Dusty Island

Inspiration

The inspiration for the game "Dusty Island" came from a real-life article about a giant garbage island in the Pacific Ocean. The garbage that washes up on the island from this giant trash pile is the garbage dusty that pollutes the island in the game. On the other hand, the natives who fight to keep the island clean in the face of this garbage are the Native Dusty. We wanted to convey a message about the environmental giant Pacific Garbage Island through the confrontation between Garbage Dusty and Native Dusty.

What it does

"Dusty Island" is a cooperative multiplayer game, where players are divided into two teams. Dusty is moved via the joypad and skills are used by pressing the skill buttons.

Trash Dusty Team: Invades the island and tries to pollute it by throwing trash. Keep moving around the map and periodically throw garbage automatically. The land will fill with garbage. When you collect 100% of your energy gauge, you can transform into lightning and throw garbage even faster.

Native Dusty Team: As a native on the island, Dusty protects the island from trash. Native Dusty can collect garbage by going near it, but there are Garbage Dusty that roam the map and scatter garbage, so you'll need to keep moving around the map to collect it. When he collects 100% of his energy gauge, he transforms into a flame and burns the trash in his path to remove it.

Game rounds are 5 minutes long, and the Trash Dusty team wins if the land is half-occupied by trash at the end of the round, otherwise the Native Dusty team wins.

How we built it

Once we decided to participate in the game challenge, we started planning our game. The planning phase of the game involved a lot of brainstorming sessions where all team members gathered and shared ideas. This process combined creative ideas and different perspectives on game development, and once the basic structure and goals of the game were set and we started working on maps and graphical resources, we moved into full development.

Challenges we ran into

I started developing with a new game engine (I had used phaser for a while before) without knowing the Dart language and flutter platform, so I was not familiar with it at first, but the basics were well documented and I got used to the structure as I wrote, so I proceeded with development little by little. However, we used a program called TexturePacker to manage graphics resources, but when I started, I couldn't see the list in bridge packages. Fortunately, I found a related repo on github and saw that it was added to flame, so I tried to use it, but for some reason, when I tried to install it, it kept installing the old version. I thought it was because I was running out of time and I was not familiar with flutter, so I copied the latest code to the project and solved the issue by using it. Also, there were tile-related features in the game, and I remember implementing the tiled bridge package while debugging it (it is still incomplete, so I will add it when I develop a new mod after submitting it). The information about snapshots and RenderedLayer that I gained during this process helped me a lot to improve performance.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We wanted to use the game to raise awareness about the environment of the Pacific giant trash island. We wanted players to have first-hand experience polluting the island and trying to save it, so they could see firsthand the difficulty of trying to restore a clean environment in the real world. By having players take on two opposing roles, we believe we have greatly increased awareness of ocean pollution and the educational value of protecting the environment.

What we learned

It was very challenging to incorporate environmental pollution as a game element. By putting players on different teams and pitting them against each other, it was a difficult balancing act. We tried out a lot of game ideas and learned how to make littering and collection a central part of the game, making it immersive and fun for players while raising awareness of environmental issues.

What's next for Dusty Island

We'll add more characters and graphical elements like sunglasses.

We wanted to add a lot of gameplay based on multiplayer servers, but time passed faster than we expected. In the next version, we will grow the map and increase the maximum number of players in the game to 16.

We wanted to give the effect of spreading pollution by directly moving across the land, polluting and cleaning up your path, but due to technical issues and lack of time, we left it out of this version and simply implemented a way to drop trash on the island and collect it.

Also, while the game is currently focused on coastal pollution, we wanted to add multiple maps covering different environmental issues such as soil pollution, air pollution, and more to enrich the diversity and educational value of the game.