Recycle Mania

Recycle Mania Logo
Screenshot of Game

Inspiration

When I heard about the Global Gamers Challenge, I instantly started looking for ideas that I could bring to life for the competition. After collecting a lot of ideas, I had to choose between two game approaches: I could build a simple, "mindless" game that players could play anywhere and at any time on their phone, or I could create something more complex, that makes players think about choices. Because the goal of the challenge was to connect a sustainability theme with gaming, I went for the second approach.

What it does

So over the last weeks, I built a simulation/management game, where you are put into the position of a manager of a recycling facility. Your job is building facilities to get resources from different types of wastes, and refine these resources into products. You will expand your recycling facility with new buildings, buy upgrades that will make your life easier and learn about different recycling processes for a variety of materials.

You start with a certain amount of starting capital. Then you can buy your first blueprints to start building production chains. There are 3 types of facilities: Processing, Storage and Production Facilities. Processing Facilities process waste into materials that are stored in Storage Facilities and that can be used by Production Facilities to create new products that are sold on the market.

How we built it

The game is entirely built in Flutter. It doesn't use a game engine like Flame as it wasn't necessary for this project.

Challenges we ran into

Although it might not appear this way on the surface, in the background the game is a complex system that required almost 10.000 lines of code. Creating this complex system in the given timeframe was extremely difficult, but I succeeded with it in the end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building this game was not easy. I already mentioned that the scope was very big for the given timeframe, especially since I also needed to add educational elements (which there are plenty of in the game). Building the game in a way so that it can also be fun was not easy as a solo developer. So no matter the outcome of this challenge, I am very proud of how far I was able to push myself to complete this project in the end.

What we learned

I learned that choosing a less ambitious project would have been less stressful for this challenge.

What's next for Recycle Mania

This game will be developed further in the future. It's already built in a way that allows for unlimited additional content and new features. The complexity of the architecture in the end makes this a very flexible system that can be extended however I want in the future. There will also be balancing changes before the game is released in the Google Play Store and App Store. Special thanks go out to my brother Kai, who helped me come up with the game idea and provided excellent and important feedback along the way.