Carrot Rush
Carrot Rush is a 3D Action Platformer inspired by the likes of Spyro & Mario.
Created in 6 weeks by a team of 10 students at AIE Melbourne as our first year production.
During development, my focus was creating a polished game, built from systems I would be able to re-use in other projects.
I took on a leadership role, working with my programming partner to keep scope in check and allow us time to test and get feedback on our systems. We were able to spend time implementing juice and polish rather than scrambling to get a bare-minimum functional project together.
Download: itch.io
I built a robust player controller, menu system, dialogue manager, checkpoint system, audio controller, and various other smaller systems.
I worked closely with the designers to make the player controller as configurable as possible.
These configuration options were implemented as ScriptableObjects so the Design team could easily A-B test different configurations with play testers.
For the level designers I created an in-engine ruler that would read these configuration files and visualise jump arcs and other abilities. This sped up development time greatly, allowing designers to intelligent place platforms fair distances apart.
It was great working in a small team. I was able to contribute to the overall design of the game and was empowered to make decisions on systems that overall improved the end product.
Player Movement Ruler Tool - Visualises jump arcs and other abilities' trajactories.
Player Controller Configuration
We found we had the scope to add dialogue to the game - in the form of flavour lines and tutorialisation. I implemented a simple dialogue/subtitle system and integrated that in to a very basic event trigger system.
Dialogue Objects contain an Audio File and a subtitle text. Subtitles are displayed for the length of the Audio File. Dialogue is run whenever objects are added to the queue, and the queue runs until empty. Dialogue Objects can be flagged to interrupt any current dialogue, if they are important.
Audio runs in 3 streams, SFX, Dialogue and Music - with internal volumes for each, user facing volumes for each, and a master volume that controls all of them at once.
Dialogue Trigger - Will queue up a list of dialogues to play, and/or display a tutorial prompt at the top of the screen.
Another fun system was the portrait system. We have an ingame portrait of the player and it reacts to your actions in game. This is a simple sprite that moves, bounces and stretches based on some configured animation curves.
It has a weight system to decide which emotes can override others that might be currently playing.
I built this system for the designers and artists to use - and it adds a little bit of dynamics to the game UI!
