A chaotic arcade-inspired open-environment driving game. Drive your school bus around a cartoonish town to pick up all the students before the school day begins, and destroy all you can while doing so. If you wish, help the students with their own hobbies in side quests that take place while you're driving them home.

• Role: level and environment designer

• Engine: Unity 3D

• Team (not including me)

  • Designers

    • Fable Spagat, Carter Marshall (systems designers), Slyvia Connolly (narrative designer)

  • Artists

    • Adele Goldader, Heirloom Luong, Aidan Matschiner

  • Programmer: Lucas Bonanno

  • Producer: Aidan Besselman-Goldes

This project simply grew out of the team's collective desire to make something fun, silly, and simple. As such, the idea of hitting things with the bus was there pretty much from the beginning, and the idea of being a school bus driver having to make different stops around town was implemented quickly as an inspiration from other games in this genre (Crazy Taxi and Simpsons Hit and Run). It was from those two gameplay concepts that I determined my key level aspects for this game: lots of obstacles for players to have lots of slapstick fun, wide open spaces so that players wouldn't get lost or stuck, and bus routes that would take players all over the map to get the full experience.

[link to Game Design Document for full details] - written by me

[link to itch.io page where you can download and play this game]

The game loop is quite simple: starting from the elevated school that acts as a landmark and level overview, the player races down into town as a timer begins. They are directed to the five or six bus stops they must visit by a compass arrow, sure to hit plenty of cars, lampposts, and fences as they follow the road and swing around corners. The player must speed back to the school once every stop is visited: they win if they do so before the timer runs out, rewarded with free-roam gameplay that contains an optional goofy narrative side quest. Returning to school after the timer runs out means the player simply needs to start again.

School on Bottom

Green Square = Suburban Neighborhood

Blue Square = Spooky Neighborhood

Though this project was a good opportunity for me to practice and expand my level design skills, the biggest thing I learned was how to coordinate my own work and work tactics in a large and varied team. Though I had worked on large teams before, this project was the first time I had done so in a real capacity with my design specialties, so I had to learn how to work in engine and with git alongside others of other majors in a way that my work not only contributed to the game, but built on others' work and didn't cause any major conflicts or setbacks.

The other major thing this project taught me is how to effectively engage in iterative development. The physical level structure in particular received much critique over the course of the semester and was highly dependent on art assets to fill it in and make it feel like a true level. As such, I had to frequently adapt my thinking and rework what I had already done to better serve and enhance the team's vision for what we wanted the game to be, while still keeping true to my original level design philosophy so that the game would not change drastically from that perspective.