Rockin’Derby
What is Rockin’ Derby
Rockin’ Derby is a multiplayer kart racer built in Unity that is played with a special controller, a physical rocking horse, the player has to rock in order to race!
Race Course
A single play through consists of multiple laps.
Level maintains the horse head shape.
Player never has to come to a complete stop.
Aiming for 3 to 5 minutes of playtime.
Race Course Evolution
Original shape.
Creating an environment to surround the race track.
Team Project, January 2025 - April 2025My role
Originally not a member of the founding team, as the sole designer joining the project I was responsible for iterating on the mechanics of the prototype to elevate it into the experience the team dreamed of. While the prototype was a single player time trial game with limited navigation through preset lanes, the vision evolved into the multiplayer kart racing game we released it as.
What I did as a designer
Wrote documentation for gameplay mechanics such as items, speed boosts, AI behavior, and obstacles.
Researched existing kart racing games.
Developed and iterated on the race track.
Created a cinematic for the race using Unity’s Cinemachine.
Experience
Communication between interdisciplinary roles such as engineers and artists on a team of 13 members.
Researched the fundamentals of level design for kart racing game.
Worked within level design constraints unique to the project because of the controller’s properties.
Designed systems such as item weights (probably of getting each item) based on player position in a race.
Created and iterated on the race course for the players using Unity’s terrain and spline tools.
This was my first project working on racing game so I had little starting experience when it came to what made a racing level enjoyable for players. To remedy this I spent a great deal of time early on in the project researching popular kart racers such as Mario Kart and Sonic & All Stars Racing. Taking inspiration from the Mario Kart track Yoshi’s Island I wanted to design a race track in the shape of a horse’s head to go along with the theming of the physical controller. Working heavily with the spline tool in Unity, I created and adjusted many versions of the track. A unique constraint that the researched games never had to contend with was the controller itself. The physical controllers had hard limits on steering that created complications a traditional controller would not have had. For example this made track features like sharp turns extremely difficult for a player to navigate without having to come to a complete stop, not good for a racing game. After working through numerous versions of the race track I then handed the shape off to our team’s environmental artist to polish the shape from my spline art into a proper 3D modeled race course.
Level Goals
Constraints
Players cannot perform sharp turns.
Playing the game is physically exerting so can’t have extended play time.
Level needs to be understandable for players that have never seen it before.
Changing into a multi lap track.
Changing the sharp turns into looped turns.
Adding variations in height.
Final shape before artist polish handoff.
