Game description
"Waste Villain" is a game that channels your evil side to learn about the World Cleanup Day and what big corporations do to avoid responsibility for the waste and pollution they cause. Instead of fighting the pollution, the goal is to use the strategies that were employed since the 1960s: diverting attention and leveraging your lobbyists to influence law-making in favour of your company.
Based on idle game mechanics, the player places factories that produce money and parts. The parts are used to build new factories and upgrade existing ones. The money can be spent on marketing and ad campaigns that remove protests or used for lobbyists, who then prevent laws from being passed that would shut down your factories.
You can download the game onto your phone and try it yourself
Team role
This university project was developed with a fluctuating small team over the course of one semester, with my role being the Game Designer and Programmer. This involved designing the gameplay systems, like the interaction between factories, the produced pollution and the reactions of the game to the pollution. These events, like protests and laws, combined with the having to make a certain amount of money, provided the main challenge to the player.
In addition, as the programmer of the team, I implemented all the game systems in Unity and built the UI, as well as the particle systems and 3D model of the factory.
Making games for a specific target audience
New for me during this project was to develop a game for a young target audience - 12 to 18 years old schoolchildren. It posed quite a challenge to find out what kind of games they enjoy playing and then build a game around the specific mandatory goal of informing about the World Cleanup Day and plastic pollution. The idea to approach this from "the evil side", by putting the player into the role of the villain was there early on. However, throughout the development process, with user tests and surveys, I adapted the game from an agressive RPG, towards a simulation game and then into its current form as an easier to grasp idle game. The goal was to require less commitment and have a game that is casually playable. The user tests showed that this is received far better while also meeting the requirements of informing about the Cleanup Day.
It was fun to face the challenges of finding people to test the game and build the experience around the requirements of the target group, while practicing to listen to them and deduct the right path to chose from it.
