Sorted! is an educational mobile game that makes waste management engaging and accessible. Players journey through 12 cities across India, sorting waste into the correct categories — Dry, Wet, Landfill, and E-Waste — while learning real data about each city's unique waste challenges. As the journey progresses, levels get harder, time runs shorter, and the stakes feel more real.

🎯 Goals

• Make waste segregation intuitive and habitual by turning it into a game mechanic.

• Use India's real urban waste landscape as the context — grounding gameplay in local, relatable realities.

• Progressively build player knowledge across 12 cities, each introducing new types of waste.

• Balance challenge and learning so players feel informed, not lectured.

📋 Responsibilities

• Game mechanics design

• UI design

• Interaction design

• Prototyping

• Content creation

India generates over 62 million tonnes of waste annually — yet segregation at source remains one of the weakest links in the chain. The challenge was to design an experience that makes people care about where their waste goes, without it feeling like a lesson.

So, my goal was to...

Design a game that turns waste segregation into second nature — by making it fast, local, and surprisingly hard to put down.

🗺️ Journey Through 12 Cities
Players travel across India city by city — Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, and beyond. Each city is a new level with its own set of waste items unique to that place's culture, industry, and lifestyle. Street food packaging in Mumbai feels different from leather scraps in Kanpur or electronic waste in Bengaluru's tech corridors.

📊 City Data Cards
Before each level loads, players are shown a snapshot of that city — what it is known for, its history. This isn't a quiz; it's ambient learning that adds meaning to the sorting that follows.

🗑️ Four Categories, One Rule
Every item must go into one of four bins: Dry (recyclables like paper, plastic, metal), Wet (food and organic waste), Landfill (items that can't be recycled or composted), and E-Waste (electronics and batteries). Simple categories, but the edge cases — a greasy pizza box, a broken phone charger — keep players thinking.

⏱️ Time Pressure That Escalates
Early cities give players breathing room to read, think, and sort. As the journey continues, the timer tightens and items appear faster — mirroring the real urgency of India's urban waste crisis and keeping experienced players on their toes.

📈 Progressive Difficulty
Later cities introduce ambiguous items, composite waste (things that span categories), and higher volume — pushing players from casual guessing to genuine knowledge.

🧩 Picking Up Android Studio, Kotlin & XML from Scratch
Sorted! was built entirely in Android Studio — a tool I had never used before. Learning Kotlin's syntax alongside XML layouts simultaneously meant there was no comfortable starting point. Early builds were messy, logic was tangled into UI files, and getting even basic interactions to work took far longer than expected. Over time, separating concerns and understanding the Android lifecycle made the codebase progressively cleaner.

🤖 Using Claude as a Development Partner — Effectively
Claude was central to the build process, but getting useful output required learning how to prompt well. Vague requests returned generic code that didn't fit the project's structure. The real shift came from providing full context — sharing existing code, explaining the architecture, and asking for specific, scoped changes rather than broad solutions. Treating Claude less like a search engine and more like a collaborator made a significant difference in output quality.

🪙 Managing Token Usage

Working within token limits meant being deliberate about what context to include in each session. Long files couldn't always be shared in full, so learning to extract and share only the relevant fragments — while keeping Claude oriented on the broader structure — became a skill in itself. It also pushed better code organization, since modular code was simply easier to work with in this workflow.

🎯 Getting Relevant Code & Visual Outcomes

Early generated code often worked in isolation but broke within the actual project. Visuals came out generic. The fix was iterative — reviewing outputs critically, identifying exactly where they diverged from intent, and refining the prompt with that specific mismatch called out. Refactoring became a regular part of the process rather than an afterthought, and the back-and-forth sharpened both the code and the design.

🧪 Testing on Real Devices

Emulator behaviour and real device behaviour didn't always match. Screen sizes, touch targets, and performance on mid-range Android devices surfaced issues that only showed up when the app was in hand. Testing across multiple devices before submission caught a handful of layout and timing bugs that would have hurt the experience.

🚀 Navigating the Play Store Publishing Process

Publishing to the Google Play Store involved a steeper process than expected — setting up a developer account, preparing store assets (icons, screenshots, descriptions, content ratings), and working through Google's review requirements. The content rating questionnaire for an app involving data collection required careful thought, and the review cycle added time that needed to be planned for.

🎮 Games are a Trojan horse for education

The most effective moment in Sorted! isn't the sorting — it's the city data card before the level. Players absorb real statistics without realising they're learning. Wrapping information inside a challenge changes how it's received entirely.

🛠️ Building what you design changes how you design

Stepping into the developer role — even at a beginner level — fundamentally shifted design decisions. Animations that seemed simple to spec turned out to be expensive to implement. Constraints became creative inputs rather than blockers.

🤝 AI-assisted development is a skill, not a shortcut

The quality of Claude's output was directly proportional to the quality of the prompt. Learning to communicate intent, context, and constraints precisely — as you would with a developer colleague — was as important as any technical skill picked up along the way.

🔄 Iteration isn't a phase — it's the process

Between prompting, refactoring, testing on device, and going back to the drawing board on edge cases, nothing shipped the way it was first conceived. The willingness to redo rather than patch made the final product significantly more coherent.

🗺️ Expanding to 20 Cities — Next Release

The roster grows from 12 to 20 cities in the next update, bringing in smaller Tier 2 cities like Indore (India's cleanest city, 7 years running), Mysuru, Coimbatore, and Bhopal — each with their own waste profiles and regional waste types that challenge assumptions built up in the first 12 levels.

📊 Live City Waste Data — Refreshed Daily

Each city level will surface real, up-to-date waste generation data via APIs — so returning players always see current numbers, turning Sorted! into a living snapshot of India's waste landscape rather than a static dataset.

🎯 Daily Bonus Level

A new and randomly selected Indian city dropping as a bonus level each day — giving players a hook to return even after completing all 12 cities, and exposing them to cities outside the main journey.

♻️ Deeper Waste Type Nuance

Future levels will introduce composite and ambiguous items more aggressively — a greasy newspaper, a broken LED bulb, a biodegradable plastic bag — items that don't fit neatly into one bin and prompt genuine reflection.

🏆 Streaks, Leaderboards & Sharing

A daily streak system tied to the bonus level, city-wise leaderboards, and shareable score cards to bring in social accountability and friendly competition.

🏫 Institutional Version

A schools and colleges edition with classroom-friendly features — group play, curriculum alignment, and teacher dashboards tracking how well students understand each waste category.

🌍 Beyond India

The city data model is replicable. A global version — with cities from Southeast Asia, Africa, and Europe — would make Sorted! a tool for waste education anywhere waste infrastructure is a challenge.