold in market
  • identification of such products
  • youth targeted
  • reduced demand of animal products
  • providing substitutes
  • reporting of illegal buying/selling of animal products
  • reporting of illegal animal slaughtering
  • save an animal
  • encouraging its users to take part in related public events

Challenges faced

Developing a game in 2 days was the biggest challenge for us. None of us have developed any game before.

Tools and languages

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript (Phaser.js)
  • Photoshop, Python (SimpleHTTPServer)

The project contains a prototype (mobile-only) website. The major part of project is the game.

Team Members:

  • Akshay Yadav
  • Rishija Mangla
  • Shikha Chauhan
  • Sudhanshu Vishnoi

To run, start a local server in the downloaded folder, and view the app in browser. The design, at the time of this submission, is to be viewed comfortably in a mobile device (It'll run in any resolution, but weirdly). Please view the website in a mobile or emulate the mobile (how to emulate mobile device in Google Chrome).

Python example,

~/zoohackathon $ python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Node.js example: (run npm i -g live-server)

~/zoohackathon $ live-server

Source: https://github.com/sidvishnoi/zoohackathon-2017

Demo: https://sidvishnoi.github.io/zoohackathon-2017/ (please open a mobile)

Presentation: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzoFw038AvnZWnhVNkhDcXUyU1U

Share this project:

Updates