A reel-life simulation game.

Track: Game Design Event: Uncommon Hacks 2026 (UChicago)

You are a clownfish. The ocean is your home. A boat overhead won't stop dumping cans into it.

Being Nemo is a third-person survival game where you spend a day in the life of a clownfish, racing to clear litter from your environment before it suffocates the ecosystem you live in — all while dodging the predators that have always called this place home. It's a small, focused experience built to make a point: the trash we leave behind isn't abstract. Something has to live with it.

• Move with WASD, look around with the mouse.
• Press F to pick up litter — cans and other waste falling from a boat above.
• Drop collected litter into a basket on the ocean floor. Every 10 items restores your health bar.
• Watch the surface. Every can that hits the surface drains your health by 10%.
• Avoid the shark. Predators patrol the area and will end your run if they catch you.

The loop is simple and pressure-driven: collect fast enough to outpace what's piling up, but not so recklessly that you swim into a shark. Health is the meeting point of two forces — the ecological one (litter reaching the surface) and the natural one (getting eaten).

Ocean litter is usually communicated through statistics. Statistics don't always land. A game that puts you inside the problem — where the player's health bar is the health of the ocean — is a different kind of argument. We wanted to see if a 36-hour build could make that argument in a way a chart can't.

Done:

• Detailed ocean simulation: wave reflections, light shadows, depth effects, coral reef contours
• A fully animated clownfish controller (WASD + mouse pan)
• Litter spawn system — cans appear randomly and sink toward the ocean bed
• Core health bar mechanics

In Progress:

• The boat: a moving surface vessel that drops litter at intervals
• Procedural coral reef placement for environmental immersion
• Predator (shark) AI and patrol behavior
• Basket-and-deposit collection loop

Stretch:

• Multiple predator types
• Day/night cycle tied to difficulty scaling
• End-of-run summary: litter collected vs. litter that reached the surface

A single-level, single-session experience. Designed to be picked up by anyone in under 30 seconds and to leave them with one clear thought when they put it down.

Karaen Senthilkumar Adithya Suresh Tushar Sonthalia Agnes Srinivasan

Unity