Crossy Roadkill

CIS568: Game Design Practicum — Fall 2020

Unreal, Blueprint Visual Scripting

Overview

I took a game design class under Professor Stephen Lane, and in this class, we learned about designing and developing 3D computer games. This course consisted of creating multiple games from scratch.

One of our projects in this class was to work in a team of three to develop a prototype of an original game concept based on a theme and implemented in Unreal. I worked with Catherine Liang and Anne Chen. The theme we went with is “Mechanics and Gears” along with “Reverse/Replay”.

Asset Creation

Anne brainstormed designs for the animals that we could potentially have in the game, as shown in this sketch she drew.

Sketches of the potential animals to add

We also came up with different assets that the player could run into, such as resources or obstacles:

Lives
- In the game, lives are known as violation points.
- Start with 3 lives
- How to get violation points
  - Hitting obstacles
- Lives can be replenished through power-ups
Obstacles
- Road blocks
- Traffic cones
Coins
- Motivates the player to keep playing and getting more points!
Power ups
- Invincible: allows you to speed through obstacles without losing lives
- Loud horns: when the siren is turned on, the police are watching, so you want to avoid hitting animals-- this is a negative consequence power up (so, more of an obstacle)
- Extra life: reduces number of violation points
- Accelerometer: speeds you up, allows you to blast through
- Coin multiplier: every coin you get counts for 2x

I modeled these assets to place in the game, which can be seen in this render.

Sketches of the potential animals to add

Contributions

I worked on modeling some of the assets, such as the power ups and the obstacles. Additionally, I worked on the car and lane setup, creating a baseline environment where the player can run infinitely towards the distance. These lanes lead to spaces where I could randomly spawn the power ups. I also worked on obstacle collision as well as powerup implementation.

My team members contributed as well, creating assets for the environment and the animals and helping with the collision and physics logic with the animals, the points and lives system for the game, and the UI design for the title/pause/game over screens. We all worked together to fine tune the game settings. For example, we adjusted how often certain power ups would spawn based on how they affected the game, and we also increased the difficulty as time went on by speeding up the car and having animals pop out more frequently and less useful power ups appear.

Conclusions

Playtesting is an essential part of game development, especially for this game. Originally, our concept was to have the car avoid hitting animals and for every animal the player hits, that would result in the loss of a life. However, after playtesting, we discovered that avoiding animals along with avoiding hitting obstacles was too difficult to maneuver. We also discovered something interesting: the players liked to hit the animals! With the physics implemented while hitting the animals, causing them to fly off the screen in a comical manner, it was rather enjoyable to create chaos rather than to try to play in a rule-bound manner. Therefore, we changed the trajectory of the game and made it so that the player had to hit the animals while avoiding obstacles and gathering power ups, which made the game more fun.

This project was also my first introduction to using Unreal and Blueprints, which was a solid introduction to the engine. I thought that working with Blueprints rather than code was an interesting experience, one that reminded me of working with nodes in Houdini. Overall, if I worked with Unreal again, I would experiment with coding in C++ and see how much more flexibility that gives me with game development over using Blueprints.

Final Results

Here is a demo video of the final product of Crossy Roadkill.