Hello everyone, my name is Anna Chen, and I am the producer for the upcoming game, Alchemic Crafter. Our team consists of twelve people, all students from California State University - Chico. I’ll be sharing our team’s progress on this game’s development throughout the next few months until our release sometime in May on the CAGD itch.io site. 

In this game, you are a young witch that has recently gained ownership of an abandoned workshop. You can collect resources and fight enemies in order to create items and potions. The items that you create can then in turn be used to decorate your workshop and your home area! 

Our goal for the first sprint was to get basic functionality done (player movement and inventory), plan out level design, create some UI and animations, and start work on creating level props and the workshop model so we can build the scene. Let’s begin with the models.

Modeling

The first model I want to show off is the workshop model. It ended up being a big chunk of work for the modeler on that task, but it still looks quite amazing! They created the interior, exterior, and the roof of the workshop. It really gives off that fantasy cottagecore vibe that we’re looking for.

 Next on the list are a few level props. To decorate our scene, we got some level props done. We have a nice crumbled ruins prop here so we can give off the vibe that something was once in the area, and you’re there to explore them.

We also have a bush model done so we can decorate the exploration areas with vegetation.

Another model that we got done was the player arm model. The player is going to cast spells to attack enemies, so ideally as a player, you’d want to see a representation of yourself actually casting the spell, right? Funny thing is that our modeler for this task “accidentally” rigged the arm so that it’s left-handed, but it’s quite the funny quirk. You don’t see many games with left handed main characters.

We also got a few outdoor decorations done, so when we get our crafting system ready, the programmer can begin using those models. For example, we got a nice rug and a mailbox.

2D Art

Generally, our game won’t need a lot of 2D art as it is a 3D game, but in the first few sprints, we’ll need stuff like concept art and cover images that go up on itch.io. Our very talented artist came up with a cute looking character and cute looking enemies for concept art. These guys are too cute to attack!!

Other than concept art, our 2D artist also did some sprite work for things that wouldn’t really make sense to have a model for, like seeds.

Animation

Our game isn’t really going to include too much animation, which is kind of unfortunate. Our animator ends up not having much to do until we start getting enemy models done. But what they did for this sprint was getting the arm to move! They did an idle animation, walking animation, and running animation.

Programming

Like I mentioned earlier in the sprint goals, programmers focused on getting basic functionality down, like player movement and inventory. We also started work on a crafting system as well as how items are stored in the game, but that part is currently not finished at the moment.

In this sprint, we had 218 points assigned and 163 of them completed. Despite these nice numbers, I do still think we are a bit behind. We did unfortunately have an argument between the designer and a modeler as to how to do a certain model, so that ended up slowing things down a bit, but now that everyone’s on the same track, we should be able to pick it up and get more things done. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next blog post!