I saw this article on why kids loves garbage trucks. And it got me looking at games about garbage trucks.
Obviously there must be a garbage truck simulator in the vein of Euro Truck Simulator or Train Simulator.
I found Recycle: Garbage Truck Simulator but since this was kicked off by kids who love garbage trucks, I saw how much focus the trailer puts on managing the whole system over just driving the truck.
From one of the negative reviews on that: “You can’t control the garbage man only the driver which sucks.” Which is a neat perspective of what that person wanted out of a garbage truck game.
Some android games seem more aimed at kid level, but then are also kind of cheap. This one doesn’t show any animation for the actual pick up, just fading out and then the garbage is gone? This feels like, for a garbage truck game, a critical lack of juice, if the act of picking up garbage is completely glossed over like that.
There’s this one where apparently the garbage man is a transformer? But just does a “knocking one foot” animation next to the garbage cans instead of a more fitting animation.
This one shows a suitable animation for picking up the dumpsters, but dropping off the garbage at the dump it sort of, tips a dumpster back out of the truck? I don’t think that’s how it works.
I guess one tricky thing is if you do want to target an audience young enough to delight in garbage trucks, you also have to make it much simpler than actually driving a garbage truck. If you want to make a highly accurate garbage truck simulator, then you’ll lose a lot of that younger audience.
Is there some way to push an element of garbage collection further? To make it sort of the Crazy Taxi of garbage collection? Not to mean just like Crazy Taxi but you drive a garbage truck, because the underlying nature is different. So exactly what way you want to push the craziness is different.
One thing I’d considered before was Crazy Taxi but you’re delivering pizzas, but the down side is you then go back to the pizza place for pick-up. The starting point of your delivery is always the same, where a taxi game lets both your start and end point keep changing. Garbage collector would have the problem that you’re typically following the same route over and over. So can you just have a list of routes and you just try to get the fastest time on each route?
Or should it be more like Paper Boy? You’re not just racing for time, but you can somehow do a better or worse job picking up the garbage. Maybe you can throw garbage?
Maybe there’s some fun to be had from the need to switch between driving mode and pick up mode? It does have a kind of frantic “juggling” aesthetic I like in some games?