Comfy Camper
A relaxing game about camping
— PROJECT NAME
Comfy Camper
— ROLE
Lead Programmer
Sound designer
— DATE
September – December 2022
— SOFTWARES USED
Unity
Reaper
Perforce
Comfy Camper is a game design project made as part of a UQAT course. It's a collect-a-thon with the goal of providing a relaxing experience imitating what can be felt when camping. It was made by a team of 5 people (me included) with the Unity engine:
- Félix Marcoux (me)
You can play the final prototype by downloading it on itch.io here.
Game design
The game’s original idea came from me. We had to think about a specific experience we wanted to convey with our game. I was primarily inspired by the anime Laid-Back Camp, describing the camping experiences of a group of young schoolgirls. It differed from my other ideas with its positivity and the pitch video I made resonated with many of my schoolmates.
Once the team was formed, it was rapidly determined the desired experience favored a collect-a-thon. So, I participated to establish a gameplay loop based on exploration and mini-games. To match the game’s vision, these needed to be simple, fun and unstressful. In the end, we came up with three minigame types we felt we could develop in the allowed time.
During development, we mostly used Discord to communicate and Notion to keep track of each other’s progress. One of my weekly tasks was to ensure our documentation was kept up to date and prioritize certain tasks for the next sprint. This gave me a lot of leadership and project management experience.
Programming
Since I was the most knowledgeable about programming among my team, I took charge of most of the base elements in order to quickly have our main mechanics working. These included player movement, implementing my teammate’s animations, and creating the first of our minigames.
During most of the development, I worked on a cooking minigame, that consisted of succeeding multiple Quick-time events that represented steps in a recipe. I created a system for it that generates multiple sequences of up to 5 random keys.
I was also responsible for creating the timer for the cooking and birdspotting minigame, as well as the small areas in each map from which the player could access minigames.
Another main mechanic of our collect-a-thon was to actually see what was collected in an encyclopedia, since we wanted the player to feel satisfied by his progress. To this effect, I created a ScriptableObject for each collectible in order to easily change their values if needed. These include their name, image, rarity, the zones they can be found in, the number collected and the minigame that holds them.
This greatly facilitated keeping track of the player’s progress, showing it in his encyclopedia, as well as adding new items when collecting them from a minigame.
Sound design
Finally, I was also tasked with searching, adding and placing every sound effects and musics in the game. Every sound effect came from the royalty-free library Freesound.org, with some modifications through Reaper. The background musics, as for them, came from various other royalty-free music sites. Every audio element was implemented via Unity’s audio system instead of Wwise.
My goal was to give every zone and minigame their own atmosphere, and every sound effect was placed to that effect. For example, the beach area was given a more festive background music to make the player feel the excitement of a beach trip. The zone also contains wave sounds when going near the water and many ambiant seagull sounds.
I’m also proud of the system I programmed that gives each zone a background music for night and day, with corresponding sound effects and smooth transitions between the two. Overall, I felt the whole audio of the game really helped to enhance player immersion.
In conclusion, I really liked working on this project. Every member of the team did a fantastic job, either on a technical level or for art direction. Sadly, like many other projects, the time we were allowed for this project forced us to change some of our vision and simplify greatly the narration and other mechanics in the prototype. However, I’m still proud to have allowed this project to see the light of day and I have gained a lot of knowledge from it.