We’re back with another update! Since last time, we’ve been able to test a few more of our missions, refine our mechanics, and continue bringing our game world to life.

Programming

The mechanics of our game are nearly complete! In addition to bug fixes, Logan has implemented several upgrades to the NPCs, including a patrol system, a marker to distinguish hostile characters from neutral characters, and an indicator that tells the player when a character first spots, investigates, or chases them. After some playtesting, he also increased the NPCs' chase speed to up the difficulty of stealth encounters.

Makiyah has been refining the flight mechanic, tweaking default and stamina upgrade values to improve the feel and range of the player’s movement. After receiving some feedback, she also added a stamina cost for sprinting and a sparkling particle effect for food items to make them more visible. She finished off her work on the player with several new actions: our little seagull can now squawk – and poop – on command! Lastly, Makiyah has implemented some optional collectibles the player can find to unlock a secret cosmetic, along with a button to end the game once the player has completed the main objectives.

Nick has been working on the in-game menu, implementing a pause function, along with navigation between the various menu tabs. He has also added tutorial pop-up messages that appear near the beginning of the game.

Level Design and Set Dressing

The team noticed that the town felt a little empty with only our main mission areas, so we decided to populate the rest with optional objectives, which come in the form of hidden postcards the player can find. After Gavin, Logan, and Makiyah sketched out some potential routes and locations for postcards, Adam grayboxed these new areas in the town. He also added terrain and roads as we move into the set dressing phase of our world design.

With playtests completed and revisions made, Autumn and Gavin have begun staging our five main mission areas while Adam adds more details to the larger town.

Animation, Assets, and UI

On the art front, Ky has finished animating the player character, implementing flight and eating animations. They’ve now moved on to finding animations for the NPCs. On the modeling side of things, Gavin has created a few more assets, including a lighthouse for the end of the game and model for the collectible postcards. Finally, Makiyah created some sketches and a style guide for the menus and HUD of the game. The above members of the team are splitting the 2D UI art asset workload.