PIZZA MANIA

ROLE - Designer

INTRODUCTION

This game is an arcade driving game produced in my 2nd year of university I created this game in collaboration with students in both 2nd and 3rd years of their courses with a range of skills (tech, design, and art). My role was the role of a junior designer in which I mainly designed some vehicle driving mechanics, money, and timer systems.

GENRE

Arcade driving

RESPONSIBILITIES

Work and communicate between different disciplines (art and tech)
Take instructions of senior members of the team to fulfil their requirements
Design and prototype parts of the scoring system
- Deliveries
- Near misses
- Speed of delivery
- Type of delivery
- Airtime
- Way of delivery
Design and prototype timer system
- How it is affected by deliveries difficulty
Design the money system and how it is affected by deliveries
Design and prototype extra driving mechanics (dash, jump and manhole cover)
Designing the gameplay loop of the game
Drop off and pick up locations
Designing what constituted an easy, medium, and hard delivery location
Designing what constituted an easy, medium, and hard delivery

TOOLS

Unreal Engine 4
Unreal Level Editor
Unreal Blueprint
Microsoft Office Suite
Jira
PerForce
Microsoft Teams
Photoshop
Diagram.net

SYSTEM DESIGN

For this project, my role was not that of a Level designer because it was the role of the senior people within the project. Instead, It was my responsibility to mainly design the systems of the game as well as mechanics for the game. The game was based on the popular series Crazy Taxi which meant I looked at and identified what and how it went about creating its core systems and adapted them for this project.

SCORE SYSTEM

For this system as well as the money system it was important that the two fed into one another and encouraged the player for playing in a certain way the main methods I wanted to encourage were

Speedy deliveries
Make deliveries in dramatic ways
Drive recklessly

The primary score system revolved around the delivery of the pizzas to the assigned locations with an increasing amount depending on the speed of the delivery (increasing with the speed of delivery). I split the scoring into 4 categories which depend on which amount of the allotted time the delivery was made in.

Once this was outlined I looked at how I could expand it further by incorporating a multiplier on the score values that were based on the difficulty of the individual delivery point itself which is determined by how easy it is to gain access to the particular point based on verticality.

design philiosophy 1

design philiosophy 2

scoring for deliveries

design philiosophy 1

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Once I decided on how exactly the score would relate to the delivery system, I was then able to relate how it would relate to other mechanics within the game from reckless driving to airtime

AIR TIME SCORING

pot hole scoring

air time scoring

pot hole scoring

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JUMP DELIVERY SCORING

NEAR MISSING SCORING

near miss 1

near miss 2

near miss 1

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MONEY SYSTEM

The money system worked very similar to the scoring system with tiers based on the speed of delivery along with the difficulty of the delivery the money earned could then be used to buy cosmetics for your vehicle.

TIMER SYSTEM

The time system had a lot of balancing needed to find the perfect timing needed for each bit. The basic gist of it worked as a set timer would countdown and depending on the level of difficulty of the delivery an additional amount of time would be added to the timer. This added time was also what was used to determine the scores and money given upon each delivery.

How it worked in game

The way I determined the perfect start time for the game is outlined below. It involved me adding a time to the start time and getting an average play time from it (as you can see a lot of the values were too long and ended up making it so I was unable to finish).

timer values not used

average timer times for used start timer

timer values not used

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MECHANIC DESIGN

As we had based the game on Crazy Taxi there was already some knowledge that we could bring over to the game from a mechanic standpoint. So, a lot of the game design decisions we made had more to do with the systems themselves. However, the mechanics that I did add all had to do with adding a more reckless nature to the driving from A to B within the level.