Bloody Traffic - Mini Open World "Crazy Taxi"-Style Game
Project Length: 4 Days (~96 Hours) | Team Size: 10 People (2 Level Designers) | Tools Used: Unity, Miro | Role: Level Designer
Overview: A frantic, crazy-taxi-like driving game where players must drive around to deliver red blood cells to the organs in a human body city
Play it here!
Design Goals:
- Create a large playable space with several routes and POIs:
When the team decided on making a game with the flow and feel of Crazy Taxi, we knew we'd need a large space for players to drive around in, with several routes that intertwine and overlap to allow players to frantically drive anywhere.
- Create a playable space that gives players a sense of scale and feels larger than it is:
Since the game jam's theme was "Built to Scale," and the setting of the game was shrunk down inside a human body, the entire space needed to feel grand in scale so players get the feeling that it's much larger than just the space they're actually playing in
Game Trailer
Level Design Process:
For this game jam, our team was remote, and all of us had drastically different availability during the 96 hours of the jam (with one of us being in a different time zone), so working together required effective communication and a lot of coordination in order to pull it off and make a cool game.
As there were 2 of us level designers on the team, my focus was on utilizing crazy-taxi's several city maps as a reference to design the actual layout of our game's human-body-city. I created the initial layout along with spacing out the POIs, which, in this case, are the human organs that serve as the player's delivery/objective points.
The other level designer then took my initial layout and adapted it with the assets made by our amazing artists (as I was unavailable at that time) then we worked together to adapt into our city layout the models for the organ POIs as the art team finished them one by one. We faced a few challenges when the scale of the organs didn't fully align with the road layout, which led to us having to modify and adapt the roads to stay relatively close to the original layout while fitting the new POIs.
Takeaways from experience:
The simpler the gameplay loop is, the easier it is to design a larger world to accommodate it
In order to effectively work on a small-scale level on a project with multiple level designers, constant and effective communication is a NEED in order to pull it off successfully, but once you get into a good flow as a team, the work goes by like nothing
Designing a small, simple "open world" type of level requires key points of interest to grab players attention and to allow them to get a sense of their locations and multiple routes to get to and from each POI allows the world to feel a lot larger than it really is