Carry Everything | Paradigm Shifters

The format: Physics stacking and progression
The platform: Roblox: PC, mobile and console
The build: Solo, in Luau, over 2 months
The studio: Paradigm Shifters

01 / THE IDEA

Everything you can lift, on your head.

Players balance increasingly unwieldy towers of random things on their character’s head while exploring a floating world whose islands are guarded by animals.

The challenge is keeping the stack stable while navigating sky bridges, combining comedy, physical skill and strategic decision-making.

02 / THE FEATURES

The features worth stacking.

Stacking and swaying.

The very first thing the entire game grew from was a satisfying stacking mechanic. The more you stack, the more the tower sways and the slower you get, until your character literally bends under the weight.

Rare finds and giant mutations.

Once the stacking felt good, the next fun step was giving items values, mutations and rarities. One run you find a regular framed photo, the next a GIANT GOLDEN DOUBLE BED that takes up half your screen.

A living archipelago.

After the logic came the environment. I tried different approaches to islands and settled on cute Roblox stud-style islands full of flora and life, which made it easy to distribute the crazy items I made.

A UI with its own identity.

Surprisingly, it took a while to figure out which UI conveyed your stack best. In the end I settled on a diegetic UI that follows your stack, instead of a typical HUD element.

Home sweet home.

Plinths near the player’s home provide passive earnings: drop off your rarest items and let them earn while you play. Each player also gets their own home to enter, with customisation planned for the future.

Something is chasing you.

With islands and a core loop but no threat, I added chasers. They guard their shinies, chase players who get too close and knock down entire stacks, which led to hilarious moments.

03 / IN THE GAME

A look around the islands.

The rare curios dealer

04 / BEHIND THE BUILD

What building it taught me.

CHALLENGE 01

First Roblox game.

The situation: Apart from a small company game jam on Roblox a few months ago, I had never properly sat down to make a Roblox game, so this was my first real attempt.
The approach: I chose not to make a typical “brainrot” or “steal an egg” game like the ones the platform is littered with, and built a unique concept instead. That means fewer players will likely find it, but it was a learning experience.
The outcome: With no existing Roblox games to reference, I had to design the systems from scratch, which also meant learning basic Luau, a language that was new to me.

CHALLENGE 02

Environment design.

The situation: I had not made environments before. I have some Blender experience, but not much further than the famous doughnut tutorial, so designing the game’s environments was a real challenge.
The approach: I looked at three options: sculpt the islands with Roblox’s realistic terrain tools, kitbash something from ready-made assets, or build the islands from primitive Roblox parts. I tried all three, and building from parts gave me full creative freedom over the shapes, plus they looked great.

CHALLENGE 03

UI design.

The situation: I know some UI and UX theory, but making UI look good and work across every device was quite the challenge.
The approach: It took a good while to get the UI working and looking good on PC. Then I switched to mobile testing and the proportions were completely off: it didn’t scale correctly, the strokes were too thick, and the panels and animations didn’t align. Controller (gamepad) testing took another few days to make navigation intuitive.

CHALLENGE 04

Networking.

The situation: Probably one of the biggest oversights in my development: I got so caught up building that I forgot multiplayer testing. I had jumped in with two players to check the logic worked, but not much beyond that.
The approach: I played the entire tutorial and tested every gameplay feature with two players, then emulated a full server of six players to see the strain on performance.
The outcome: That led to a lot more performance tweaks and improvements. One thing I didn’t expect was that carrying animations didn’t sync between players, which looked odd until it was fixed.

Four-player server test at max stacks

CHALLENGE 05

Onboarding and tutorials.

The situation: No amount of personal playtesting could prepare me for making onboarding effective. I knew the game inside and out, so my tutorial felt intuitive to me, but real playtesters were fairly confused.
The approach: I made the onboarding much more hand-holding and added contingencies for edge cases. What if a player logs out mid tutorial? What if they lose their whole stack by falling off the island? What if they ignore the tutorial and head to a high level zone?
The outcome: After a lot of testing I cut the original tutorial in half and took a just-in-time approach: pick up an item and you get the item tutorial, open the shop and you learn about the shop. About 95% of players completed the tutorial and went on to play the game, which I think is a pretty good metric.

The full just-in-time onboarding flow

THE ENGINEERING PROBLEM

Juicy physics on a networked engine.

The primary engineering challenge was delivering “juicy”, high-performance physical comedy on Roblox’s networked engine without succumbing to network replication lag or client desync. Simulating a 15+ piece stacked tower using standard Roblox physics constraints across multiple multiplayer characters caused severe jitter and network strain.

Instead, the stack physics were implemented as a client-side procedural chain of spring-damped joints responding to player acceleration vectors, with lean and sway limits, keeping the server strictly authoritative over inventory records while maintaining silky 60 FPS motion locally. A predictive “PickupGhost” system eliminates touch latency on mobile, and the entire prestige economy was modelled mathematically to balance superlinear reset costs against additive reward scaling.

Mind the branches.

Ready to
carry?

Carry Everything is live on Roblox and free to play. Jump in and see how high you can stack.

Play on Roblox Back to the studio →

CarryEverything