GCU Students create video game to help teach about recycling at GCU

A group of third year students from the BSc (Hons) Games Development programme have developed a game to teach people about recycling at GCU.

The team were presented a brief by GCU’s Head of Operational Sustainability, Paulo Cruz, who requested a game that could help the Sustainability Team inform new GCU students about the recycling process during Induction.

After initially brainstorming a wide variety of ideas the team settled on the name and concept of Campus Cleanup. They also had regular presentations and check-ins to keep in contact with their client and spent a total of 13 weeks throughout the module coming up with the prototype before getting the green light to create the game.

Third year Games Development student and Campus Cleanup producer Euan Whiteford said: “Campus Clean-up is a game where the main focus is trying to teach players how to recycle around GCU. It’s supposed to be kind of cute and quirky and very easy to play.

“We settled on a very quick burst fire game play, where you’re against the clock and you need to run and there are certain elements in the game such as the bins being colour coded, much like GCU, and underneath the items that float around there are glowing colours as well, so when you pick up a piece of rubbish, there is also colours there to create a mental association between the rubbish and the bins.”

The premise of the game is intended to be a fun, interactive way to teach students how to recycle at GCU by being easy to understand and accessible to everyone.

“We built the game initially with the intention of it not being very word-heavy because we’re aware as a team that GCU is very diverse and not everyone’s first language is English, so a big part of it was actually that the recycling learning aspect was supposed to be intrinsic to the game.”

By completing a module with hands-on experience with working with clients, Euan and his team are getting experience that will be valuable when they enter the working world. Euan explained: “It’s a form of work experience, we can put this on our portfolio that we made this.”

The project has also brought him and his course mates closer as a group, having helped one another through the project and supported one another when motivation began to dip.

“There was a couple of weeks where there was not necessarily much motivation, but that’s because it’s a long project and it’s a very heavily critiqued project as you go along, which created a little bit of a motivation dip occasionally but our team was very happy and friendly with one another to the point where like we just pushed each other back up.”

For the students involved, the project has put into perspective how much work is required to create a game with a specific brief, with a lot of thought going in to the psychology behind the game and different concept ideas being put forward before settling on a final product, something which Euan and his fellow course mates will experience when entering the world of work.

“It’s definitely given me a great insight into what is potentially to come in the future… I do think it was a great learning experience that really opens your eyes to a lot of things that you might not necessarily know.

“I thought it was an amazing experience and it honestly made working on it a lot more fun and I personally had a lot more motivation for it because I felt like we’re making this as an actual product, people are actually going to be using this.”

Euan also explained that experiences like these are why he chose to study Computer Games Design at GCU. Having been an avid gamer and a ‘Nintendo Kid’ since a young age, a Dungeons and Dragons host and a keen creative writer, this course has brought together each of Euan’s creative outlets into one. On creating games, Euan said: “I love being able to encapsulate something so personal, but then you put it out there not necessarily in a way that’s vulnerable, but that if people have experience something like that before, that they pick up on it and becomes a love for them.

“I absolutely love just the ability to be kind of in a silly, fun, relaxed environment and also tell something that has deep meaning and deep purpose, which is why I got into Game Development.”

Having struggled with forming friendships in his small, rural hometown in the past, Euan has formed tight bonds with likeminded people on his course and has truly found his feet at GCU.

“I’m very thankful to GCU for pushing diversity and pushing a wide range of people to be able to attend and learn, because through that I’ve met some of the people that I will be forever close to and people

like myself who are LGBT and have a passion for games and just love creating and talking.

“So I genuinely think the takeaway for me from this has been all the new friends I manage to make because I’ve had very serious chats with them, very silly chats with them and whenever I feel burnt out or anything they have been my rock to fall back on, we’re always there for each other and even though it was work we were doing it just felt like a fun activity.”

You can play Campus Clean-up here.

By Derry Wyllie.