Cart Chaos- 10/8/2025-12/11/2025
Pre Production
Note
This game was a two-month project, with a team of two people; the other person did not contribute to the game.
Description
Cart Chaos is a fast-paced speed-running game where you play as a shopping cart and build momentum by clicking or pressing W. The game had a level editor so users could build their own levels, it featured a terrain system, a rail system, a road system, and allowed users to place objects like trees, water, rocks, etc...
Mechanics
Press W or Left click to push the cart, A and D to steer.
My Contribution
I made the whole game, I did all the sound design, level design, modeling, scripting, and the whole level editor.
Production
MVP
Post Production
Game Links
Problems & Failures
This game had a lot of issues, the Road Generator probably took a month's worth of time, and still did not get to my satisfaction, and that's totally my fault, it was a lack or reasearch. The issue is that I wanted the road to always point upwards, on both ends, but when you would go up and turn to a different direction this wasnt that possible, looking back at it, and looking at what other games did, they didnt fix this issue, there roads where not perfectly flat, and same some curving, and as long as the road is not titling like 45 degrees, then really isnt an issue for driving on the road.
There was also massive clipping issues, for example if a turn on the road was two extreme the road would cut into itself, and also overpasses was a large issue, at what point should we check of clippings, for example if you have have two points that are on the same x and z position, but different y positions, but the y position difference is 0.1, but technically there not touching, they should be considered to be clipping, at what point should we stop consider thoes points to be cliping and start considering them to be overpasses, well you can use an indexing method, but you run into the same issue, if a line clips into itself, there is an intersection start, and an intersection end, we can check the index of where these points cliped, and if the index different is large its probably an overpass, and if its a smaller value is proabably a clipping issue. You see the issue, "probably", that's the issue, I could not for the life of me figure out a way to solve this issue, so it was just hard-coded values, and hope the user of the editor does not break the road.
Another issue which was never solved was the UV's, the mesh generation used a greedy meshing method, where you would two lines that make up a road, and each lines has points, you would loop through the line with the most amount of points, and find the closest point on the other line, and build the mesh like that, However the UV's where never consistent, and this was an issue for the road texture.
I wanted to allow custom railings to be imported to the game, aswell as custom models, but the custom railings was a large task, that I really dont know how I would tackle to this day, I would again have to do a lot of research, the issue was that I needed to know how to connect the railings together, for custom models, and off the top of your head, greedy meshing, I used it inside of the road generator, use it inside of the railing generator, however you'd likley be correct, that likley would work, a semi small issue would be the fact Id need to cache how to connect the railings together, from both ends, then connect them, theres a few ways of doing this. But at the time of making this game, this idea did not come to me.
A semi-large gameplay issue was small bumps; a shopping cart is not very large, especially inside a game, and especially when you're using a box collider for your collisions.
The scope of this project was WAY too large. I fully fledged editor, along with a whole cosmetic system, global leader boards for every level, and data storage, way too large. Especially for a 1 person team.
Fixes & Improvements
The first issue I would fix is the road generator. I would add a little bit of leeway for the rotation of the road, so that I can have the road properly be smooth. For the self-intersection and clipping issue, Im not 100% sure how I would go about fixing this issue. I would have to do probably very extensive research, or I could just let the player be able to break it.
For the UVs of the road, I would also have to do more extensive research on how this should work. I don't believe this issue would be that hard to fix, and it's possible this issue would fix itself by the road becomes smoother.
For the small bumps issue, I would switch to a sphere collider and also increase the mass of the shopping cart. This should fix the issue.
For the scope, I would 100% get rid of the editor, this was the biggest waste of time, I should have focused on gameplay, and getting a beta version of and running, the data storage, global leaderboards, and a few maps would have been plenty for a beta, and once the game generated some revenue, I could start working on a level editor.
Strong Points
Visuall the game looked super good. I tried to go for a semi-realistic style, and I think I nailed that. The road texture was not really a texture at all; it was generated through a shader, and it was not great for semi-realism, but in the beta version of the game, that would have changed.
The movement was very responsive and felt like your where driving a shopping cart.
The sounds were pretty decent and sounded like driving a shopping cart super fast.
The editor could actually produce some nice-looking levels, as seen inside the Gameplay video; that level was entirely made via the editor.
The concept of the game was not all that bad, I would likley needed to expand on the game, because it was just a "Trackmania "clone but with shopping carts.
What I learned
I learned why you should not scope super large. The MVP was not actually a bad idea for scope. The original idea was to drive a shopping cart along an infinitely generating road, and you would need to catch falling groceries from the sky. Was that idea fun? Meh, was the scope good, yes it was.
Personal Reflection
The game actually turned out super well and polished. If you look past the flaws of the game, I think that if the scope was a lot smaller, I would potentially be working on the game as of today. February 2nd 2026. When presenting this game to my game design class, I actually got a lot of positive feedback, and people really enjoyed it. But it was just an issue of getting burnt out, from seeing no progress, and having such a large scope.
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