Game Title
The C.L.E.A.R. F.A.C.T.O.R.Y Game

Developer Name
Pacific Rim Designs

Short Promo Blurb
After decades of unchecked consumption, our planet is drowning in piles of trash. Join the C.L.E.A.R. F.A.C.T.O.R.Y. today and help change the story!

Full Description
After decades of unchecked consumption, our planet is drowning in piles of trash. Even though the cry for help has come through loud and clear, people continue to choose convenience over sustainability. The question is what happens when there is no more room for buying and tossing?

The Community Landfill Extraction and Repurposing Fabrication and Creation Through Optimized Recycled Yields, or C.L.E.A.R. F.A.C.T.O.R.Y. for short, offers a long term survivability solution. The C.L.E.A.R. F.A.C.T.O.R.Y. will answer the cry for help by reusing existing materials to reduce emissions.

As our newest member, you’ll take discards and cast-offs and transform them from the trash filling our landfills into useful everyday items. You are the key player in this new manufacturing venture. The difference you can make starts today. Welcome to the C.L.E.A.R. F.A.C.T.O.R.Y.!

Promo Image(s)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1S3JzVGKqLS_krMXmZcmaJOEC0dYqur6B?usp=sharing

Promo Video
https://youtu.be/lBRDrpxcb8g

Artistic Statement / Use of Theme(s)
The largest user of fossil fuels is manufacturing. In order to significantly reduce fossil fuels, manufacturing facilities need to be redesigned or closed. There is already a societal call for 0% Carbon Emission manufacturing. Currently, many companies have joined the Climate Pledge that calls for net-zero carbon by 2040. The problem with these pledges is there isn’t a unified definition of what counts as net-zero carbon and most companies are planning to do things like plant trees to offset their current carbon emissions. While more trees isn’t a bad thing, it isn’t a sustainable option as even on a foundational level, we’d eventually run out of room for new trees. It also doesn’t address their actual fossil fuel usage. From the Covid shutdowns, we know changing manufacturing would better our planet. We saw the difference in just weeks.

Since a prolonged stop to manufacturing is not realistic due to the economic impact, it would be better to minimize manufacturing as much as possible and replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. This would require a shift in designing items to last longer or pushing to reuse existing items. Reusing existing items inspired us to create this game. While recycling is well known, the actual usage of recycled materials isn’t. For most people, they stick their recyclables in their blue box and it gets taken into what is essentially a void. The Phoenix Factory takes recyclables, a community makerspace, adds a little bit of game magic, and Voila! Players can see what using recycled materials to limit unnecessary manufacturing might look like. Examples we drew from include @Wood_Mood’s plastic bottle beanie, Campanópolis in Argentina, and our local makerspace, SnoCo Makerspace.

Development Summary
Originally, we planned for the following:
* Restricted access to certain areas and materials
* Cleaning up 5 landfills that give different materials
* Energy level management and required dues to use factory for difficulty
* 5 stations in the factory that perform different tasks
* Selling mechanic at the farmers market with dialog between shoppers and player
* Specialty items that provide boosts like additional inventory space, energy, automatic material gathering

Where we ended up:
* Access to factory, landfills, and farmers market without restrictions
* 2 landfills that give plastic, glass, and fabric
* 3 stations to clean, process, and paint items with animation
* Selling mechanic at the farmers market without dialog

The hardest thing was finding existing models to cut down on development time. We had to limit the number of stations and other areas of game play in order to meet our production timeline. The hardest thing to cut from our concept was the additional landfills and the specialty items. These parts would have created a more enjoyable game, but we had to cut back in order to have a playable game. There were 4 people involved in the creation of our game.

Release Plan
The game is currently fully playable. In the future, we plan to continue working on it to add the additional landfills and the specialty items that you can collect from the landfills.