Created a walking simulator centered on sustainability, exploration, and giving back to the world around you
Roles
UX Researcher, UI/UX Designer, Asset Designer, Sound Designer
Tools
Figma, Unity, Git
Team
Tommy DeBenedetti, Thu Le, Mai Mostafa, Myan Ngo, Candy Tang
Course
CS247G: Design for Play, 6 weeks
OVERVIEW
Wandering is a gentle exploration game about curiosity, care, and returning small moments of goodness back into the world. You play as a tiny creature roaming a quiet, hand-drawn landscape, discovering forgotten objects and choosing how to restore them to the environment. The game invites players to slow down, notice details, and experience a soft, meditative form of play.
CREATIVE INTENT
Instead of solving a “problem,” this project explored how games can evoke emotion, reflection, and environmental empathy through minimalist mechanics. We set out to design a world that feels alive in subtle ways — a space where players are rewarded not by points or progression systems, but by the small joys of exploration.
This section frames the why behind the game’s design:
We wanted to create an experience that encourages players to pause, wander, and immerse themselves in a quiet world.
We explored how environmental storytelling and object placement can communicate themes of sustainability and renewal without explicit dialogue.
We aimed to evoke a feeling of gentleness and care, allowing players to interact with the world at their own pace.
We experimented with how lightweight mechanics and soft aesthetics can create a meditative, restorative play experience.
Wanna try it out? Our slice is available for download on itch.io!
OUR CONCEPT
Creating a world of wonder
Our first big task was to land on a catching narrative and concept. In order to explore this, we created a concept document which contained storylines, moodboards, and playlists in order for us to create a cohesive narrative around transformation, healing, wonder, hope, and discovery.
CHARACTER DESIGN
Bringing our characters to life
To ground the story in emotion and whimsy, we crafted characters whose looks, quirks, and arcs guide players through a journey of wonder and discovery.
MAIN CHARACTERS
The Player
A young child on a camping trip wanders into the forest. Lost and unsure where to go, they lay down and try to stay calm. When they wake, they emerge as a fox in a magical forest. The forest is strange, there’s odd fruits and fashionable creatures and…a big dead tree. Is that a bipedal beaver?
This child-turned-fox helps the bipedal beaveress create a salve to heal The Great Tree, meeting interesting creatures every step of the way.
Bonnie the Beaveress
A wise, old, fashionable beaveress who practices magic. She seems to be the only one who does though, strange.
Bonnie finds the player and immediately notices. The shaky walk, the wobbly knees.
Bonnie speaks to the player and offers to help them find a way home. But reciprocity rules, you must give where you take. Bonnie recruits the player to help acquire the ingredients necessary to create the salve for The Great Tree.
SIDE CHARACTERS
Benjamin the Bear: Big fan of honey and pollen-rich flowers, insanely cute
The Frogs: “BUUURRRPPPPPP”
Simone Ze Swan: French and misses Fashion Week; doesn’t know how she ended up here, but is a very big fan of the unique hats
Oliver the Owl: An environmental engineer who has been studying this fancy thing called '“carbon capture”
The Bees: Suppliers of honey, of course only with pollen-rich flowers
MECHANICS DESIGN
Encouraging players to slow down
The game’s mechanics center around exploration, collection, and interaction, encouraging players to slow down, wander, and connect with the world around them. The core loop revolves around gathering four key items—shards, water, honey, and a flower. Every mechanic was designed to reflect the game’s themes of care and restoration: puzzles reward observation rather than speed, and dialogue emphasizes reciprocity over extraction. Through iteration and playtesting, we refined pacing, feedback, and accessibility to make the act of wandering itself feel meaningful, a quiet reflection on our relationship with nature.
ASSET & ENVIRONMENT DESIGN
Allowing users to explore
Our game map was one of our most iterated upon details, continuously being edited to convey our story without explicitly guiding the user. There are prior iterations that included different color schemes, clear pathways, less variety of plants, and many other alterations to get to this map which we felt provided the feeling of open-world, but not one without any direction at all. This sentiment carried over for our asset design, which I was primarily responsible for. You can see the entire asset pack here. I then used these assets to create the game map, doing my best to cultivate a guided open world experience.
PLAYTESTING
Reflection and continuous iteration
Throughout the course, we playtested at leats twice a week. Through this, we gained valuable insights throughout the entirety of our design and development process. Beyond our map, our playlists contributed to alterations in dialogue, task, and overall comprehension of the themes of our project.
If you’d like to see more of our process, you can see our final report here!
IMPLEMENTATION
Wandering was developed in Unity using a modular, scene-based structure that separated each forest area into distinct environments connected through fade transitions. The game’s core systems were built around a lightweight player controller that managed smooth movement, collision detection, and camera follow, creating a natural wandering flow. A custom dialogue and interaction system powered exchanges with NPCs and environmental objects, while a centralized Game Manager handled quest logic, inventory updates, and global state persistence between scenes. The inventory UI dynamically tracked collected items such as shards and ingredients, updating through event listeners whenever players completed a task.
Puzzle interactions—like assembling glass shards or gathering fireflies—were implemented using conditional triggers and scripted object states that evolved with player progress. Throughout development, the team refined visual feedback, optimized hitboxes, and fixed camera jitter to polish the player experience. The final implementation balanced narrative pacing with exploration, creating a cohesive, technically stable slice of a larger world.
You can see all this work in our GitHub repository for this project
OUR FINAL PROJECT
Following where the wind blows
Wandering—a walking simulator that follows the story of a fox in a magical forest which has been a bit down on its luck.
REFLECTION
CS 247G was a truly amazing course for me. As someone who had always loved analog games, it was such an wonderful experience to take my interest and see it to its fullest potential. I had never really been given the opportunity to explore game development before this course. It had always felt foreign and intangible to me, something beyond the scope of my understanding or capabilities. But I took a chance, and I took this class, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
When I learned the concept of something being “fun” for the first time, it fundamentally changed my worldview. When I understood that “fun” actually is learning in a structured, satisfactory, and challenging way, my world expanded. As someone who always had an interest in educational technology, it redefined for me what it means to make something that is educational. In fact, educational technology is everywhere in everything, in every game, in every Canvas assignment, and even in every Tumblr post. I realized that my inherent love of education can guide me even in fields where it may seem unrelated.
Beyond that, being able to learn how to use Unity in a productive and helpful environment was incredibly beneficial to me, especially because I now use it every day in my own research at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL). I am incredibly grateful to both my team for their patience with me, and the teaching team for all the support they provided. I am also incredibly grateful because this project was the first time I had created my own vector graphics, and it was a worthwhile and fulfilling challenge. And finally, being able to work on the sound design was very special for me. When I was younger I always dreamed of composing for games, and although I didn’t get to do that here because of the time constraint, being able to find music and create the auditory experience of this game meant the world to me. This is a truly remarkable class.
If I were to continue working on Wandering, I would love to build upon its narrative. Some of my favorite video games, Hollow Knight, Breath of the Wild, and Undertale, tend to all captivate me because of their phenomenal world building. This isn’t particularly shocking, I’m a reader and I love a good story. I would love to learn how to build a world through this project, to create not only a fun experience, but an impactful one. I also would love to explore creating accessible experiences, via text to speech, variations in color schemes, and designing hint systems for users who may need assistance to fully engage with what we made.
