Coming up close to the PGF, the team has worked hard on getting the content together for the game presentation. This week, the concern for most of the team was to make the required assets and programming into the game that would summarise our 5-minute gaming experience together. This week was a heavy marketing planning week, with needed budget and timing plan implemented to make sure that we have the required minimal for representing our game at the convention. Kris and Nathan concentrated on making and implementation of UI to the game, to make the game clearer and easier to read. For the marketing, Evie has created a sticker design that was pushed through and published for production. There were also some improvements to the gameplay done by Teresa and Lewis, including an important foundation of a new mechanic and animation.

A short summary of what each team member did this week:

Kris (Producer & Marketing)

This week for me was concentrated around the UI development for the game and improvements to the current one to make it clearer and more readable. First, I have worked on improving the UI for the tutorial menu. As our game improved, more instructions needed to be included and I have updated some illustrations and typography to make it more up to date. Then I have also worked on the suggestion UI sketches for the “special body” conditions and how they would look like to review what team though would look the best before I work on the finalised looks. In the upcoming week, I will be working on finalising those UI to be game-ready. Another part of the week was based on marketing. I have worked with Evie to research and explore merchandise offers that would work with the short time span that we have and the budget allowance. Evie and I worked together on making sticker designs and I was asked to create the typography for the design that she created.

Nathan (Design Lead)

This week I spent some time dissecting the UI to implement some additional designs created for the game. I managed to get a pause UI functional which stops the game time. In addition, I added in some of the previous UI designs sitting in the art repository ready to be coded to functionality. This next week I will be working on setting up the UI for body preparation in time for our last mechanic before PGF.

Evie (Art Lead & Marketing)

This week I worked on developing a budget and exploring some marketing options with Kris. We discussed with the group what they might want last week and everyone really wanted some button badges to distribute at the festival for visitors. We agreed this was a great idea and did some research, unfortunately button badges were a bit outside of our budget with the current timeline as we’d have to pay $2.70 per badge to get them on time, so we decided on stickers as our second option along with other marketing materials. I worked with Kris to decide on a sticker design which I then illustrated, with Kris providing typography that matched our brand identity for the game.

Lewis (Tech Lead)

This week I coded the foundation for the preparation system for special requirement bodies. The three special body types can all be placed on the prep table and picked up again, seamlessly transferring to and from the player’s hand. This is done using a similar trick to the old hacky switch that used to occur when the corpses were dumped by the cart, only a lot more sophisticated. The ragdoll corpse that the player is carrying is disabled on interact, the code checks which corpse type it is and then enables one of the three non-ragdoll dummy models laying on the table. When the body is picked up, the dummy model is disabled again and a brand-new ragdoll model is instantiated in the player’s hand. This will allow to me to easily swap it out with a cleaned corpse model. I was able to use the same code to allow for placing a corpse in the boat coffin, and can also use it for picking up items. With only one week left to complete this mechanic and the scoring system, having this foundation will speed things up a lot.