Camp Wattow - Comfy Jam Summer 2026
- Nick Lee
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
"Play as a kid, excited for a week at a sleep away fishing summer camp. But the lake, the store, and the camp sponsors may not be all they seem… Camp Wattow is a cozy fishing game where the player fishes, sells their catch, and buys upgrades at the end of every day. Campers will discover new types of fish and may even make some friends along the way"
This was a super fun game jam project I made with an online international team for the Comfy Jam: Summer 2026 https://itch.io/jam/comfy-jam-summer-2026. Give the game a go for yourself on Itch with the link below.
The two week long jam was a really fun first online jam for myself. I'm very happy with the sounds that I designed for the game given the limited amount of time. I definitely feel like this was a new approach to sound design for myself, pushing myself into a bitcrushed world that I had experience playing when I was younger, but hardly ever in the sound design work I had done before. Some of the sounds turned out very satifying and were a lot of fun to make. Certain sounds used realistic source, as can be heard in the ambience and others took a more unique approach to get right, such as the reel casting sound needing a professional "whoosh" sound I spoke into the mic.
The dialogue took inspiration from other similar games in this style, but it was the first time I had attempted to make it myself. Doing a few of the voices, I realised that I would need to add a slight American accent to the performance to sell it being at a summer camp.. This can be heard for the main character, counsellor and for Lewis. Some of the letter recordings had to be removed as you could really hear the pronunciation of the letter instead of a phonetic noise. For this reason, I took a slightly different approach to the dialogue for the parent and corporate characters by instead using a selection of phonetic phrases which, in my opinion, worked better. I would have gone back to do the same for the other characters but ran out of time.
The last bit of the sound design I want to mention was arguably the most important part, the fish catching interaction sounds. Originally, the plan was to have the player clicking a bubble perfectly triggering a musical note from a pre-designed melodic sequence and then the whole thing would play again when the player caught the fish. As this task had been given to the project's composer, I instead focused on other sounds, but I did take the opportunity to do some research into the sound design in other games for fishing and bubble tapping (Stardew Valley and OSU). As it turned out, this was super helpful to do, as, midway through the last day the plan quickly changed as the musical note tapping was not working in the way the team had hoped. We instead switched to a sound design approach. I quickly jumped into action and, with plenty of direction from the team, managed to make some very satisfying (if I may say so myself) bubble tapping sounds for the Bad, Good and Perfect interactions. They made their way into the Github repository mere minutes before the game was uploaded!
Overall, this was a fun and exciting game jam project and I have the other wonderful team members to thank for that. We worked very well together and are looking to work together on upcoming jams too. The reception to Camp Wattow has been wonderful to see. The Itch page has many comments and the game came 11th out of 439 entries. It even managed to be rated 8th for audio too! A great way for my first online game jam game to be received.
Please give the game a go for yourself if you like a cosy fishing game and thanks for reading!
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