Hello, welcome back to another production update for our game Glass Castle. 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. This sprint, we were able to push our sprint velocity even higher, as well as make huge progress on implementing new systems, assets, and fixing bugs found during our playtests. To start with, I want to direct you to our game designers blog post, Designing Glass Castle #4, where she goes over results from our playtests conducted during this sprint.

Modeling:

First off, I'm going to hop into discussing the work finished by our modelers.  Cyrus created these awesome trees for our world 1 that really pop with the toon shader applied in-game. He also produced a blanket model, crates, and awnings for our world 2 marketplace. Alongside his modeling tasks, he was charge of overhauling a material for our world 1 buildings in order to work with our toon shader. Moving on William, he created a series of modular clay buildings using various parts that he modeled and textured. He also built a gate object, and rescaled fence props to better fit in the game engine. Our last modeler Liam spent the sprint creating our first NPC model, with variations to the model that are toggleable within Unity. He also produced different textures for these NPCs so that there is variation among our characters in world 1.

Level Design:

Our level designers, as well as our lead designer Brie, were hard at work completing terrain and prop work ready to implement into our worlds. Davis got our world hub put together with the various glass castle models, as well as starting fleshing out world 1, complete with farm land and a beautiful river. Thanks to the terrain work done by Davis, Brie was able to export this Unity object out as a .raw file to compelete modeling work in external programs, before beginning texturing. This process was essential in our development as we wanted to include the toon shader being applied to other materials in-game to the worlds environment throughout each world. Additionally, Chris was able to complete the custom audio for our second world, as well as add our finalized prop assets to the well area currently used for our playtests.

World 2 Audio

Programming, Animation, and VFX:

I lumped a large amount of work together in this section due to the intertwined nature of the majority of these tasks, and the team behind them. Our programmers have been hard at work this sprint with enemies, fine-tuning our quest system, and many more visual elements. Colin completed work with health systems for our enemies, animation blending research (with help from our character modeler Liam), and a lot of bug fixing. He also created our save and load system to keep track of our player progress. Christian took on VFX work this sprint, creating new visuals for our spells, teleportation portals, and a new water shader. He was also in charge of modifying the behaviour of our telekinesis spell to improve functionality for players, and reduce bugs found in previous builds. Finally, our animator Mel finished up an attack animation for our wolf enemy, and transferred over our rig from our placeholder quadriped model in order to begin weight-painting to polish up our custom animations. 

Sprint Statistics:

At the end of Sprint 4, we had a total of 129 story points assigned. Our team completed 110 story points, with 19 having not been moved. Our sprint velocity increased this sprint up to 98 points. I'm incredibly proud of the team for the work that they have completed this sprint. As we move into the following sprint, we plan to begin a lot of implementation work with both our assets, as well as additional puzzles scattered throughout our included Worlds.

I hope we see you in the next sprint! Until then, I shall continue to look forward to talking more about the work done by this team. Thank you for following  along with our development. See you soon!