Trash Talk Retro platformer · Unity · K–12 Education
Trash Talk is a retro pixel-style platform jumper with a hip-hop soul. Players guide sanitation engineers Hitch and Marge through an urban skyline, hunting down answer choices hidden in dumpsters and spiking them into the truck below. It’s ridiculous. Students love it.
It was also our first Unity game — and it had to prove something.
The Problem
We were moving from HTML5 to Unity and needed to make a case for the investment. Not just to our team — to company leadership and ultimately to the schools buying our curriculum. Whatever we built had to be fun enough to hold a middle schooler’s attention, flexible enough to support review content across hundreds of K–12 lessons, and polished enough to signal that a new era of interactive content had arrived.
A garbage game about finding answers in dumpsters turned out to be exactly that.
My Role
Keeping a small team of designers and a developer aligned toward a shared vision — especially one they couldn’t fully see yet — was the hardest part of this project. I was the compass. Mockups, style guides, storyboards, and interactive prototypes were how I kept everyone moving in the same direction without stopping forward progress.
I also got my hands dirty. I built a parallax prototype in Unity to demonstrate how we could create a convincing illusion of driving through a city without ballooning production costs — showed it to the developer, he was in, and it made it into the final game. I developed the visual language with the team, drawing on real urban landscapes and graffiti culture for reference. I designed the UI, animated the characters and effects, and built out level components that the team could assemble modularly across courses.
The Outcome
About a year later the pieces came together. Trash Talk shipped across 50 lessons in four subjects — Social Studies, Science, Language Arts, and Math — and was eventually played by around 2,000 students. It ran on Chromebooks. It ran on mobile. It made the splash we were hoping for, and it proved that our team could deliver something genuinely new.
