Emo Camp is a serious game utilizing cognitive science, aimed at teaching different human emotions to children and teaching how to use them more appropriately in everyday life situations. The game was developed and tested at different stages in close cooperation with cognitive scientists and researchers to maintain a solid scientific foundation.
Every player starting the game should make a profile of their own so that they could come back to the game later and continue on their progress, even if another player wanted to play the game in the meantime. After making the profile, the player enters the game and could select a level among all the levels they have already played or unlocked.
Since Emo Camp was an educational project, I did much R&D from the beginning of the project, studying almost every released game with a similar purpose (teaching emotions recognition) to come up with a unique and yet scientifically valid idea for the game.
Almost every game that I studied was either too focused on the scientific part of the work and therefore lacked fun elements, or was not supported by enough scientific study and could not be relied on, in that matter. So I tried to include both scientific and fun elements, combining and presenting them in an engaging manner to keep any potential child interested in the learning process. In this case, I did a considerable amount of research into cognitive science and how the brain works regarding human emotions, and also on the other hand, how to make a fun and engaging game for children.
I designed the levels of the game as independent mini-games, with a focus on variety and childlike environment to make an educational game as much fun as possible for children. Every level begins with voice instructions from the speaking assistant (Macaw parrot) and then provides appropriate feedback on every interaction and choice that the player makes.
After designing the levels, I also prototyped them with some free art assets in the Unity engine using C# language. In doing so, I learned a lot of things regarding managing the UI elements of the game and their relation to the backend coding in Unity.
Here you can see some of the finalized levels of the game:
Emo Camp introduces six primary human emotions (Happiness, Sadness, Surprise, Fear, Anger, Disgust), categorizing them into different levels of difficulty and presenting each category at a time to the player, in a progressive manner. In that matter, I needed to make sure that the player learns the emotions within each category well enough, before advancing to the next category. So I designed a "progress calculation system" for the game, which estimated the player's level of improvement in learning different emotions and decided accordingly whether he/she is ready to face tougher challenges. The system utilized various information according to the player performance to set the right level of difficulty throughout the entire game.
Watch the gameplay video:
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