Campanion Starting Page
Take care of your cute pet!
Set wellness goals for yourself
Connect your Google Calendar
4 areas: Recovery, Fuel, Focus, and Move
Food items and nutritional values taken straight from the UCBerkeley dining hall menus website
Buy cute costumes with paw points earned from taking care of yourself!
Unlock achievements and earn cool items!
Connect with friends and play games for more paw points!
Get extra paw points by meeting up with friends!
Engage in some friendly competition and see how you rank against other students on your campus!

Inspiration

College life often rewards pushing through: another late-night study session, another skipped meal, another day without a break. But doing well academically shouldn’t mean neglecting everything that helps us feel well.

We wanted to build something that connects the pieces of student wellness rather than tracking them separately. Our starting question was: What if taking care of yourself felt like taking care of a character you loved?

That became Campanion, a gamified wellness companion whose avatar reflects your real daily habits. Instead of caring for a fictional pet through fictional actions, you help your buddy thrive by caring for yourself.

What it does

Campanion brings four areas of college life into one experience:

Recovery: sleep, consistency, rest, and recovery planning.
Fuel: meals, nutrition, food variety, and balance.
Focus: study sessions, focused work, and breaks.
Move: walking, exercise, and everyday activity.

Your buddy’s expressions and animations respond to your logged habits. Campanion identifies areas needing attention and suggests small, achievable quests, such as taking a walk, finishing a focus session, or adding vegetables to a meal.

Three features make the experience especially relevant to students:

Personalized recovery: Google Calendar commitments help shape bedtime, wake-up, wind-down, and nap recommendations alongside your sleep goals and logged sleep.

Campus-specific nutrition: Campanion pulls directly from Berkeley Dining menus, letting students build plates from dishes at Crossroads, Café 3, Foothill, and Clark Kerr instead of manually searching a generic food database.

Social accountability: Squad Goals and a shared virtual campus make progress something students can celebrate together. The public campus shows buddies and completed quest names while keeping personal logs private.

Completing quests earns Paw Points for customization, while achievements unlock special items and buddies. The goal is balance, not perfect scores or calorie restriction.

How we built it

We built Campanion with Mana, using React for the interface and Firebase for persistent data and real-time updates.

We created reusable SVG characters, expressive animations, and customizable outfits and environments. These visual elements connect the underlying habit records to a buddy that feels responsive and personal.

Google Calendar supplies scheduling context for recovery planning and quest timing. Berkeley Dining’s published menu and recipe data powers campus-specific food selection and available nutrition information.

The core experience connects those pieces into one loop:

Log real habits → find a useful next step → complete a quest → earn rewards → personalize your buddy.

Challenges we ran into

A central challenge was defining “balance” without turning wellness into another competition to maximize numbers. More studying should not automatically mean a better day if sleep, meals, and movement are neglected.

Personalization also required more than generic reminders. Recovery recommendations needed to respect calendar commitments, overnight timing, and realistic opportunities to rest.

Working with dining menus introduced another challenge: food availability, serving sizes, and nutrition information can vary. We needed to make that information useful without presenting estimates as exact measurements.

Finally, we had to balance community with privacy, making accomplishments visible without making someone’s detailed personal habits public.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of turning a broad wellness concept into a connected, playable experience.

We brought calendar-aware recovery, real Berkeley dining menus, focus tools, movement quests, and avatar customization into the same world. We also built a shared campus where individual progress can contribute to a sense of community.

Most importantly, we kept our original idea intact: the character reflects how you care for yourself, rather than becoming another responsibility to manage.

What we learned

We learned that useful wellness guidance needs context. “Eat better” is less actionable than helping someone choose from today’s dining hall menu. “Get more sleep” becomes more practical when it accounts for tomorrow’s first commitment.

We also learned that gamification is about what a system rewards, not just adding points. If we want to encourage balance, rest and recovery need to matter alongside productivity.

What's next for Campanion

We want to test Campanion with students and learn whether its quests, rewards, and social features support sustainable habits over time.

Next steps include expanding to more campuses, exploring opt-in wearable and health integrations to reduce manual logging, and developing an AI game master that adapts challenges to recent habits and feedback without offering medical advice.

We also want to deepen cooperative experiences so friends can build routines together without pressure to compete.

Our vision remains simple: your day becomes the game, and taking care of yourself becomes something worth coming back to.