Hey everyone, Kade Chambers here with another production update for our game Glass Castle.  I'm excited to talk about some of the work that we were able to complete during this sprint. As a refresher, Glass Castle is a story driven Action-Adventure game with anime and fantasy inspired elements that pushes our player forward to solve the mystery of the Castle. We were able to make good progress on our backlog, as well as increase the velocity that our team was completing work. We met our sprint goals, and received valuable feedback in our very first electronic prototype featuring the mechanics that we had worked on in our first sprint, and into the beginning of sprint 2.

Electronic Prototype:

For our first playable build, we decided to focus on testing out the first of our core mechanics that would be available to the player. This included a dialogue system, our player controller, as well as three spells for the player to experiment with. Because of this focus on testing functionality, our playtest was put together by one of our talented programmers that had also designed some of the player control systems. This quick prototype showed us where players were struggling the most, and informed our decision on controls as we moved forward. You can go and check out our Designing Glass Castle log created by our designer Brie for more information on the design decisions that were made from this data. 

2D Art:

This sprint, one our goals for the art team was getting some of our final UI assets so that we could start implementing it into the game. We had our artists take the existing concept designs and iterate on them. These objects include our spell wheel, the players health bar, and the mana bar. Included in this is our finalized title asset. One of our artists also created a set of themed button icons for use in the game so that we can prompt the user while they are interacting in the world, and show control schemes. While all of these icons look great, one of my favorites for the sprint is the health bar that contains the mana bar sphere. I think it looks amazing! 

Modeling:

Our modelers kept busy this past sprint! We got a series of modular building, castle objects (Made of glass of course), and character props. We also got our very first enemy model and texture completed. The modular buildings are to ensure that buildings placed are not repetetive, and are easy to modify as they are placed in the world. This goes for both the farm buildings that were completed, and the glass wall structures. Speaking of those Glass Castle walls, I think that they really look amazing once brought in to our game engine, and having our modeler work with our toon shader settings. Another amazing model is our enemy wolf. Our character modeler did a great job getting this ready for us, and really nailed the detail on its textures.  I was really happy with the work completed by our modelers, and am excited to get our next set of models ready to show off.

Animation:

In Sprint 2, we started our animation process! Our animator was tasked with getting a riggable wolf to start quadruped animations for our enemy. We're excited to see how these animations evolve as they iterate on it and get it applied to our new model for the wolf. Additionally, we started implementing our first animations for the player character, Zayden, into Unity. We got our first idle animation, and our walking animation set up, with many more in the works. We were able to make use of Mixamo for player animations. Since we had our finished character model, this was as easy as uploading our model into their rigging system and exporting animations set up for Zaydens smaller build.

Level Design:

Our level designers spent a lot of time in-engine this sprint, building the groundwork for what will become our playable worlds. Since level design is so important to the final feel of the game, our lead designer worked with the level designers to make sure that their level blockouts and design implementation matched what she was expecting. We have gotten our Glass Castle layout nearly finalized, and are in the process of getting the required assets ready to build it out completely. Another area that received a lot of attention this sprint was our World 2 well area, which is filled with a series of puzzles for the player to interact with. Our level designer Chris was also able to create a soundtrack for World 2. We're excited to give you a closer look into these areas as we move into the next sprint.

Programming:

These guys have been hard at work building our systems out this sprint. I am incredibly proud of the work and detail put into the tasks that this team has completed. To begin with, our programmer Colin set up the systems for what would become our players health and mana. Additionally, he created a detailed dialogue system with context specific dialogue speeds, as well as a system to quickly add to a NPC's available dialogue. After he had finished with these tasks, he also implemented Zaydens animations and edited our player prefabs to work with the new model with the current prefab scripts, ensuring collision and area detection were still working appropriately. Our other programmer Christian worked on spells, and creating systems to later use to refill the players available water for our fountain spell,  fine tuning our fireball interactions, and finishing up the player shield spell, and teleportation. Overall, the work that these guys completed set a strong foundation for our mechanics moving forward, and I am incredibly proud of the work done.

Sprint Statistics:

When we wrapped up the sprint, we had a total of 125 story points assigned over the course of the sprint. Out of this total, our team completed 101 story points, with 13 remaining in progress, and 11 having not been moved. A good number of these tasks were assigned at the end of the sprint as large chunks of work were completed in order to maintain tasks for every member of the team. Our sprint velocity increased from 75 points, to a new average velocity of 88 points. We managed to meet our sprint goal of blocking out our first 2 worlds, and getting our player character model in engine and textured with our toon shader. As we look to the next sprint, we have set our goal on finishing up a small section of World 2 for the player to playtest with an animated character model, as well as completing additional character models and world props.

I'll see you in the next post! Until then, I look forward to showing off more of the work being completed on this project. Thanks for following  along with our development. You'll hear from us again soon.