Clean Scoop

Clean Scoop: Tap into fun, scoop up waste, and see how gaming can green the world!

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Clean Scoop: A Journey to a Greener Future

Inspiration

Nowadays with environmental awarness being more crucial than ever, the inspiration for Clean Scoop came from desire to blend education and motivation with entertainment. The aim was to create a game that not only entertains, but also educates players about types of recyclables, recycling tips and facts and the potential impact of our actions.

What it does

Clean Scoop is a mobile game designed around the concept of recycling. Players are engaged in a rather "level-based" game where the main objective is to collect specific recyclable waste objects — plastic bottles, paper, organic waste, and glass bottles — that spawn onto the screen with an upward trajectory. The challenge increases as players advance, requiring them to collect more/different types of objects. The game incorporates educational elements by assigning arbitrary weights to each object, reflecting the environmental impact of recycling different materials. Points are scored by tapping on the correct items, and players must avoid obstacles like mushrooms (poison) and incorrect items (that are not the objective of particual stage) to maintain their lives. A unique feature of the game is the "Game Over" screen, which not only displays the player's score and collected objects, but also provides an "environmental impact" summary, showing how the collected amounts would benefit the real world in terms of energy saved, water conserved, and CO2 reduction.

How we built it

The game was built with Flutter's game engine framework - Flame. Free resources of amazing designers available on Figma community page were used (all of them are attributed in README of Clean Scoop github repo) to create a pleasing UI and UX. Environmental impact calculations were based on small research to make the game's educational content as accurate as possible.

The game is built for iOS and Android phones and was tested mainly on iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone SE 2nd gen and Google's Pixel 6.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges was balancing educational content with engaging gameplay. It was crucial that the game did not feel not entertaining enough. Technical challenges included optimizing the game for different devices and screen sizes, as well as implementing a user-friendly interface that could accommodate the game's educational components without overwhelming players.

Another challenge that I ran into was adapting this game for Web. Spent around 2 days for that trying to understand why my camera is not centering and resizing properly and in the end decided to move away from this functionality. Honestly, the only reason I was trying to do it was for demo purposes for the jury.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Really proud of creating a game that successfully educates players on the importance of recycling in a fun and engaging way. Clean Scoop has been well-received across my peers, with players reporting a greater awareness of recycling and its impact on the environment with a comment that "you know what, playing this could actually motivate me starting recycling waste". Plus, game's ability to illustrate the tangible benefits of recycling through its "environmental impact" visualization at the end of the game has been particularly rewarding. As always, overcoming the technical and design challenges to create a seamless and accessible game experience stands as a significant achievement personally.

What we learned

The development of Clean Scoop was a learning journey. This time around I tried to follow official Flame documentation as much as possible and use out-of-the box components like SpawnComponenent for spawning objects and ParticleSystemComponent for generating particle effects. It just made my life so much easier and the development process itself much much smoother, because there was no need to think of some custom functionality on how to accomplish the things that were required by the gameplay.

What's next for Clean Scoop

Looking ahead, will try to expand Clean Scoop with more levels, recyclable objects, and challenges to keep the game exciting and educational. The main thing's that are not yet implemented, but will be before the game hits production, are ultimates (like freeze, double points etc. which could produce even higher scores), global leaderboard and some easter eggs (there are none at the moment :/ ).

The ultimate goal is to make Clean Scoop a platform that not only entertains but also inspires real-world action towards a more sustainable future.

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