Anohana: When the Firework Rocket Launches

Anohana: When the Firework Rocket Launches is a novel garbage sorting game.

[Need]

On July 1st, 2019, the Shanghai city in China “introduced stringent trash-sorting regulations that are expected to be used as a model for the country. Residents must divide their waste into four separate categories and toss it into specific public bins.” Ever since the implementation of these new trash-sorting regulations, most Shanghai citizens appear to support the idea of recycling in general. Still, they have been complaining about how they feel perplexed and frustrated about the detailed sorting requirements.

Although about every school, office building, and restaurant in Shanghai have been plastered with recycling instructions, the garbage sorting knowledge conveyed by countless fliers doesn’t seem to leave much of an impression in people’s minds. Receiving recycling instructions as passive information, people struggle to apply the knowledge in real life. As mastering the garbage sorting skills is hard for adults, we believe it is even more challenging for young teenagers. We hope that some more engaging and thought-provoking learning methods could address this problem.

We conduct researches on how the young teenagers (middle school students of Grades 7-9) in urban areas of Shanghai are learning about garbage sorting and find out there are three major approaches: instruction sheet, classroom lecture, and trash sorting competition. The majority of the learning happens in students’ school days and under a formal learning environment. However, according to our interviews with several students, all of them find these approaches unattractive. A board game about garbage sorting is widely welcomed by Shanghai students, which inspires us to develop an educational video game, which is equally fun but more portable and accessible for urban students. Our target player would be Shanghai's urban middle school students (Grades 7-9) who are interested in video games and have easy access to electronic devices such as computers and mobile phones. We hope that the game would serve as an informal learning environment and students would find it interesting enough, so they are willing to play the game in their extra-curricular time.

Shanghai’s stringent trash-sorting regulations are expected to be used as a model for China. We’ve seen similar initiatives followed by other major cities, and anticipate that the whole nation will finally adopt a shared set of waste management system. So we are hoping that developing an effective educational garbage sorting game for the pilot city Shanghai would turn out to have reference value for other cities too.

[Design Description]

Background story of the game:

The story line of the game is adopted from a popular Japanese animation called Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day.

“A group of six sixth-grade-age childhood friends drift apart after one of them, Meiko "Menma" Honma, dies in an accident. Five years after the incident, the leader of the group, Jinta Yadomi, has withdrawn from society, does not attend high school, and lives as a recluse. One summer day, the ghost of an older-looking Menma appears beside him and asks to have a wish granted, reasoning that she cannot pass on into the afterlife until it is fulfilled. Jinta gathers his estranged friends together once again, believing that they are the key to solving this problem. All of the group joins him, though most of them do so reluctantly. However, things grow increasingly complicated when his friends accuse him of not being able to get over the Menma's death, as they cannot see her and believe Jinta is hallucinating. Menma shows her presence to the group in order to prove that she is indeed real. All the group members eventually wish to shoulder the blame for Menma's death and long-hidden feelings among the group are rekindled. The group struggles as they grow from trying to help Menma move on and help each other move on as well” (from Wikipedia).

Menma’s wish is to watch the friends launching a firework rocket together again. So the task of the player is to help this group of friends to build and launch a firework rocket in the game.

Six major interfaces:

• a 3D Map Screen that connects every other screens;
• a Backpack Inventory Screen, showing the player’s belongings and the number of flower coins;
• a Firework Rocket Workshop Screen to play the firework rocket constructing mini game;
• a Waste Management Plant Screen to play the garbage sorting (pair matching) mini game;
• a Firework Rocket Accessories Shop Screen where the player can use flower coins to buy and customize various styles of lightshow components and surface decorations for the rocket;
• a Landfill Site Screen where the player needs to pay flower coins to bury the residue waste that gradually takes up all available places in his/her backpack.

Four NPRs:

• the Rocket Master
• the Waste Management Plant Manager
• the Shop Owner
• the Landfill Worker

 One example of game playing:

(Player A, female, 7th grader, Shanghai, China)

After entering the game, Player A makes her first stop at the nearest location, the Firework Rocket Workshop. She encounters the NPR Rocket Master who teaches her that a firework rocket includes four major parts: the main body structure, the rocket engine, the lightshow component inside, and the surface decoration. To build each part needs specific materials that could be either gathered or purchased by flower coin, which is the currency of this world. The Rocket Master offers to lend the player the workshop and tools for free and directs her to go to the Waste Management Plant to apply for a part-time job to earn some flower coins and building materials.

The player follows the Master’s suggestion and gets a part-time job offer at the Waste Management Plant. Before she can work as a qualified waste worker, the player receives a set of quick pre-employment training, including the introduction of (1) the four categories of waste (2) each category’s corresponding disposal method, which is also their classification basis (3) her earning for sorting out each category. Then the game system opens the garbage sorting (pair matching) mini game screen, and the player starts to pair up each waste to its right category. The more the player correctly pair up (sorts out) the waste, the more flower coins and building materials she earns. She can store the materials in her backpack, but it only has limited space. As a result, she needs to travel frequently, bringing materials and fuel from the plant to the workshop to build the firework rocket. Every time the player goes back to the Firework Rocket Workshop, she may enter the firework rocket constructing mini game where she drags the materials out from her backpack and places them to the right areas on the rocket. There will be a progress bar floating above the rocket, showing how much materials left are needed for each part. The finished parts will turn colorized while the parts under construction remain gray.

The player might purchase or customize the lightshow effect and “skin” for her rocket, using the flower coins to get various styles of lightshow components and surface decorations at the Firework Rocket Accessories Shop.

At some point, when the residual waste the player stores in her backpack exceed the backpack’s space limit, she will no longer be able to carry any useful materials. She will be guided to a New Landfill Site not far away from the Waste Management Plant. She needs to pay the Landfill Worker there to help dispose of the residual waste so she could remove them from her backpack.

Dozens of rounds later, the player finally finishes constructing her firework rocket and fuels it up. At this point, she could launch it whenever she wants and push the game to the final scene, which includes an animated video with music and sound effects, showing the rocket flying to the sky and firework exploding with the lightshow effect the player chose.

Primary game mechanics:

• Pair matching the waste and its category by clicking and flipping the cards
• Storing and removing materials in/from the backpack by dragging
• Dragging and placing materials to construct the firework rocket

Core dynamics to game play:

• Planning for and allocating time between earning materials and constructing the firework rocket, by monitoring the backpack space and construction progress bar
• Deciding the timing to dispose of the residual waste taking up the backpack space
• Purchasing or customizing the lightshow effect and surface decorations

Aesthetics: 

Pleasant colourful graphics, high quality music, original sound track etc.

The game play supports learning in five ways:

• From the interaction with the Waste Management Plant Manager, the players learn about the four categories of waste.
• Form the pre-employment training at the Waste Management Plant, the players learn about the disposal method of each type of waste, which is also their classification basis. Understanding the logic behind the classification will help players to draw connection between a specific piece of waste and its category. And players can practice and improve their classification ability through multiple rounds of the pair matching game.
• Players’ different earning from sorting different types of waste implies the different method, recycled product, and cost for disposing each type of waste in real life. For example, the plant incinerates most of the household food waste to generate electricity. So every time the players successfully sort a piece of household food waste, they get one flower coin and one unit of fuel. Every time the players sort a piece of recyclable waster, they also get one flower coin and one unit of recycled materials such as metal, wood, plastics and paper. But since the hazardous waste require much more complicated methods to be taken care of, thus higher disposal cost, the players only get half a flower coin for sorting it out. Residual waste are everything that cannot be recycled or composted by current technology, so the majority of them goes to landfill. As a result, disposing residule waste not only requires finanal resources, but also land resources.
• The game rule about residual waste emphasizes the cost of and technical challenges and limitations in disposing residual waste. Years of landfilling have left the Waste Management little space to contain the residual waste, so every time the players sort out a residual waste, they are required to take the garbage with them. The residual waste will gradually take up available space in their backpacks, so at some point, the players will have to pay flower coins to bury the residual waste in the New Landfill Site, thus remove them from the backpacks. The number of flower coins they need to pay goes up as time proceeds and the available space for landfilling decreases in the New Landfilling Site.
• The ideas of disposal cost and technical limitations in disposing waste are embedded in the game play and get reinforced through rounds of playing. They reveal a tip of the iceberg of the multiple factors influencing garbage disposal in the real world. Understanding the bigger picture helps to raise the players’ overall environmental awareness. 

[Reflection]

• One success we are proud of: we give our game a good story line that is engaging and motivating
• The biggest challenge: time and technical challenge. We can't realize everything in our design due to the strict time limitation and our lack of programming knowledge.

Link to the Map Screen: https://games.gdevelop-app.com/game-70b53090-e2ee-474f-90a2-340342d42313/index.h...