You Are Trash! was born as one of the games of Project Gamerama 2009, organized by PUC-Rio Arts and Design Department's professor and Donsoft Entertainment's Arts Director Guilherme Xavier. The teams were meant to choose 3 game style concepts, and apply them to the game design, under the proposal of Sustainability. The concepts chosen for our game were: Plataform, Puzzle and Shooting.
You Are Trash! meets sustainability using the idea of recycling, but not on a usual approach. We decided to run away from the common thinking of making a educational game about recycling and trying to go through an edutainment proposal, instigating the self-education of the player via tangential learning. In You Are Trash!, facts and ideas about recycling are presented to the player throughout the game as cutscenes, not forcing the player to advance in the game by learning. Recycling is also part of the gameplay, but in a fun way, not like in a school textbook.
For Project Gamerama 2009, it was decided that the development platform was Java for it's multiplatform characteristics, although in the end we had some problems in MacOSX and Linux operating systems (which suggests that some Java libraries are not so portable as we'd like them to be). As Project Gamerama demanded a short development time until we could get a playable demo, our team decided to use an open-source game engine, GTGE, which served our necessities well and made possible the first playable demo to be done under the time constraint.
After Project Gamerama 2009 we continued development in our spare time. YAT was submitted while not completed to SBGames 2009, and was submitted to SBGames 2010 after being considered complete.
