It’s Dinner Time is a third-person arcade driving game where you must race against time to deliver fast food in a surreal depiction of outer suburbia in Melbourne, Australia. Drive with speed, style and chaos to make those delivery deadlines before your car explodes.
Project Outline
Timeline: 12 weeks
Engine: Unity 6
Roles: 3D Layout and Level Design, Programming and Tech Art.
Genre: Arcade, Racer, Time-Trial.
Version Control: Github
Responsibilities
Designing and building a large sandbox racing map.
Creating and fine tuning the main car controller.
Facilitating playtesting and actioning feedback.
Creating shaders and particle effects using Shader Graph.
It’s Dinner Time was a 12 week long team project made in Unity 6. The team’s goal for this project was to make something small and polished with a short and casual gameplay loop that focussed on juicy visuals and feedback, and felt tight and satisfying to play.
In It’s Dinner Time, player’s take the role of a driver delivering food to different locations around a sandbox map. Player’s have to race against the clock to make each delivery before their Ford Falcon explodes. Drivers are able to smash through obstacles, clean up pedestrians and make sweet jumps to find the most optimal path to their destination.
LEVEL DESIGN
As the team’s level designer my chief responsibility was the conceptualisation and construction of a 3D layout that would facilitate fast and chaotic driving. My first step in achieving this was reference gathering. My main sources of references for our map were real life images of outer Melbourne suburbs, as well as references from other video games with driving as a core part or focus of it’s gameplay such as Grand Theft Auto, Need for Speed and Crazy Taxi. In addition, Canberra was also used as a reference for it’s Australiana identity and it’s unique urban planning that follows a ‘tree’ motif, resulting in more obtuse bends and turns in it’s streets that I believed would support faster paced gameplay by lessening the amount of super sharp turns. I find Google Earth to be a great resource for sourcing real life references for giving ideas for both layout and elevation.
Following this I drew a few rough top-down layouts on grid paper to give myself a jumping off point for planning out the rest of the sandbox. One of the biggest challenges we faced throughout development was the overall size of the map leading to players struggling to find their way to objectives and getting lost. This was mainly due to the lack of distinctive landmarks and each district of the map not having enough unique shape language for the player to mentally map out the level. This problem disappeared as we ticked off these elements of the level design, however we noticed during playtesting that players would take the down time we provided them in-between doing the main delivery loop to just drive around and explore the map, discover jumps and shortcuts, and just smash into things/pedestrians. Players really enjoyed this during playtesting and so we locked in the map’s scale to that size to support this experience.
PROGRAMMING
We knew early in development we wanted a very casual/arcadey feel for the car. To achieve this I used the same physics and rigidbody framework that the developers of “Very Very Valet” use for the cars in their game. The car is made up of a single rigidbody being the body of the car. Raycasts are used as the position for each wheel where variables such as suspension, acceleration and traction are calculated during playtime to give the car it’s feel. I tweaked these variables many times over the course of playtesting to create a controller that we were satisfied for the feel of our game. This proved to be one of the most polarising elements of our project with a 50/50 split of players that really enjoyed and gelled with the feeling of the car and those that found it slightly abrasive to use. Navigating this feedback was a big challenge and in the end we found that the best solution was to stick to the current course for the cars handling and feel. Drifiting in particular was very divisive with some player preferring how it was currently implemented and others suggesting a powerslide drift such as in Mario Kart would be better suited for the game. I intend to explore this future work on the project. Overall we were pleased with the reception of the car controller and how players felt handling it.
Suspension adjustments.
TECH ART
My core focus for the particle effects I made was to make sure they serve both the juice and the retro PlayStation-era aesthetic we were aiming for. Vertex jittering is a staple of PlayStation-era graphics and was something I put a lot of focus on early. While playing around with the jitter intensity I noticed that certain values lead to some crazy amounts of jitter and thought that it would provide a nice piece of player feedback when colliding with pedestrians and destructible objects; making the car wobble and shudder on these collisions. I compounded this with a spark particle effect as well as controller haptics to make collisions look and feel satisfying and impactful.
Vertex jitter intensity.
Spark particles.
Collision feedback with jitter and sparks.
Other VFX work I did includes an ambient pollen particle effect that gently drifts through the air attached to the player car and some post processing work that dynamically changes the amount of chromatic aberration on the camera lens. Both of these effects were made to emphasise the sense of speed in tandem with an FOV pull on the camera when the car reaches it’s top speed. The pollen particles in particular provide a nice frame of reference between the movement of the car and their suspension in the air.
I am very proud of the work our team did on this project. It provided a number of new challenges for me such as sandbox level design, tech art and programming work that I haven’t done to this extent in previous projects and I’m grateful for the learning experience it provided. Our team worked and communicated extremely well together and it was an absolute joy to collaborate with the people I did on this game.