Crashtastrophy

Game Designer, QA Lead

Engine: Unity
Platforms: PC, Android phones
Genre: 3rd person puzzle platformer
Time: February - August 2015
Team: BoINC (10 members)

Crashtastrophy is a unique action-paced game where the player plays as a bumper car racer in a grim, neon-filled city. They have to avoid lethal hazards to acquire collectibles and race to the finish.

At the biannual in-house IGAD awards, Crashtastrophy received the awards for Best Game, Best Design and Best Art.

​Details on my role can be found below.

My Contribution

Concept Design
I worked out the concept with other members of the team around the theme of "speed". Originally we came up with a fast-paced dungeon crawler, but this lacked originality. We used a suggestion from a lecturer--to have the player be shot into the level with a cannon--and another member of the team decided that we should change the main character to a bumper car that bounces around the level. This unique concept was used to work out the rest, adding lethal hazards and collectibles to nail down the final concept relatively early on.

Metrics
Together with another designer, I worked on refining the metrics of the game and discussing with other team members which variables were needed. We tested rigorously in the early stages of the game to get the right feel for the controls.

Quality Assurance
I was in charge of quality assurance throughout the project. This was done in several stages.

At first, testing solely happened within the team and with feedback from lecturers. Once the game was taking shape and starting to look like an actual game, I recruited outside testers. These testers included fellow game development students of various years, but also other students and non-students, family members and--most importantly--total strangers (recruited from local schools and events). I asked them questions up front to get a feel for their personality, likes and dislikes, and afterwards asked them open questions about their opinion on the game and how they rated certain features.

In addition to interviews, the programmers had created a tool that allowed me to view heat maps of the locations of players' deaths and the most common routes they took in the game. We used this data to alter the levels (such as changing collectible or hazard placement), after which I'd see how these changes affected play.

The data also showed the completion rate of each of the levels, which was used to create the right order and a good difficulty curve for the game.

Heat maps of death locations and routes taken
​(level 6)