Hello again everyone! Once again, my name is Conner Howard, and I'm the Producer here on our game Citadel, a Rouge-Lite Clicker game about exploring the destroyed remains of a castle, overrun with monsters and treasure! As always, I'll be going over the wonderful work done by our passionate team this sprint, and I'll also be discussing the huge improvements I feel we saw from a production standpoint, but also the consequences of simply being this far into development during agile development, and how I've been handling it.

As usual, to start, I'm happy to once again show off our Burndown chart, which has once again seen some additions in points.

Points Assigned: 116

Points Moved To Verify: 89

Points remaining In Verify: 1

Points Moved To Complete: 88

Points Assigned But Not Moved: 27

Overall, compared to the last sprint, we did see a decrease in overall work completed, but that isn't to say the team didn't do enough! In fact, the team is still far ahead of pace currently as we can see on the chart itself, being over 40 points ahead of schedule currently even after the continuous addition of points to the backlog that we naturally see over the course of development. At the current pace, I more than expect the game to be finished on time, with only requiring the potential cut of a few features at the tail end of development.

Programming:
Chase

Andrew

Hunter

Each one of our programmers made awesome improvements and additions to the game this sprint. Chase made some awesome improvements to our systems as always, with what's being shown here the inclusion of descriptive text when hovering over an item in the shop he's created. This is awesome for player feedback on what the player is buying actually does. Andrew did more work on the AI for our enemies, with all of them still needing some tweaks, but being nearly complete! One awesome addition to enemies was their health bars hovering over them, but only after the player is damaged them. You also may have noticed that Hunter has started getting quite a few of the finished animations implemented into the game with the player character being a highlight. Hunter also got quite a few player's upgrades operational, with my favorite that I've shown here being the floating shield, an item that will protect the player from taking a hit from behind.

2D Art:
Kevyn

Our 2D artist Kevyn has kept grinding away at the many UI assets that are needed for the game, with a big focus this sprint being on the assets for the many spells at the player's disposal.  Kevyn did an awesome job really capturing what the spells are capable of and we're quite happy with how they turned out. You can also see Kevyn's great work on the official artwork for the title screen of the game, which you may have noticed is now included on our itch page! Kevyn continues to make great art for us, and we look forward to seeing more as always.

3D Art:
Bert

Beren

Our 3D artists continue to impress, with some of the final character modeling being finished by Beren this sprint with the skeleton enemies finally coming to life. On the left, we have the lancer, and on the right, we have an archer, each one of them having very unique attacks tied to them, and very distinct designs so that despite being skeletons, you can easily tell them apart, and as a result, know what each one of them will be doing when you encounter them. We also have more assets to really diversify the look and feel of the castle with the creation of a table and a crate asset by Bert. I love the crate the particular! There's just no better way to put it, it's a beautiful crate.

Animation:
Arturo

Arturo absolutely blew me away this sprint, with him starting on enemy animations now that the player is complete. Things that behave anything that isn't very human-like can be quite difficult to animate, but Arturo more than proved he was up to the task. Here we have animations for the Orc, Eyeball, and Goblin enemies, and they all look fantastic. The Orc has a great sense of weight to him, the goblin is terrifying and fast with its crawl animation and the Eyeball?? Just look at that thing! It sends chills down my spine each time I look at it, and if you look closely, you can even see the frantic and jittery movement of the eye itself as it blinks. I cant wait to see it in-game with its textures.

Level Design:
Jonathan

Branden

For the level designers, this sprint was pretty routine, with the creation of more maps and levels for the game itself. This next sprint should finally see the end of development on these levels, and we can have our level designers focus their talents on really getting into the completed levels, and fine-tuning them to perfection based on the immense feedback we got from our many playtests so far. With so many additional assets being created for the castle as well, I'm excited to see them get creative, and fill their levels with all the gorgeous models.

Overall, a very successful sprint as usual for the team! In particular, I'd like to highlight the changes that I mention in my last post, and how they went. The team now has a dedicated meet time over any weekend before a build is to be completed, giving us far more time together as a team to really dial in the build, and make it as great as it can be before it's finished. This also takes a lot more pressure off of our Designer Tyler, myself, and our programmers having everyone there to help troubleshoot any issues with their work, and also just get more work finished and put into the build. Our build was finished earlier than usual is as a result of this, and we got far more playtest data as a result, which is extremely beneficial for our game and our ability to make it as good as it can be by the time we reach our final sprint, which is fast approaching!

But because the end is fast approaching, another problem has arisen that you may have noticed in our burndown chart, and that's burnout in the team. Agile development can be intense occasionally, and with our team in particular firing on all cylinders the last few months, we've naturally seen a slight slowdown in work output. The moment I noticed this, I made the very conscious decision to cut back on work where possible for the members of the team experiencing this burnout, and smart redistribution of work, close communication with my team members, and the natural requirement to cut work has lead to what I believe will be the team feeling a lot less pressure in the coming sprints, allowing them to still complete all the work needed to push through and finish the game, while not pushing any of them too far. I want to avoid any unneeded additional crunch and stress on the team as we approach the end, and I hope that these precations can allow that to happen. My team has been nothing but wonderful and has done wonderful work, and I hope to see that passion last throughout all of development on Citadel.