Trash Panda

Trash Panda helps build sustainable habits through the encouragement of a cute raccoon pet! Complete tasks involving sustainable eating, reducing waste, and recycling to care for your furry friend.

Comment

Inspiration

Our team is interested in sustainability and environmental issues since they have become increasingly relevant and important within the world. Additionally, a couple members of our team wanted redemption for their unfinished sustainability project from FemmeHacks 2023. Hence, we decided on creating a web application for educating on sustainability and practicing sustainable living habits. We thought a raccoon would be the perfect mascot, since we would have a trash panda helping us reduce our waste and environmental footprint. This ulimately led us to developing Trash Panda, a website equipped with the unique combination of an activity tracker and game where you take care of a raccoon through completing tasks to save the environment.

What it does

Trash Panda is a web-based game where engaging in sustainable living habits allows you to care for your own virtual pet raccoon. Sustainable Eating tasks earn you food to care for their hunger, Reducing Waste tasks gets you toys to care for their happiness, and Recycling tasks earns you energy to raise them. As long as you keep up with your raccoon's stats, they will be happy with your progress towards leading a more sustainable life.

How we built it

Our project is a web application built in HTML, CSS, and JS. We also used Phaser.js to create the game elements and animations.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we encountered was constantly dealing with merge conflicts since we were all contributing to the main game scene file. In addition, it was a bit difficult to find all the assets we needed that were aesthetically pleasing and suitable for our vision. We also encountered difficulties with the animations, such as having them run correctly and at the speed and timings we desired.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of our cohesive and visually pleasing UI, which is inspired by Stardew Valley and Tamagotchis. We are also proud of getting our web application hosted with a GoDaddy domain. Additionally, although it was difficult, we are pleased with how the animations turned out, especially in their high visual quality. Lastly, we are proud of

What we learned

We improved our Phaser skills and workflow. We also learned how to register for a domain and successfully host our website. Notably, we learned the importance of perseverance, communication, and collaboration.

What's next for Trash Panda

As far as what's next, we hope to add more tasks for users to complete and more animals for users to raise along their sustainability journey. Also, the pace of the game is extremely fast for demo purposes, so we hope to fix that for the application in the long-term. Our dream is for Trash Panda to expand into a mobile application, which is more alike to its Tamagotchi inspirations and helpful for users tracking their sustainable tasks.

Share this project:

Updates