Wellbeeing

Wellbeeing is a 2D point and click casual game where players take on the role of Charlotte, a budding community scientist learning how to grow a native garden and attract local pollinators. By experimenting with Charlotte’s garden and interacting with her neighbors, researchers, and other members of the community, players discover what it’s like to conduct community science research. Players are also encouraged to customize their garden based on strategies used to support local pollinators in the real world.

The game seeks to accurately represent the process of community science and highlight the benefits of cultivating a native garden on both an environmental and personal level.

Design goal:

Wellbeeing aims to give players a sense of creativity, discovery, and community as they design their garden and observe new types of bees while learning to conduct citizen science.

The Bees

We worked with a science advisor specializing in bee ecology to ensure that we were representing bees and their behavior accurately!

There is something so satisfying about the way bees move that we wanted to capture in this game, so we used pathfinding to give the bees some autonomy and behavior trees to allow them to find and land on their preferred flower species.

The Garden

We wanted players to feel a sense of ownership over their native flower garden, so we decided that players should be able to customize their garden as much as possible.

Players can choose a species of unlocked flowers and place it in their garden wherever they choose. Because the bee pathfinding and flower detection is dynamic, they have no problem finding the flowers in the garden!

The Journal

Data is at the core of citizen science initiatives, so we wanted to represent data collection in an approachable and visible way.

The player can click on bees to "observe" their current behavior and record any new happenings. Finding a new bee species will add a new entry to the journal, but there is more to discover than just the bee! Bee's flower preferences can also be captured and logged into the notebook as important data.

The behavior tree keeps track of which flower the bee is on and lets the journal system know when to update the information it is displaying from each bee's data logs.