TrashBash

Scene 2 P2
Scene 2 P1
Scene 1
Unity interface set up

Inspiration:

In the age of short, snappy TikToks and addictive Instagram reels, the power of media in our lives is more obvious than ever, especially with younger people. To a certain extent, we are becoming what we consume. So when it comes to tackling issues of waste management, of the islands of garbage growing in our oceans, of the toxic waste sites (most prevalent in New Jersey!) leaking into our soils, my partner and I wanted to find a concise but tech friendly way of representing the issue that people could interact with and learn from. We wanted to create something fun and short, but informative, so we created a single-player RPG game called TrashBash, which teaches players about sustainability as they play.

What it does:

The current version of TrashBash has two scenes, a single player, and three main monsters. The player spawns into a welcome room with an NPC that tells them about the game, and then they can travel to a different scene. TrashBash keeps track of player points based on 3 things: a player can gain points by picking up litter like paper / plastic water bottles, lose points by stepping in puddles of toxic waste, and gain points or lose health in boss battles with the main villains. There is a pop up for each boss battle that provides a fact about waste management.

How we built it:

We downloaded a texture pack from itch.io for the graphic components of the game, and then we utilized Unity Game Engine to run and develop it. The code for the individual components was written in C# in Visual Studio Code.

Challenges we ran into:

Designing the scenes took a lot of time because despite downloading a texture pack, we had to do all the actual formatting and placing the blocks together ourselves to make the scene with the walls, accessories, and sprites (players) Layering and formatting certain components took a lot of time to ensure different game components interacted properly with each other and weren't hid underneath under components. We often lost accessories or sprites in the frame and had to redo things

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We successfully implemented a fun, interactive, and informative single player RPG game in 24 hours utilizing a complicated game engine and language that we don't have much experience with.

What we learned:

We learned that when it comes to games, UI/UX, and front-end development in general, having experience with coding doesn't always ensure a smooth coding experience. Getting experience with how to layer components, how to work with Inheritance and object-oriented programming, was extremely important.

What's next for TrashBash?

If we had more time to work on TrashBash, we'd get to implement many more features. We wanted to make a little block at the bottom of the player screen with a textbook that displayed total points and health, rather than just the "+5 points" disappearing texts. We would display the names of the villains and make them more involved in fighting (harder to kill). We would also adjust the formatting of the text for the pop up facts to create more of them but easier to read. Additional scenes with more villains would be very cool as well.