Hello Everyone!

This sprint marked some major progress for our team and game. Our focus for this sprint mechanics-wise was to complete the home area's functionality for gardening, collecting, and crafting. We ended up completing almost all those goals with a few bugs that we will flesh out before the next build. Our new playtest is up and running for you all to try which we highly recommend doing! 

If you would like to see what our teams have been doing, please check out the production blog! There is a lot they got done, and I would be ecstatic if you would take a moment to go and see! A lot goes into game-making!

Firstly, I would like to highlight some mechanics I was super excited to see during my own playtest of the game.

The first goal I was happy to see implemented is our Gardening mechanics. Players can interact with the planting plot to get a seed menu where they can select which seeds they want to plant. 

Once the seed is selected it will start a timer countdown for when the plant is ready to harvest. These materials will be used for crafting the decorations for the house and garden!

Another awesome mechanic implemented is the crafting table UI. Once the player has the required item, they can craft it! The player can also see a visual of the item!

Now, for the playtests. We are always grateful for those who playtest because it can give us further information as to the direction we are going with the game. This is where feedback matters most.

We had a total of nine playtesters. With those playtesters, everyone was able to plant a seed. The bug report for the gardening mechanic was only one, which was a really good sign. The bug was when a player exits the menu it can cause an accidental fire of the spell cast.

Another nice thing was nearly every playtester explored outside the home area those who did explore collected items. However, collecting items is where some bigger bugs appeared.

 There is a bug where most of the dry bushes were unable to be collected by the player in Faebury Forest; however, if the player went into the empty platform, they were able to harvest those dry bushes. The other issue pertaining to this mechanic is that when players did collect the bush, it didn't drop the correct seeds needed to craft a decoration. It was a game-breaking bug essentially because you all couldn't progress. I sincerely apologize and can assure you we are working on this issue immediately, and it will be addressed before the next build.

Another minor issue was that when players collect the items, the little crosshair in the middle of the screen disappears. The bug was present in our previous build, which was initially fixed, but a bad push to GitHub was how we learned as a team for this build. Some of the bugs you had all mentioned we did fix, but due to how the GitHub program that our level designers and programmers use works a bad push can cause all our hard work to get disrupted. We have since resolved this issue, and as a team, we are moving forward with a different workflow so that this issue doesn't happen again. We value your input and we take that information and consider everything with this game. 

Other than those big game-breaking bugs, we had a couple more minor ones; however, they are not game-breaking, and most of you already knew of them because of the previous build. We are working incredibly hard to get all these issues resolved and I can say with confidence a lot of the bugs have been and are continuing to be fixed. 

I am happy with our progress so far despite the issues. I am seeing my growth within my team, and we are working well together; I am excited to see what the future holds for our game with these upcoming sprints.

Thank you all so much for your time and for staying along for the ride. May you stay until the end and beyond! 

-Tyla Chadwick