Welcome to week 6 of Postway Pass's devlog! We're coming up to the halfway point of semester, and t-minus 60 days until the Perth Games Festival. We've spent the last 3 weeks focusing on the winter level of our game, and this week has been spent polishing and finishing up that level, so we can begin testing for it over the weekend and then move onto starting the 3rd level and also completing the post-office.

Producer: Tilly

This week was spent focusing on finalising some tweaks to one of our textures for our gravestone that's used in the winter level as well as on the back of our winter level boss. I also spent a while focusing on the UI, particularly with elements such as the typeface by exploring ideas and getting inspiration online. I also did some prototypes of potential custom fonts for our game that can be used on menu items and throughout all of our UI. The photo below shows a prototype of one of our custom typefaces, with colour palette ideas done by Kirsten! The next week will be spent on finalising the UI and now working alongside Kirsten and Tahleia to do so. We're also entering our focus now on testing of the winter level and finishing up the post-office, so all of my upcoming tasks will be focused on meeting those milestones.

Design Lead: Kirsten

this week has been all about polishing our winter level demo! One of the main things I did was re-arrange props like trees and lanterns to create and emphasize composition in key areas of the map. Some of these areas include vantage points which players may come across to discover new areas or hidden secrets! One of my favourite (yet very meticulous) things I did this week was lay out cobblestone pathing to further guide players in certain directions, as well as it being a nice visual aesthetic to decorate the map. In addition to world-building, I also modelled some props to replace some of the placeholder assets in our little cave area! I also did some minor programming this week to implement some proximity-based lanterns and polishing our puzzle in the cave.

3D Art Lead: Tate

Hi! this week I worked on the Bee Boss model as well as the walking and running animation reworks. I started working on the bee boss model over the weekend by getting everything planned out and executed in ZBrush. After completing the model I showed the team to get feedback and worked on what was given back to me. A large majority of feedback talked about the scale and exact location of certain objects. I made these changes as well as "fluffed" the character out slightly so make them feel more full. I also worked on and blocked out the walking animation rework as well as started on the block out of the running animation to reflect the changes made to the idle and jumping animation. I have only done block outs of these as I want to get them to look as nice as possible over time due to the player seeing these animations the most.

Test Lead: Madeleine

This week, I worked on modelling the central hub for the game, the post office! This has been a work in progress for a while now, but I’m finally managing to wrap (or rather, unwrap) things up! I also continued to work on letters for the game, expanding the lore of the world of postway pass.

Art Lead: Tahleia

As we continue to finalise our winter level I have gone ahead to design the next boss for the next level, spring. Our team was debating what species would be most fitting for spring and we came down to two options: luna moth or a bee. As I played around with the moth design I had to keep in mind to incorporate the iconic wings that luna moths have, in doing so it sacrificed the silhouette base and was not easily read. From the one bee sketch I knew it had a strong foundation to build upon so I decided to explore it further. I experimented different occupations for the bee and from the feedback I received we decided to finalise it as a gardener. Then followed up in creating turnarounds for the design and passed it onto our 3D lead Tate, which is coming together nicely! I have also been focusing in the final touches for our boss owl Wilbur and currently in the process of fixing some texture seams, hope you guys look forward to seeing him in action soon!

Tech Lead: Daniel

This week I worked predominantly on the teleport mechanic, the teleport mechanic would be useful for any time we might want to travel from an exterior environment to an interior one without making a whole new scene. For level 2, this is going from the cave outside to the cave inside, where the puzzle is located. It's broken up into a teleport entrance and exit. The entrance is a box trigger that disables the player's movement and plays a transition animation to cover the screen. The player is then immediately placed at the exit (an empty transform), the transition animation ends and the player's control is restored. This helps the teleport look seamless enough that player's won't notice.