I made this game during an internal game jam at Bossa, where we had just two days to pull something together. Here’s the original pitch email I sent around:

"Based on true events I saw yesterday in the streets of Shoreditch: A group of garbage men had (apparently...?) a few beers too many before work, and their clumsiness—and complete inability to stay on the trash truck—was pretty inspiring.

In short: it’s Crazy Taxi meets Human Fall Flat.

One player drives toward a target destination (shown by arrows on the ground), while the other players hang off the sides of the moving trash truck, trying not to fall off. When they reach the stop, Player 2-4 have to throw trash bags into the back of the truck—without accidentally tossing themselves in—and then scramble to jump back on before it drives away. That’s it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

I started with a basic character controller, which you can see in the first working prototype. I had a good head start since I was able to reuse parts of an old climbing system from a previous prototype, shown here in the original climbing test.

Once that was solid, I added the trash truck itself, along with the ability to throw trash bags into it. The first trash car test shows the whole thing starting to come together. From there, I focused on gameplay—grabbing and throwing trash, then jumping back onto the side of the truck—shown in this early gameplay loop.

Local multiplayer was a big part of the fun. In the multiplayer test, you can see the multi-target camera keeping track of all players as they try to keep up. I also added teamwork mechanics, where heavier objects can only be moved if players work together. You can see that in action in the teamwork gameplay demo, where one player can't move a heavy item alone—but with five more players grabbing on, they finally drag it across.

I added a simple respawn system, too. If you fall into the trash truck, you can quickly respawn, as shown in the spawn UI demo.

Once we had the basics in place, we moved on to adding more chaos. The city scene demo shows local multiplayer mayhem, with one player tossing another straight into the trash compactor. I also added some ridiculous interactions, like in the trashboyz feature test, where a player falls into the truck, spits out their head, and someone else throws it back in for good measure.

Finally, I added a simple start and end sequence. The trashboyz full loop shows the entire flow—press A to join, local multiplayer madness, and a results screen at the end tallying up the scores.

The game turned out so well, they added it to the Bossa Presents roster. At the time, everything in the lineup had an animal theme, so we swapped out the humans for raccoons and rebranded it as Trash Pandas.

The core gameplay stayed the same, but seeing raccoons hanging off the back of a trash truck made it even better. You can see one clinging on for dear life in the panda hang-on test. In another clip, a raccoon launches itself into the back of the trash truck… and gets crushed—shown here in the panda self-launch fail.

We kept building on it with more chaos. The gameplay sequence shows a bunch of different moments: raccoons grabbing trash, falling off the truck, and climbing back on. In the hit and run sequence, the camera is attached to the front of the trash truck as the driver crashes into a traffic light while other pandas hang off the sides.

Eventually, we pulled it all together for the final trailer, which featured plenty of raccoon mayhem and pure local multiplayer chaos. You can watch the full teaser here: Trash Pandas teaser trailer.

Literally days before launch, we ran into some moral concerns. Another indie dev was working on a game featuring raccoons doing funny physics-based stuff. It was a different concept, but we didn’t want to risk a potential shitstorm or step on anyone’s toes.

So we made a last-minute call to swap the raccoons for foxes and renamed the game Trash Bandits. Easier said than done. In the early prototype test, you can see one of the first foxes in action—completely deformed and hilarious in all the wrong ways. Replacing the characters turned out to be a lot harder than expected.

After a lot of fixes, we got the foxes working properly. The updated gameplay test shows them behaving (mostly) like they should. There’s also a clip where one fox gets totally wrecked by another trash truck in the hit and run moment, and another where a fox throws something across the map in this throw mechanic demo.

After redoing a ton of assets (and the entire trailer), we wrapped it up just in time. The final Trash Bandits gameplay trailer features all the new foxes, and yeah—it was a wild time.