Camposition
A relaxing game that lets the player practice photo composition
The Project
Camposition was a two week project that I worked on with four other graduate students while in UCF's Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy in the Fall of 2020. For the project we were given the assignment to make a game that goes beyond just being entertainment. Besides myself there was Dillon Lynch (Project Management), Yami Trujillo (3D Artist), Emmanuel Otero (Tech Artist), and Arthur Karapateas (Programmer). I myself was a Technical Designer for the project and we worked in Unity.
Design Origination
From early on the group really wanted to take a learning by doing approach. It was something I championed given the natural of games as an interactive medium. Further we liked the lack of consequences that a gamic learning experience provides. This keep the learning a stress free activity. In that vein we strove to make the play space feel familiar, comforting, and zen. This way of thinking led our team to choose on the calming camp setting for the game and to further this feeling through a sunset like color palette and calming white ambience. In addition we liked the opportunity that the environment had for multiple angles and composition possibilities. As far as why
we settled on teaching photo composition it was a concept brought to us by our artists, who had gone over such concepts recently. There were a few other ideas on the table at the time but the group collectively agreed to it as we felt it to be an interesting lesson to teach and a fairly lighthearted concept. In addition, the nature of there being multiple composition layouts meant that we could focus on one first and then expand to the others if we had time. This meant that despite the technical challenge of handling checking for correctness we felt that we were within scope since we could create this as a proof of concept for one composition if needed.
My Work in the Project
On this project my first focus was movement and controls within our game. While Arthur took on the role of coding the algorithms to check the composition, I played with the mechanics that allowed the player to bring up and align the composition, and then take a picture. When it came time to put it together Arthur and I worked in tandem and collaborate closely on the bugs that came up. In addition, wanting to add additional challenge I added a tilt to the players view that gets offset each time the player pulls out the camera which also makes it feel more realistic. From there I tweaked and added features to increase the games feel to make sure everything fit that zen and calming tone. The final area I worked on was the game's audio using clips I found online through freesound.org that were listed as Creative Commons 0, which I then edited myself. With these sounds I worked a lot with Unity's 3D audio spatialization and audio mixer channels to help build the games atmosphere.
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