Toasty Scouts – Dave Pickett

Toasty Scouts is a video game where you roast marshmallows with raccoons and earn merit badges. The initial prototype was developed in early 2021 by myself and two other students at DePaul University for a class project.

Gameplay footage of Toasty Scouts. The player rotates a marshmallow on a stick near a campfire to roast it. In the background there are raccoons roasting marshmallows and a dark forest. — *Toasty Scouts* prototype gameplay

After our class was over, I decided to keep working on the project. I wanted to improve the user interface based on feedback from playtests. I created low-fidelity wireframes in Figma for a simplified heads-up display and new menus.

An illustration showing a simplified HUD with a bag of marshmallows, a roasting stick, and a plate. The cursor now looks like a raccoon paw and there are dotted lines to indicated how a player would interact. — Simplified HUD concept

An illustration of an open book with large icons of various achievements. Each achievement badge is accompanied by a title and a description box. — New achievements menu wireframe

A menu screen for Toasty Scouts. In the center there are basic menu items such as "New Game" and "Options". The wireframe demonstrates selected, unselected, and unavailable states for menu items. The background of the menu has simple illustrations of raccoons, a campfire and a forest. — New title menu wireframe

I also made a user flow diagram for a new onboarding tutorial. Working through this helped give me even more clarity on the interaction states I will have to account for as I implement the new UI designs.

A user flow diagram with various game screens connected by arrows. Each arrow describes the user action that leads from one screen to the next.

I haven’t yet implemented these new designs in Unity, but working through different issues in the wireframes has given me a clear plan.