Perth Games Festival is this Saturday (11/09) so we are all making any final preparations to the game and merchandising to get it ready for the festival. Kris was working with Evie on finalising merchandising for the event, picking up printouts and merchandise from Snap Print and Officeworks and also planning supplies we’d need for the booth on the day. Lewis was working on bugfixing and finalising some mechanics for the game such as the wave system and minigame. Nathan was helping out Lewis with UI and also the minigame. Theresa was working on finalising animations as well as bug testing the game before PGF.

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

Kris (Producer and Marketing)

The week of PGF was very busy in terms of overall organisation and planning. As a producer, I needed to make sure all things ran smoothly, and the team had everything they needed for the convention. On Tuesday, Evie and I went to Office works and Snap print to pick up and print out the rest of the merchandise. There were few issues upon the printing process with the post cards but mostly everything run smoothly. This week I was concentrating on the 3D model that would act as a merchandise display during the PGF. Upon receiving it, I had to cut off excess plastic, file it and sandpaper it. Then, I applied base coats of primer for easier application and filler of the leftover printing lines, afterwards applying the paint layers and finalising it with polish and gloss coats. Overall, it came out well and was well-noted by the players.

Nathan (Design Lead)

The week leading up to PGF I spent setting up the framework for our bubble tutorial UI. The idea was for icons to appear near the disposal sites of the bodies with the portrait of the corresponding corpse it belonged to. Originally it was set up to appear for the first few bodies until it would vanish, but it was then changed to be more dynamic by Lewis to appear when a body of that type is being picked up. Additionally, I added to the body washing minigame UI by adding in a small animation for the sponge icon which appears when interacted with. Some smaller things I did in the leadup to the week also included fixing the long running sound issues which prevented the audio from being built out in the exe file.

https://va.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_qzdncbpZEd1zqt600.mp4

Evie (Art Lead and Marketing)

I was working with Kris this week mainly to finalise any merchandising we’d planned. We arranged to meet up on Tuesday to do some printing and buying of supplies we’d need on the day. On my way to pick her up I picked up the sticker order from Snap Print since we’d shipped it to a store near where I live. Once I picked up Kris we headed to Officeworks. We were mainly wanting to print the postcards, the QR sign and some concept art to display. We ended up waiting around the Officeworks for a fair while and getting stuff reprinted a few times since it wasn’t really working out. We eventually bought our supplies for display and paid for our prints. We also picked up the sweets we’d be giving out on the day for our table. On Thursday we made final preparations to marketing materials, cutting out some stickers as well as cutting borders off of concept arts and printed materials. We realised there’d been a critical error with the printing of the postcards so we had to change how we’d planned on delivering them to manage that.

Lewis (Tech Lead)

Over the course of the week leading up to PGF, I added a wave system to the game, fixed a lot of bugs, added visual cues and button prompts, improved the cleaning minigame, and too many other minor things to list. The final build that was showcased at the festival was relatively stable for 1-2 players, but there were some critical bugs that started to crop up with 3-4 players (mostly to do with the new wave system). Despite this, PGF was a huge success for the team and the game received very positive feedback. My job now (once I’ve spent a couple days recovering), is to fix all the new bugs that were discovered on Saturday.

Teresa (Test Lead)

In the week before PGF, I spend majority of the time making sure I can import or fine tune animation for the boatman and the delivery cart. The cart was probably the most difficult compared to the boat. A lot of adjustment were made in order for the cart to have weight when it rolled in to dump the bodies. I spend a lot of time tweaking the “throwing” animation so the bodies won’t clip through the cart when its leaving. For PGF, I spend majority of the day socialising with fellow developers and helping the event goers playing our game. It was an interesting experience and we all met a lot of people who were really interested in our game. Even if we did had a few game breaking glitches that prevented a lot of people from finishing it. At the moment, I will be setting up multiplayer playtesting sessions with the Murdoch Esport club on their Friday meetups to comb out bugs to fix. I would also try and arrange other external playtesting just in case we don’t have enough.