River Recycle

Turn junk into power-ups!

Tom & Jerry put aside their differences for once and join forces to clean up the river with their Grab-o-Matic claw machine!

Brief

Boomerang were looking for a simple and addictive arcade-style game to add to their growing collection, that would suit the Tom & Jerry brand and deliver an environmentally conscious message to their their target audience of 5-6 year olds.

Our Response

We were keen to ensure a strong focus on delivering an instantly engaging and fun moment-to-moment gameplay experience that’s quick to learn but that has some depth to mastery, with a tone that would suit the lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek- style of T&J whilst also pushing the core environmental message right the way through.

After discussions with Boomerang, we collectively agreed that the classic ‘Gold Miner’ Flash game from 2003 would be a great model for gameplay, swapping out the grabbing of gold nuggets for grabbing junk from a river whilst avoiding the fish!

The Challenges

The junk recycling system was tricky to create as we wanted all the junk the player had grabbed from the river to drop into tubes according to material type (a little like those recycling bins at your local supermarket!) and that meant we would need to represent the odd shapes correctly in physics, so that the items would react correctly as the junk piled up!

The Results

River Recycle delivers 10 levels of increasingly tricky junk fishin’ as the player must guide T&J to grab everything from TV ariels to old BBQs against the clock – without grabbing the fish!

Between levels the player can optionally recycle some of their junk into power-ups to help out with tougher levels. Battery boost will power up the claw making it work faster and harder, Scissors will allow the player to cut through river plants so that stuck junk will float to the top for an easier grab, and fish food will distract fish and clear a path.

This recycling section not only serves to provide an opportunity for a bit of strategy but also helps bolster the environmental message and educate the player about recycling. We also added incidental fun facts about recycling to in-game loading screens.

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