Charon's Corner
Game Overview:
Charon's Corner is a high-speed 3D cart-racing inspired project reimagining Greek Mythology's ferryman of death as a bowler who sends souls to the afterlife by bowling their skulls down a bowling lane. This game is in its late/polishing stage of development by the Studio Aspen team of 2025-2026, a student-led AAA simulation studio from EGD Collective.
Engine: Unity
Platform: PC/Mac
Type: AAA Simulation
Team size: 80+
Duration: 9 Months
Tools: Unity, Discord, GitHub
Role: Game Designer, Programmer
Build: Itch.io (Coming soon to Steam)
My contributions to the team:
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Acted as Game Design Lead for a cross-functional team across multiple development sprints, driving the core creative vision and evaluating, iterating, and approving all gameplay features prior to final implementation.
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Designed and implemented a core "guiding light" mechanic, creating a moving point-of-interest that dynamically illuminates the surrounding environment and guides player navigation.
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Designed and integrated a robust checkpoint system to track player progress, managing real-time coordinates to seamlessly reposition players upon falling outside the map boundaries.
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Designed and programmed an intelligent "Wrong Way" system utilizing spline pathways to calculate player orientation, triggering real-time UI feedback when players face away from the objective.
Snapshots
Process
Goal: Spline-Driven Cinematic Level
To design a high-octane, close-quarters track that capitalizes on the player controller’s drifting and steering mechanics, rewarding players for maintaining momentum through precise timing. Additionally, I aimed to establish a scalable, foolproof level design framework for the team, ensuring future tracks could consistently replicate this sense of speed, flow, and mechanical mastery.
The Solution
I designed a system of cascading spline paths that function like a racetrack. This allowed us to smooth out steep slopes, create visually dynamic paths, and provide a clear, intuitive directional flow that naturally guides the player forward without leading them astray.
Challenge: Maintaining Variety within Spline Design
When designing purely spline-based levels, it is incredibly easy to fall into a repetitive layout, resulting in a flat, uninspired "snake way" path. The challenge was preventing track fatigue by introducing structural elements that kept traversal engaging without overcomplicating the underlying tech.
Outcome
By integrating varying elevation slopes and physical obstacle "pins" along the spline pathways, the core movement mechanics instantly felt more dynamic and rewarding. This framework successfully provided the team with a standardized mapping workflow, enabling us to rapidly generate fresh, distinct level layouts while keeping the player’s core interaction with the spline consistently fun.
Reflection
This project highlighted how core player mechanics must dictate environment design. When dealing with a controller built around high-octane drifting and velocity chaining, the track cannot just be a passive backdrop; it has to actively reward the player's timing and smoothness. While transitioning my initial vision into a functional spline-based layout, I had to solve a classic designer's trap: preventing a purely spline-driven path from becoming a flat, monotonous "snake way." By introducing intentional elevation shifts and obstacle pins, we smoothed out steep slopes and transformed a basic pathway into a dynamic, cascading playground that preserved player momentum.
Ultimately, my role as Game Design Lead was to translate the abstract feeling of speed into a concrete, repeatable framework for my team. By establishing this structured approach to spline design, we created a reliable and scalable pipeline. This allowed us to rapidly generate fresh, distinct level layouts that consistently replicated that sense of mechanical mastery, proving that great level design isn't just about building a single great stage, but empowering the team to build many.