Big Back Bird

settings window
instructions window

Inspiration

Food insecurity has been a challenge for college students for a long time, and as juniors living off-campus, we’ve felt it even more. Without dining plans, we now shoulder the responsibility of doing groceries, cooking food, and doing dishes ourselves. So we thought, why not make a game that helps you stay motivated to tackle it all and maintain a healthy lifestyle? Our game allows you to feed your birds while feeding yourself. Become a big back with Big Back Bird, where all your (healthy) big back dreams will come true!

What it does

Here are the official instructions of the game: Your goal is to keep the birds in your field happy and well-fed—just like yourself! Log your meals and recipes, along with how you prepared them. It’s a great way to stay mindful of what you’re eating! Birds are more likely to be happy when you serve them a home-cooked meal. Not all birds like the same food, so pay attention to their preferences! The birds can enjoy up to your set number of meals per day. It’s a reminder for you to maintain a balanced routine. A full heart means a happy bird! The more hearts a bird has, the more likely it is to stay in your field. If your field is empty, use the invite button to bring in a new friend. Set your meal goals and preferences in the settings tab to make healthy eating fun and interactive! In this game, birds will come to your field in search of happiness and food (food is happiness..). Each bird will have 3 hearts that are as of now invisible to the user. You can maintain these hearts by cooking meals that make the birds happy (you will see that their eyes look happy!). If not, don’t worry as the hearts won’t go down, but do note that everyday a bird will lose one heart. The current styles of cuisine associated with each bird right now are Mediterranean, Italian, Indian, Mexican, and Chinese. There is a flex option (the duck) who will accept any style of cuisine.

Our goal for this game is two things:

Help encourage a consistent meal schedule
Also encourage (when possible!) to cook in the kitchen

We do both of these by certain characteristics of the game: There will be a meal count that resets everyday that tracks to see if the user uploads XX meals a day. This setting can be changed via the Settings menu Birds will greatly prefer cooked food over takeout food in the game; they would be happy even with cooked food that isn’t even in their preferred meal category. Even if the user doesn’t cook a meal, there is still a chance that the bird will be happy as long as they fit the meal category. Of course, if you want better chances of happiness, you might as well cook when you can.

How we built it

We used Unity and the Unity Web GL library to make a website runnable game, and coded all the scripts in C#. We used a centralized game manager to track daily progress and meal submissions, ensuring that the game encourages healthy habits like cooking consistently. The visuals were created using Procreate and Figma and we used simple Unity 2D UI elements like input forms and dialogue boxes to facilitate user interaction.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges was managing time and game state, especially when dealing with daily resets for some game components (like the 3 invite cap). There was also some conceptual difficulty we faced in balancing the random nature of bird invitations with the need for mindful player freedom. As for the technical aspects, working in Unity brought forth some challenges as in fine tuning the game objects, anchoring UI and facing discrepancies on different monitors (due to differences in aspect ratios), as well as having merge conflicts where we as a team had to tread carefully. There were also many edge cases of the game that made the game function in a way that we didn’t want to initially, and we had to individually go in and fix those bugs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully created a game that addresses a common issue amongst college students helping manage a healthy eating schedule. We are proud to turn this concept or issue into a fun and engaging game with our “feed the birds” mechanic, bringing enjoyment into daily meal-tracking. The whole goal was to design a concept that would encourage players to be mindful of meal consistency and inspire them to cook at home more often, making healthier choices accessible and fun. Another accomplishment we're proud of was mastering Unity and implementing Web GL to make the game accessible on a website. With limited experience, we pushed ourselves beyond our comfort zones to learn new skills, tackle technical challenges, and adapt as we went. Working under time constraints, we had to deal with debugging issues and complex game states, like tracking and resetting daily progress and managing random yet purposeful bird invites. Navigating these hurdles brought our team closer, strengthened our resilience, and gave us a sense of achievement in not only overcoming these challenges but also in enhancing our teamwork and technical skills. Along the way, we also developed our own art assets using Procreate and drafted the UI for particular screens using Figma, which added a unique touch and personalized feel to the game. Designing an inviting visual experience helped us enhance user engagement, making gameplay more enjoyable and accessible. We also fine-tuned interactive features, such as the daily meal count and bird happiness indicators, so players could easily track their progress and feel rewarded for consistent meal logging. With each feature, we ensured our design would support the game’s core purpose: to bring positivity and habit-building to players' lives in an enjoyable way.

What we learned

It was a first time using Unity for a big project for most of the team members, so this was a valuable learning experience with the app and coding in C#/.NET. Throughout this project, we deepened our understanding of game development, especially using Unity in a WebGL deployment context. Learning how to manage time-based events in a game using DateTime.Now was an interesting journey and we also gained experience in game design—we had to really think about how to balance the game mechanics to create a fun and rewarding but helpful player experience.

What's next for Big Back Bird

Our initial idea was to allow the app to take pictures of the food and create a scrapbook screen, but our knowledge with image uploading systems and Unity was very limited. Thus we hope to make this a mobile app and implement that feature one day. We hope to incorporate more neat features for the game, such as adding new birds and new cuisines. We also considered adding a point system, which redeems accessories for more fun. In a more updated version we hope to fix some weird bugs that we encountered from running the game.