Crashy Cart

This was a fun project with a strange beginning.

In Crossy Road we have an this animation of a Chicken with a Shopping Trolley that plays when ever you purchase a character. It’s pretty cute, and serves the function of conveying the progress of the purchase.

I’m not sure exactly how it started, but apparently a few of the fans in the official Crossy Road Discord Channel started pushing the idea that this should be a playable character. This isn’t that uncommon as there are lots of ideas constantly being thrown around - but for some reason this one floated to the top.

We were trying to figure out ways to make it interesting. We toyed around with things like pushing a trolley in front and a mechanic that made the character constantly moving (a bit like the Slippy Penguin character) but nothing really felt right.

Something Different

We finally decided to try something new. After throwing around some ideas and I was tasked with making a prototype of a lane changing mechanic using the trolley as a vehicle.

As you could imagine the first attempts were pretty rough. It started with the traditional 3 lane approach that is common with these types of games but without the ability to duck / jump /etc. it felt quite limited. There wasn’t a lot of options in regards to avoiding obstacles, and it felt quite repetitive.

The addition of a couple of extra lanes made it suddenly feel like we had room to move. It also opened up the opportunity to add in different types of obstacles, such as parked cars and trolley bays.

A alternate View

The camera was also originally on the more traditional isometric-ish angle that is a classic part of the the Crossy Road game. This made it quite hard as you couldn’t see very far ahead, especially on a landscape device. After a bit of trial and error, we came up with a lower camera angle that used perspective projection. It felt like I was breaking the law by doing this in Crossy Road, but it worked much better.

As always the artists weaved their magic and brought the whole thing to life in our voxel style, giving the game the proper Crossy Road feel. My personal favourites though are the death animations. There’s something about a chicken being launched into the air and wiping out in an classic cartoon style that cracks me up - especially when the landing triggers a car alarm :p

Crashy Cart ended up running as a limited time event, but I’m sure it will be back in one form or another. You can read about it a bit more on the Crossy Road website.

Easter Egg

A little secret I snuck into the final build was that if you get air born, you can tap rapidly to make the chicken flap its wings, giving you a little bit of extra distance - enjoy :)