Trashket

A portrait recycling game about the decisions nobody sees.

Waste Isn't One Thing

Litter is easy to notice. The decisions behind it are invisible.

What happens after you throw something away? What can be recycled, separated, recovered, or turned back into something useful? Most people never find out, because the answer lives inside a facility they'll never walk through.

Trashket makes those steps tangible. Waste is not one category and how you sort it decides what can happen to it next.

Sort. Strip. Process. Restore.

Trashket is a portrait recycling management game built around one rule: everything you do feeds the next thing you do.

You clean up familiar places and sort waste into the right streams. You pull useful parts out of discarded products. You run the processing machines yourself.

The materials you gather from sorting and recovery are the materials processing needs — there's no other supply. Finish a job and you earn Improvement Points for facility upgrades. Finish enough of them and a small neighborhood visibly comes back.

What's Under It

A self-contained browser game: TypeScript, Three.js, cannon-es physics, HTML, and CSS. No engine, no backend, no account.

Eleven authored jobs across sorting, recovery, and processing. Waste items, material yields, recipes, machine settings, scoring, and restoration progress are all data-driven, so the content is tuned rather than hardcoded. The submitted build runs locally with its libraries, textures, audio, and assets bundled in.

The Hard Parts

Teaching without lecturing. Recycling has real rules, and the fastest way to kill a game is to explain them. Every rule in Trashket had to be learnable by doing, not by reading.

Making it physical on a phone. Picking up a small item, dropping it into the right bin, peeling a component off a product, holding a machine control — each of those had to read clearly on a portrait screen, under a thumb.

Making the jobs need each other. The real risk was three separate minigames wearing one title. Sorting and recovery had to feel useful inside processing, or the game had no spine.

What I Got Right

The chain closes. Litter to restoration, with nothing hand-waved in between. What you sort determines what you can process, and the places you fix visibly change as you go.

It feels like handling things. Bin contents build up as you fill them. Surfaces get cleaner. Materials have their own drop sounds. Products open to reveal what's actually inside them. Machines produce visible output you can see stack up.

What the Build Taught Me

Waste management is made of small decisions that are easy to overlook. Correct sorting matters because contamination and mixed materials can block recovery further down the line — a mistake at the bin is a material lost three steps later.

The other lesson was about systems. A management game's mechanics have to explain each other. A recipe means more when you remember collecting its materials. An upgrade means more when you've already felt the machine it improves being slow.

Where It Goes Next

A bigger neighborhood. More realistic material journeys. Deeper choices in collection, processing, and restoration.

The target hasn't changed: keep Trashket satisfying as a management game while showing players how much value and how much complexity sits inside everyday waste...

Built With

• cannon-es
• ktx2-textures
• three.js
• vite
• web-audio-api