My senior ongoing capstone project and submission to the 2025 Toronto Level Up contest. This project was to be developed over the academic year with a developer team of six.
Game design, 3D artist, cutscene developer, VFX, shaders, and UI.
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Table of Contents
Clean Getaway (2025)
Grab 3 of your friends and enter this cutesy and chaotic car chase. Work together to fight off the oil enemies chasing you by shooting them with your bubble guns. If you stick together, you might be able to take down the looming Big Rig Behemoth - from the inside! Jump in, plant your bath bombs, and make a clean getaway!
Action || Puzzle || Local Co-op (4 players max)
Game Design &
Pre-production
Entering capstone, we initially went with one of pitches which was a race car concept inspired by the game Overcooked! I really wanted to introduce the Y2K aesthetic with this because I thought the fashion and colours would fit well with cool cars. Ultimately, we realized that our idea iteration kept being centered around racing, and instead, we focused on a new concept about car chasing and being a strike team. When making screenshot mock-ups, I used Kenney assets to draw over.
Character Design
In the beginning, I played with different proportions to exaggerate in order to develop a character base. I was heavily inspired by anime caricature because of their cuteness and because I thought their big heads went well with the overhead cameras we planned. Characters themselves had a unique concept and colour to make them iconic and interesting. These concepts were chosen and developed by my teammate's interests and feedback.
3D Chara Exploration
Using the character base drawing concept, I began modelling something I could use across all playable characters to easily pass along rigging and animations. I felt that the proportions were still off, which motivated me to look at games such as Maplestory 2 and models from the Bomberman game series to help. The right-image shows the final version I landed on, though I did make minor adjustments later on.
3D Character Model
This slideshow shows all the playable characters in the game. Models were done in Blender with face textures done in Photoshop, additional textures were drawn by teammates, or sourced using Adobe Stock education license. URP Toon-shading was applied afterwards, and UV animation was done within Unity timeline. Materials that required seamless textures had the mesh UV unwrapped by projection view.
Character Animations
Characters were rigged with inverse kinematics to easily position movements for game interactions such as holding the handles to shooting a turret, or pushing a wall. I wanted the animations to feel bouncy and joyful to fit the cute vibe, using Animal Crossing as the inspiration and making VFX in Unity later on to emphasize some animations.
For two of the animations, I filmed a teammate and imported it into After Effects to pause on certain frames. I then used those frames as reference to create seamless dancing loops!
General 3D Work
As most of my work has been with characters, there isn't much I can show here yet!
GUI & 2D Assets
I worked on iconography using Illustrator, and also drew in Photoshop for the loading screen.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Selection Screen
0:22 - Loading Screen
The vector icons were inspired by the ones from the Splatoon series, and the loading screen controller image was inspired by Overcooked!
VFX & Shaders
This project has given me many opportunities to learn more about visual effects and shaders. I always make the assumption that an action or change of state can benefit from an additional visual, which has prompted me to make things such as dust particles, glitch effects, hologram shaders, and more! I have utilized VFX graphs, shader graphs, particle systems, fullscreen effects, and custom scripts to achieve my goal of amplifying how the game looks.
COLLABORATORS
Charlie K.
Joshua Michalski
Rek Carlson
Sam Khan
Sarah Chambers