Motivation

Like ‘Stacked’, ‘Crossy Road’ is pretty straightforward. No need for handcrafted levels, everything is generated by the game level designer. You control a animal character that can jump in 4 directions and tapping just moves the player forward. The camera is isometric and slightly skewed. It only moves when player moves forward. If player wanders of camera it dies. Along with couple of collider on the sides the player has not choice just to march forward.

The game world consist of different type lines, that the players need to cross.

• Grassland
• Roads with cars
• Trains
• Rivers with water lilies and wooden rafts.

Eventually the game gets harder with wider danger zones (anything but grassland) and fewer neutral zones (grasslands). Players dies when he jumps into water or collides with trains or cars.

Development

I only included grasslands and roads with two types of car to simplify things. My animal of choice was sheep instead of chicken. I modeled it quickly in blender and assigned it few basic materials. Added moving and idle animations along with two dead animations (impact with the car from side, run over). Character checks for collision before moving. Camera is orthographic and follows the character with slight uneven offset.

To create the actual world I need to find boundaries to fill. I picked where the four corners of screen land on plane in the real world and filled that space with world-lines, checking each update cycle for chance to add new ones and destroy the old ones.

Grassland being to easiest one I started with that one. Modeled bunch of trees and rocks that are placed them randomly beside each other on a greed quad. Trees and stones are placed based on a distribution curve (Start and end have the highest chance of placement and middle point has a zero chance).

The other type of line is road. Different types of cars are spawned on one end of the line and travel to the other one. Each road spawns cars with different speed and interval. Cars will honk when they character on the road. Upon colliding with the car character plays animation and it’s game over.

I did not care much for performance, no object pools are used and objects are simply created and destroyed instantly.

Visuals

Not much to write here, each material just has color no textures what so ever. Scene is lit by top down light under slight angle that creates the shadow and one light that shines on the direction that player is going.

SFX

Grass sounds when character is moving, car honking sounds with varying pitch and traffic sounds.

UI

Ui is minimalistic with few fade animations and score counter jumping with each successful line.

Bottom Line

The most important aspect of the game is the game progression. My version is lacking the variety found in the original due to limited road types. Apart from that the game is still enjoyable in its simple form.