Garbage Collector

Inspiration

Usually, the citizens of Vancouver look at taking out the trash as a simple chore but the amount of effort the city garbage collectors put into making sure such a populated city like Vancouver remains clean is incredibly impressive. Our team made a game in Python using the Pygame module in VS Code to showcase the challenges and raise awareness about the problems in Vancouver's garbage disposal system.

Purpose/Objective

The main objective of this game is for the player to drive the truck and keep the city clean by collecting and disposing each garbage that is thrown out by the houses in the city. Each house and building in the city produces a random amount of garbage to simulate a real city’s garbage disposal amounts. To understand the controls of the game and how to play, press the instructions button in the top right corner of the game window. If you want to learn more about Vancouver and BC’s garbage production data, click the information button on top of the instructions button. If the truck capacity reaches 100%, you need to rush to the disposal facility in the bottom right corner of the window to dump the garbage. If the amount of garbage left exceeds 500, the player loses and they have to collect as much garbage as they can as fast as possible to win!

Challenges we faced

Some challenges we faced were to detect collision of the truck and the garbage bags as they were produced randomly. Another challenge we faced is the short timeline as we had to complete a lot of code, including a video in just a few days.

Future improvements

We would like to make this game even more informative about Vancouver’s garbage collection data while at the same time making it more fun and entertaining to play. We would also like to base the map off of the actual map of Metro Vancouver and make it more realistic with the real locations of the garbage disposals in Vancouver. There would also be different kinds of garbage like compost and plastic, and different garbage truck services. Finally, we would like to automate the truck’s responses to the garbage it collects depending on its kind using machine learning. We hope you learned something about Vancouver’s garbage and had fun while playing our game!