Carma

2nd Year University Project
(Finalist for Grads in Games Student Game Award (Group) 2022)

Project Role:

Technical Designer

Project Contribution:

Designing systems and working with programmers to iterate on them.
Managed design vision throughout project and ensured there was design awareness in all departments.
Level design, blockout, and final art implementation.
All lighting and post processing.
Balancing physics based vehicles to handle in a way that aided the design of the game.
Designing an in-game economy and lootbox system.
Using custom tools to import and organise large amounts of customisables.
Bug tracking and fixing.
Organising and running external and internal playtests, using a community Discord server.
Creating Steam page and community posts.
2D UI element creation.

Project Specifics:

Engine- Unity 2019.4.1f1
Team Size- 14
Status- Released
Unique Lifetime Users- 1.1k+

Steam Page

GDD

Game Description:

Out drive your friends in fast, arcade-style vehicle combat, using power-ups, killstreaks, and the environment to smash your foes! Battle across a miniature world, avoiding dangers and earning the gods favour to level up and unlock a wide range of customisables to help you stand out from the crowd.

Design Decisions:

Fun above all else- in order to appeal to the casual market, the minute to minute gameplay had to be as action packed as possible, with minimal downtime between matches in order to increase player retention. This was done through are large focus put on feedback and ensuring we got it right, from the way powerups are signposted, down to the explosions feeling powerful enough.

Accessible- to make sure the game was well received in the market we targeted, it was high priority to make sure the game had a low skill requirement to pick up and play, but retained intracacies that allow players to improve over time and play more competitively. We approached this by creating a very simple control scheme, with a very responsive car controller that was forgiving enough that even non-gamers could play with ease.

Playful- we wanted to prioritise a playful feeling throughout the game, with comical powerup names and VFX to create a whimsical atmosphere. This was kept in mind throughout all aspects of the development of Carma, which in turn created a very cohesive feeling game.