LEVEL 01 · PUBLISHED
LoosyWheels
- Level Design
- Systems Design
- Economy
- Tools
Your car has a mind of its own. Your job is to not die.
A top-down endless street-dodger for mobile and browser. The car drives itself; you weave through traffic with one thumb.
- 7 days
- BUILD TIME
- Solo
- TEAM
- ROLE
- Game designer: level design, systems, economy and tuning
- ENGINE
- Unity 6 (URP)
- DURATION
- 1 week, solo
- PLATFORMS
- Browser (itch.io), Telegram Mini App
DESIGN PILLARS
What the game is about
One thumb
Every action reads in half a second and works with a single finger.
Always fair
Any death must be the player's fault, never an impassable road.
Chaos on a leash
Random order, authored content: variety without unfair surprises.
LOOP
Core loop
- 1Dodge traffic
- 2Chain near-misses
- 3Bank coins
- 4Buy or upgrade a car
- 5Go further
- 6Beat the highscore
- REPEAT
Taxi fares, a daily word quest and revive offers plug into this loop as side goals.
THE PROBLEM
The challenge
An endless dodger lives or dies on fairness. If the road can ever block every lane, the player dies for something they could not have avoided, and they stop trusting the game. The road also has to feel different every run, or the loop goes stale in minutes.
The second problem was scope. One week, one person, and an endless game needs a lot of content. Hand-placing every stretch of road would never have been enough, and streaming chunks in a random order gives endless variety but cannot guarantee fairness on its own. So I built a system for each chunk that guarantees there is always a small room to overtake and pass the car.
OBJECTIVES
Design breakdown
- 1
Hand-authored chunks, random order
The road streams from a pool of self-contained chunk prefabs, each a hand-built place (beach, city, country, junction) with its own obstacles. I control every obstacle placement, and the engine only randomises which chunk comes next. Chunks share a standard width at their entry and exit edges so any two connect cleanly.
- 2
Lane-based fairness
Obstacles snap to four lane centres. Selecting a chunk in the editor draws a red line across any spot where all four lanes are blocked, so an impassable stretch is visible while authoring instead of being found in playtests.
- 3
Controls that adapt to the player
Tap halves, a floating drag joystick, or device tilt all resolve to one analog steer value, so handling is identical whichever scheme the player prefers. Braking is mapped to the natural gesture of each scheme.
- 4
Layered goals on top of survival
Distance is the score, near-misses build a combo, and coins fund a garage where cars are bought and upgraded. Car prices are derived from their stats, so the fastest cars cost the most. A taxi side-job, a daily word quest and revive-or-continue options give runs secondary goals.
ACHIEVEMENTS
What I learned
- Level design for a streaming world: designing pieces that are fair on their own and still work in any order.
- Building tools for repetitive work. Menu commands to create a chunk, build a standard road, snap objects to lanes and mark obstacles, plus a car-spawner window, turned chunk authoring from a chore into a fast loop.
- Shipping is a design skill. Cutting scope, tuning onboarding, and getting a build running in the browser taught me as much as the mechanics.
MEDIA
Screens and video
