Introduction: Trash Traders is an iOS app built by a team of students at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center in 15 weeks for West Virginia’s Steenrod Elementary. Trash Traders is an experience that has shown to be fun and promote discussions about living a more green life.

Award: Serious Play 2018 Bronze Award

Platform: iOS | Time: 15 weeks |  Role: Game Designer | Team Size: 6

Design Goal: The goal of the project was to promote a sustainability mindset in our target demographic.

Design Challenges: We faced a number of design challenges during this project including:

• System design
  • Setup & Tweaking
  • Multiple difficulty configuration
• UX challenges
  • UI Design
  • Tutorial
  • Trash Visuals and Content

My Contributions: As the game designer on the project I took the lead on directing our creative efforts. My efforts helped create a well received, fun, and engaging experience which made a good attempt to achieve our transformational goals. Other areas I made significant contributions in were:

• An ideation process that created the main mechanic of the game
• Conducting and interpreting playtests

Download: Trash Traders has been released on iOS and can be downloaded here