Position: Level Designer, Scrum Master
Engine: Unity
Date: September 2025 – Present
Choo Choo Boom Boom is an arcade-style on-rails shooter that interprets the genre in the most literal sense possible. Take up arms in a repurposed commuter train with cannon strapped on top of it to combat against a giant, extraterrestrial hand attacking your city. Utilize different weapons to counter the boss’ attacks, help civilians, and save the day.
Developed for my senior capstone project, this project was developed in two phases: one semester aiming to get the game greenlit, and a second finishing it with new team members. We wanted the game to feel similar arcade-style on-rails shooters, but put more of an emphasis on player agency to make the game feel more engaging. Our main way of doing this was through track switches: a mechanic that allowed the player to move to a higher track to deal more damage at the risk of taking more damage, or lower to deal no damage to the boss, instead recovering health and gaining buffs. Because of this, one of the biggest things I wanted to focus on was making the track loop and offer different paths to the player. This helped the game feel less repetitive on repeat playthroughs, and also gave room for players to learn about the different paths and master the game.
Post-greenlight, some changes were made to the scope and design of the project that affected the level design. Most notably was the realiziation that we were making a “shooter on-rails” rather than an “on-rails shooter” and deviating from the genre more than we had anticipated. As a result, we made the tracks more linear, rather than looping. At first we had only considered making the first of the two phases linear, and keeping the second similar to the one present in the pre-greenlight version, but this proved to be out of scope. I initially fought back against this change, as I felt that the lack of looping would cause the value of track switching — and therefore player agency — to be diminished. However with a new scoring system and some revamps to our old mechanics, these worries were put to rest. In fact, I ended up liking the linear track layouts because they allowed us to place story beats and events a lot easier due to knowing where the player would be at any given time, making the game much more engaging.
Looking back, I learned a lot from this project. Due to the constantly shifting scope and direction of the game, there were a lot of times where I had to make sacrifices for the game or the team. And being able to navigate those situations is a very important skill. It also taught me a lot about the processes of level design itself. Another big issue for me was, given the tools we set up for laying out track, it was very difficult to make small changes to the level after it was created. Going forward, I now know to look for situations issues like these could pop up, and nip them in the bud before that happens. All in all, though, it was a very rewarding project that a lot came out of. Especially the kick-ass arcade cabinet we built.
Collaborators
Design: Benton Lane, Carter Marshall, Dimitri Sophinos, Elliot Morneweck, Lindsey Bellaire, Sam Cassidy
Programming: Alex Bianca, Brandon Salvietti, Tristan Schonfeldt-Aultman
Art: Hal Phillips, Heirloom Luong, Olivia Santmauro, Taylor Harrington
Sound Design: Morgan Smith