Becky Schmader

 United Pawstal Service

Project

A team of four of us worked together to create United Pawstal Service for a month long Game Jam, in which teams were challenged to create a game in this period.

Software Used

Unity | Pixaki | Figma | Photoshop

Menu Design

One of my roles for this project was to create the user interface for the game. The concept behind our game is that you are a dog that works with the “United Pawstal Service” to collect lost packages that humans have left behind in the snow. Given our month long timeline we didn’t flesh out the story too much beyond this but it was a good starting point for creating a general theme for the game. From here I decided that we’d have a more rustic feel to the interface relying on wood grain and paper to achieve this. Additionally our entire game was created using pixel art so I decided to carry that over into the interface as well.

Above is the initial design I came up with the menus. I created this in Figma and started with simple boxes and a grey scale palette to make sure they layout made sense without adding art elements.

Here was the next stage as color and some of the art elements began to be added to the interface.

Here was the final implementation of the interface into the game. Some of the buttons were removed from the top of the interface as they were not needed for the stage in development that we were at. Additionally they were added in as separate elements by our developer. Lastly the wood grain was designed by one of our other artists and I put it into the UI to create the final wood effect.

Gameplay Interface

Beyond the menus my interface design carried over into gameplay when it came to creating a way to communicate to the players key information. The information we needed to show was the temperature of the dog, the number of packages needed to be picked up, and time left on the level.

Original sprite sheet for the thermometer used in the interface. Later the grey was removed as the wooden motif from the menus was carried over into the interface.

Wooden UI created with spaces for the thermometer, time, and packages as they are collected. The wood grain was not added to this element as I did not want it to look muddled when shrunk down.

Final UI with thermometer and timer added. Over time the thermometer will go down as the dog gets colder from being outside.

Art Assets

In addition to the interface elements I created the dog and the walk cycle used to animate it. I created rocks, trees, and platforms used around the level.

Dog design and walk cycle sprites.

Additional art assets created and utilized throughout the game.

Try the Game

Click the photo if you’d like to try out the game in browser on itch.io. You can also download the game if you’d like it on your computer! Note: the game does not run on Mac OS Catalina or on mobile.

Takeaways

This was the first time any of us had worked together and it was a great experience in learning how to work remotely on a game. Myself and one of the other artists had previously done some game design work while in college. I was definitely rusty at game design and it was an experience in relearning how to create a game. For next steps personally I plan on learning UI within Unity so that I can better implement UI without bogging down the developer with tiny and constant requests. This was my first time creating UI for games and it has definitely inspired me to continue down this path and learn more.