Hello and welcome back to Glass Castle's design blog! I am the game's lead designer, Brie Parr, here to share with you the progress and design decisions made this sprint.

First of all, let's dive into the playtest data. I am learning a lot from the data. For example, I have recieved a lot of positive feedback reguarding things such as the UI elements and the puzzles' difficulty levels. Players report having a better understanding of the game based on the UI elements and the inclusion of a control scheme located in the pause menu. All players report that they solved at least one puzzle, and that the puzzles are overall very balanced in difficulty, with some players stating that puzzles were only a little too hard or a little too easy. I have also got much feedback as to what can still be improved, such as adding a step by step tutorial for each spell, and allowing the player to adjust camera sensitivity in the settings menu. I will make sure that these changes get implemented before the final playtest.

This time, let's start with level design. Our open worlds are being filled in with props, buildings, NPCs, enemies, and puzzle-based objects. World 2 now includes the scuplted terrain for the underground well rooms implemented, and I am working on sculpting the above ground terrain. In addition to that, I have written out all the character dialogue, NPC dialogue, and tutorial dialogue in chronological order of when it should happen in the game. This also includes randomized NPC dialogue that will be triggered if the player is not in the middle of a quest. I tried to keep the character dialogue to a minimum to tell the bare bones of the story so the player feels immersed in the world without getting bored. Finally, due to the deadline fast approaching, I have had to rework some of the quests and cut out Worlds 3 and 4. The final quest is now the cave quest at the end of World 2, which I had to redraw an annotated map for so that there is only one path that leads the player (while chasing the main antagonist) into the final boss arena.

Next, let's talk about art and animation. We continue to have so much to show! On the 2D side, we have an asset for the pause menu background created by Mel to match our crystal theme. We also have an Alien NPC turnaround created by William. And finally, I was able to get a screenshot of the Castle to use as our Title Menu background so the player will immediately be filled with wonder and curiosity. 

Let's jump into 3D now! Liam continues to impress with his character models. This sprint he created our main antagonist, Zayn. Cyrus went above and beyond and not only created the extra debris pieces for the bridge, but he actually built out the whole bridge, which I was going to task to our level designer. He also created lots of small props such as jewelery, fruits, dirt mounds, and blacksmith tools. Finally, William created the Blacksmith building, a well for World 1, barrels full of water and iron ore, an anvil, and some more blacksmithing tools.

Finally, we have been making progress with animation. Specifically, we now have a fully weight painted wolf enemy that we can bring into Unity and begin applying animations to. I also feel it's appropriate to include Christian's VFX in this section. We now have some improved portal effects for the World 1 portal in the Castle.

Last, but not least, the magic of programming! A big step forward was taken when we finally implemented our first quest, which includes NPC dialogue, a pseudo-tutorial, and objective text on the UI. Since the structure of this quest strayed a bit from how I wrote it (mainly so it could be finished in time for the playtest), players did have a slightly harder time figuring it out than I would have liked. It will definitely be fixed before the next playtest, as previously mentioned. Another mechanic that we got up and running is the respawn feature. The player will now hit various checkpoints around the maps and will respawn in these areas if they die, which includes colliding with water.  Another important implementation was the inclusion of actual spell information in the spellbook menu. This menu is still incomplete, but it is better than the menu either not popping up and freezing the player, or having nothing useful and confusing the player. Eventually, this menu will have all the important information the player will need. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we have created an object leash script so that if the player does lose any puzzle pieces, which should actually be more difficult to do now, it will respawn so the player can progress through the game.