Recyclor. project 01
Introduction Video
The protagonist, who lives in a slovenly lifestyle and does not care about environmental hygiene, is reduced to the size of a mouse in a dream by chance, and all the garbage turns into monsters that attack him. In an emergency situation, the hero must use the right props and weapons to fight against the garbage monster, and shuttle through the scene, looking for clues to escape from the dream...
Development engine. Unity
Game type. horizontal clearance
Development period. June 2020 to June 2021
Operating platform. Android
Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition for College Students
3-person project. Dong Li (responsible for program and game design)
Inspiration: Although the environmental protection concept of sustainable development has gradually become a social consensus, multiple difficulties exist in the process of implementing environmental protection measures. Therefore, we hope to develop more playfulness based on the process of garbage classification and convert the passive and boring memorization process of garbage classification knowledge into active participation in environmental protection. For garbage classification which needs to be memorized by tedious repetition, teaching with recreation can address it well.
At the beginning of the project, the team members extensively investigated the existing types of garbage classification games. We found that the top attractions of mainstream games are collection, cultivation and placement. Users only need to log in every day to receive rewards. The means of popularizing classification knowledge is mainly asking some simple and non mandatory questions, and rewards will be given if the answer is right. This game mode is easy for users to master, but its enhancement in memorizing garbage classification knowledge is very limited, and it is not interesting enough to attract users to log in every day. This result is quite opposite to our goal. Games are aimed at strengthening the memory of science knowledge, if they cannot arouse users' interest in playing, it will be like putting the cart before the horse. Therefore, our team members planned to combine garbage classification with mainstream game types to effectively stimulate users' interest in logging in to the game.
Art Style: The garbage classification game is quite serious as a whole, so I spent a lot of time designing art style, and finally chose watercolor hand-painted style as the overall painting style. The reason is as follows: 1. Watercolor represents the most environmentally friendly art style in form. 2. In the common art style of 2D games, hand painting seems more natural and friendly than over-simplified pixel style and vector style as well as impasto painting that is over realistic. Therefore, we planned to convey the concept of environmental protection and the basic atmosphere of the game by adopting the overall style of paper grain watercolor, which is an illustration form often used in picture books and conforms to the science popularization and public welfare natures of the game.
Mechanism Introduction: The game mode is an ingenious integration of garbage classification and horizontal shooting. In the game, the enemies are turned into garbage monsters, while the four weapons that players can control correspond to four types of garbage, namely, recyclable garbage, kitchen garbage, hazardous garbage and other garbage. Taking the recyclable garbage "empty water bottle" as an example, players can correctly harm garbage enemies only by using the weapon corresponding to recyclable garbage: "water gun". Through the interaction, players' impression of garbage classification and the memory related to garbage classification can be effectively enhanced by constantly eliminating garbage enemies. Meanwhile, to avoid the situation where the players feel disorientated due to the lack of classification knowledge when they first meet the enemy, they can long press the enemy in the scene to display its classification.
The main challenge of the game is that players should quickly locate the garbage's category in time and make movements. To arrange the difficulty gradient, we cleverly distinguished the enemies with different scenes. After abstracting the theme representative colors of four garbage categories, we designed four scenes, featured by blue ocean, green rain forest, red volcano and gray wasteland. In each level, the garbage with the category commensurate with the scene will act as the main enemy. For example, in the blue ocean scene, recyclable garbage is the main enemy, and hazardous garbage in the red volcano scene. Such scene design reduces the operation difficulty for players to some extent, with background color also assisting players in memorizing garbage classification effectively. Furthermore, from an overall perspective, the color transition from dark to light, and the changing amount of stacked garbage from large to small are aimed to visually offer players a sense of achievement that the garbage are gradually decreasing and the environment are improving by eliminating garbage monsters, so as to encourage players to keep exploring.
Iterative Process：After finishing the game, the most worrying point for me is the science effect of the game. In the process of usability testing, I conducted a survey of the students who participated in the test. For the testers who passed the game, I designed a series of questions, mainly to examine whether they could remember the classification of the garbage appearing in the game. It turned out that half of the players only remembered the correspondence between garbage and weapons. To solve this problem, I needed to weaken the influence of weapons on players' memory, so I replaced the icons of weapons in the game with the icons of garbage classification. At the same time eliminated the button that control the shooting, players need to constantly press the four icons to shoot. In the final result display, most players can remember the basic knowledge of garbage classification after the game.
Making Process: In addition to the basic functions of horizontal shooting games, we also made painstaking efforts in game storage and boss design. You can click the link to view the detail.
