Kyle Willemsen
Systems & Level Designer
Carrot rushed is a fast-paced, 3D platformer, collect-a-thon game set in the third-person perspective where you play as an energetic bunny, needing to hop, dash and glide around floating islands to find your missing siblings.
During the production of Carrot Rush, which was my first major project in the first year of my 2 year degree at AIE, my main responsibilities were both as the Producer, as well as the lead designer.
Gameplay design
Producer / Lead designer responsibilities:
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Running daily stand ups, weekly team meetings and milestone reviews, keeping everyone up to date with each other and where the project is at as a whole
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Task tracking in HacknPlan, ensuring all team members have their assigned tasks and keeping the games schedule on track
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Gathering all team members available hours, and working the games scope within the amount of available hours within the team
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Overseeing all aspects of the game, from gameplay and level design, to audio and narrative design
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Worked closely with both programmers, ensuring both the character and camera controller were as flexible as possible to be tweaked by the design team
Level Design
Level Design responsibilities:
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Ensuring the levels difficulty curve keep a linear progression, teaching the player new mechanics as they progress through the game
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Ensuring platforms don't feel too repetitive across all levels, mixing up the jumping patterns while still keeping in mind the difficulty curve
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Planning out and creating a set metric system for all the levels to follow, based off; jump height, sprinting jump length, dash length, and glide length
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Designing the starting tutorial level, guiding the player using the collectable carrots, teaching them the base mechanics in a linear fashion
When creating the tutorial level, I needed to introduce the mechanics in a linear fashion on an island where they can freely roam, which made it difficult.
I bypassed this by spawning the player in facing a certain direction, with a set of carrots in front of them. This immediately draws their attention to the carrots, and not jumping, dashing or gliding around the island. From there I then guide the player using sets of carrots, teaching them the core mechanics along the way and introducing them to the core loop of the game, all within a safe space. Sound quips play in certain areas when triggered, to help guide the player as well.
By the end of the tutorial, the player has been taught all the main mechanics required for this area, as well as showing them their first sibling, and how to collect them.
