Sanitizer
Sanitizer is an educational eco-adventure game where players navigate a boat through polluted oceans, completing cleanup missions. By collecting marine trash and rescuing trapped sea animals, players not only enjoy the game but also gradually raise their environmental awareness. With easy-to-learn controls and a visually appealing low-poly style, Sanitizer blends ocean cleaning with adventure, creating a world that is both relaxing and challenging.
Role: Project Manager/2D Artist/Level Designer
Genre: Simulation Game
Duration: 4 Weeks
Tool Used: Unity, AIGC
Team Size: 6
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User Experience Goal
In Sanitizer, players take on the unique role of an ocean cleaner, navigating beautiful yet polluted waters to restore the environment. Simple, intuitive controls allow players of all skill levels to engage easily. Collecting trash and rescuing sea animals offers a sense of achievement and fosters an emotional connection to the game’s environmental message.
Game Story Background
The game takes place in Balotia, a fictional island nation in the Caribbean Sea, set in 1985. Balotia is a newly emerging country that initially relied on tourism to develop its economy, later boosting its foreign exchange through marine trade and low-cost industries.
Over the past few decades of rapid development, Balotia neglected environmental protection, resulting in severe environmental degradation. Like many developing countries, this was an unfortunate but necessary choice.
Since the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm in 1972, many countries began enacting environmental protection laws, including Balotia.
Balotia is surrounded by three different ocean currents: the Caribbean Current, the Gulf Stream, and the South Equatorial Current. This makes Balotia a crucial migratory route for many animals and leads to a highly variable climate. As a result, the cleanliness of the environment causes significant changes, providing diverse climate scenarios for the game.
Players will take on the role of a government-appointed waste cleaner in Balotia.
My contribution
Project Management
I acted as the primary meeting organizer, planning brainstorming sessions and coordinating the development schedule. I designed the system framework diagram, refining the core gameplay loop and securing team-wide approval. When team members departed during production, I reorganized task assignments and rebalanced the workload. I also managed the project’s scope, proactively preventing feature creep to keep development focused and achievable.
2D UI & Pixel Art
I led the design of the game’s UI system and created 2D pixel art elements with art materials from generating AI, including the main interface, menus, mission reports, and pop-up panels. To address resource shortages after an artist’s departure, I combined AI-assisted tools with hand-drawn techniques to produce the required assets. I also standardized the UI’s typography and visual style to maintain consistency across the game.
Team Communication & Problem Solving
I was responsible for constructing all game levels using Unity Terrain, including the tutorial and main campaign stages. I designed and optimized level terrain, defined playable areas and boundaries, and refined the environments to ensure fluid gameplay and an engaging player experience.
Narrative
I independently created the complete backstory and lore of the game, including the fictional nation of Balotia, its history, and geographic setting. I wove real-world environmental issues into Balotia’s development narrative to enhance emotional depth and real-world relevance. In addition, I wrote all in-game narrative text and mission dialogue, ensuring that the story complemented and strengthened the gameplay experience.
System diagram
Design Insights
Integration of narrative and gameplay
In the worldbuilding design, I attempted to connect real-world environmental issues with the fictional nation of Balotia’s political and economic development. My intention was for the narrative to serve not merely as background decoration, but to actively drive player actions through a grand overarching story. In theory, players’ efforts to clean marine debris would influence national news, public opinion, and diplomatic relations. This design aimed to give players a sense of the larger significance of their actions, reinforcing their sense of purpose and responsibility.
When the player finishes different levels, the impact will be reflected on news paper.
Self-Assessments on the Integration of narrative and gameplay
However, this design did not succeed in practice. The connection between the players’ in-game actions and the nation’s political landscape lacked immediate and intuitive feedback. Players’ motivation primarily stemmed from sensory and instant reward stimuli, rather than purely textual descriptions. Although the game provided narrative explanations of how player actions affected politics, this indirect feedback lacked sufficient visualization and actionable response, preventing players from forming a strong sense of cause and effect.
At its core, this issue violated Skinner’s operant conditioning theory—the principle that effective behavioral feedback must be timely, perceptible, and provide positive reinforcement for player actions. I attempted to replace immediate feedback mechanisms with narrative text, which ultimately resulted in insufficient player engagement and failed to establish the expected behavioral motivation loop.
UI design
In the UI design, I aimed to create an immersive role-based experience that allows players to engage with the game from the perspective of a marine sanitation worker. I incorporated numerous elements that reflect the daily routine of a cleaner: the mission list resembles an authentic work logbook, the pause menu draws inspiration from vintage nautical equipment, the mission success screen presents a government-issued black-screen report expressing national gratitude, and the news pages emulate the layout of newspapers to reinforce the player’s impact on national and global affairs. The overall aesthetic combines the visual language of office documents, maritime instruments, and personal notebooks, crafting a UI experience that not only reflects the game’s world-building depth but also reinforces the player’s in-game role.
Self-Assessments on UI design
Although the UI’s visual style successfully aligned with the narrative goals, there were shortcomings in technical implementation and user experience. Due to limited team resources, some UI elements lacked smooth interactive feedback, such as dynamic effects for button presses and more refined visual responses. Additionally, while the text conveyed world-building and context, it lacked sufficient visual hierarchy and clear prioritization of information, which could make it difficult for players to quickly grasp key details during fast-paced gameplay. This issue highlighted for me that even narrative-driven UI must strike a careful balance between clarity of information and stylistic expression.