Hi everyone and welcome back to another production blog update for our game Glass Castle. My name is Kade and I can't wait to discuss the work that our team was able to complete during this sprint. As usual, I want to also direct you to check out our Designing for Glass Castle blog update to follow along with design goals, playtest results, and additional insight into the development process. 

The most important goals for the team this sprint was getting our dialogue and different worlds finalized and fleshed out. This involved setting up the first quests in the game, as well as placing finalized assets, colliders, and characters in the world. 

Modeling:

Our modelers continue to create amazing assets for our game. Our designer wanted a larger variety of props between the worlds when it came to environmental design. We also wanted to distinguish the the architecture between World 1 and World 2.  To do this, William modeled various world specific objects like the well and the blacksmith props. Additionally, he also drew up a concept design for another set of NPC's. Cyrus spent the sprint modeling and texturing market props such as various fruits, and jewelry. Finally, we tasked our character modeler Liam with creating the final antagonist model, retopology, and texturing.

Level Design:

Moving on to the design of our levels, we had Davis designing the layout of World 1 with the various available props and buildings, while also expanding on the puzzle segments and their locations. This area was fleshed out with NPC's, old armor, weapons, and appropiately fenced in order to direct the player. In World 2, we had Chris beginning the placement of the majority of his building models, but soon came to the realization that we needed to quickly reduce the size of the level. He also produced a blockout of the final cave encounter area based on an annotated map done by the lead designer, Brie, who has also began to oversee level design in order to make sure they are shaping into her final vision. 

Programming, Animation, and VFX:

Moving over to our condensed group of programmers, VFX designers, and animators, we have a large amount of work being completed. First off, Colin was crucial to getting our players respawning correctly, and for setting up our quest systems, menus, and a lot of other fixes over the entire project, including NPC's that wave when they have an available quest. He was also key in adding the additional info page for collecting notes on our antagonist as quests were completed. Christian spent the sprint implementing audio on almost all player actions, as well as NPC's, and scene specific music. He was also charged with creating the new effect for our World 1 portal. Finally, our talented animator Mel finalized the weight painting on our wolf enemy, and adapted the original animations created on a placeholder model over onto our custom made model, including an attack animation, as well as an idle animation.

Sprint Statistics:

As sprint 5 drew to a close, we had a total of 146 story points assigned. Our team completed 106 of these story points, with 40 having not been moved into verification. Though we were quite short on our goal, we were still able to increase our sprint velocity this sprint to up to 100 points. Going into the sprint, we knew that we were going into the period right before our final full length sprint, so we tried to cover as much as possible in order to better quantify what content could make it into the game, and what just wasn't feasible. I believe that we were able to get a good measurement of how much work we still have time to complete within our final sprints due to this  push, and I want to thank my team for their incredible hard work.

We will see you in the next sprint! Thank you for following  along with the development of Glass Castle. We will see you soon.