It’s quite unusual for an idea to start with „alcoholism“ and end up with the a game to raise awareness for saving our oceans.

But that’s exactly what we did. And on behalf of the self-titled „Brats“, we sure are damn proud of:

OctoTrash

Play it here! https://pnchk.itch.io/octotrash
(PS. the high-score to beat is currently held at 969, comment your score below to make yourself feel good about procrastinating which you probably did 🙂 )

Humble beninngings

Best Miro board <3

As aforementioned, our ragtag team chose the word „umsorgen“ to work with (in eng. „to nurture“ according to Google Translate), and for some reason, our shared single braincell all hopped on the idea of basing this game on an alcoholic. Do mind that our intentions were good, and in no way, shape or form any kind of representation of how we live our lives.

We quickly scrapped the idea on some conflicts about the core gameplay loop and decided to keep one of the aspects that stuck the most: long, elongated arms. Gears turned quickly, and we decided to stick to the concept of having to protect an octopus from trash instead, though we’ll be circling back to our alcoholic friend perhaps some time in the future.

And with our newfound idea, it was time to cook.

Planning Goes a Long Way

Best paper prototype <3

Okay it wasn’t exactly time to cook, as all good kitchens know, proper „mise-en-place“ (excuse my french) goes a long way into efficiency.

We split our group into roles; the Designers, Vlad and Zoya, and the cool guys Luka and Mika, who were in charge of the technical parts.

Putting our new knowledge to use, we created a Kanban board in Miro and listed out the tasks needed to be done, as well as a simple (yet scarily accurate in hindsight) timeline of our milestones and goals.

We have never felt so ready. Our excitement was oozing, our ambitions unstoppable. Now, it was really time to cook.

The Prototype

Game Over ):

The Octopus eats fish and not plastic. Concept sounded simple enough. The execution however, had a few challenges. We started off with our concept on paper (literally) and we were at least able to decide on the layout of the level pretty quickly.

Deciding on the smaller details of the game was a spontaneous thing; every twenty minutes or so we would have a new idea and get super excited about it, with a lot of it making into the final game itself, and a few we needed to leave out to keep to our deadline. Luckily we were all on the same wavelength for the most part (again, single braincell) and through proper communication we didn’t hang up too hard on those things we lost or the amount of work we gained.

Paper could only bring us so far though. It wasn’t long until we started with our prototype in Unity, and with a few basic shapes and some simple game logic, we had a very simple framework to work with done in a single afternoon (yay).

In movies, we call this the Exposition

If you don’t believe that alchemy exists, then explain how we were able to turn something so ugly into the beautiful game we all know and love.

The nerds starting working on engineering the individual game mechanics. One thing we learned was how much freedom we had in deciding in which direction the game feels – which isn’t exactly always a good thing. As a game designer, we are able to tweak and adjust everything, and we can keep doing this perpetually until we break our skulls from slamming them on the table from the never-ending loop. At some point, we had to make the call, and stick with it.

In parallel, the Designers worked on the background, the Octopus itself as well as other game objects and the UI elements. And they delivered.
Every once in awhile I would glance up to see them locked in and focussing hard on their design, which paid off very nicely as seen in our game. Seeing our lovely designers‘ work gave us a second wind, and implementing those designs in our game gave us the the final push to complete our project.

Roll The Credits (3 ECTs)

With the meat of our project accomplished, it was time for the final polish. We had ample time for testing and with the feedback we received from our „beta testers“, our magnum opus was complete.

Safe to say, we are all still on talking terms after the project, which to me is as much success as the finished product itself. This wouldn’t have been possible if everyone wasn’t as responsible as they were during the project. Our commitment to making a fun game really shows in our final product, and we hope you, the player, can say the same.

"Stabil"
Luka Stanisic, Zoya Stronchynska, Vladyslav Husiev, Mikael Jed Cruz