Hello again, my name is Brie Parr, I am the designer of Glass Castle, and I would like to take the time to reflect on my experience as a first time game designer. This journey has been interesting to say the least, but it led me to a place of learning and accomplishment. When I pitched this idea in August, I never imagined it would actually be picked to be put into production. And here we are at the end, looking back on what we've created. Our team of only ten people were able to pull together a solid playable game in only 14 weeks. First, I'd like to summarize our accomplishments.

Our level designers (including myself) had our work cut out for us given that this game is very open-world based. Together, we were able to build out the Glass Castle as a hub world, as well as two fully fleshed out open worlds: the anicient battlefield, and the arid alien world. Each of the open worlds can be accessed via portals found inside the Glass Castle.  The Castle itself surpassed my expectations and turned out beautifully. Although not originally designed that way, it now includes portal rooms themed around which world the portal connects to. Even the portals themselves have themed VFX to give the player a visual hint as to where they might end up. I think this was a very cool way of directing the player through the game.  

Each of the open worlds were populated by unique eye-catching 3D props, buildings, and NPCs created by our modeling team. In addition, the player's UI and HUD was filled with amazing 2D artwork that really immerses the player into a fantasy setting. Overall, this game's visual aspects turned out very well.

On the programming side of things, Colin was able to build the mechanics for and set up eight playable story quests that I designed for this game. These quests include written dialogue and character interactions to immerse the player in the main character's story. We were also able to collaborate to create a final boss fight, which is essentially the climax of the story. 

But let's not gloss over the earlier feats of programming. The core mechanic of this game is magic, and thus, our focus for a while was on creating a spell casting system. This ultimately ended up with the player having five spells that they can use: Telekinesis, Fireball, Fountain, Portal, and Shield. The control scheme for these spells took several itterations to figure out, but in the end we had an array of useful and fun spells to cast. 

So what went right? As I mentioned, this game has beautiful visuals and a complete story, so I call that a win. I had a good experience designing different aspects of the game, even though a lot of my time was spent designing and redesigning things to cut down the scope. Another thing that went very well was music and SFX design. I did not expect my chosen level designers to be that good at composing music, but they turned out some awesome ambient tracks for each level and a special song for the boss fight. Similarly, I did not expect VFX to go so well, but Christian kept playing around with Unity's shader graph and particle effects and created some awesome animated visuals that further help to immerse the player.

So what went wrong? Thankfully, only a handful of things. First of all, we did have bugs, and they occasionally broke the game. Colin then became our honorary bug hunter and squished all the one's he could find, with a high success rate. Secondly, we had to keep adjusting our scope, meaning I was constantly rewriting our GDD. There really was no good solution to this, other than gaining more team members, which was impossible in our circumstance. All in all, we were able to adjust our scope to reflect what we were actually able to accomplish, and we were indeed able to get the game into a finished state. Thirdly, we had several issues with level design. Building out the levels in Unity started later into the project than I would have liked. In addition, we learned rather quickly that we would not be able to use the terrain editor with the stylized toon shader. This meant that I needed to 3D model each environment, which took a great deal of my time away from being able to do actual level design tasks, such as item placement and distribution. Again, the only real way to solve these problems would have been to aquire another team member, which we could not do.  Finally, because of poor planning, our wolf lunge animation could not be added into the game, and was instead replaced with a chomp attack. This is mainly due to the animation not being created in place, and thus, we did not allow time to program the wolf to move forward inside of Unity, which would have been the proper way to set it up so that the animations blended properly.

What would I do differently in the future? I would have liked to be more prepared with gameplay designs, such as the magic spell control scheme, or the exact quests I wanted the player to experience. If I had written those out prior to pitching my game, it would have allowed me and my team more time to actually implement those ideas. Also, I am still learning how to be a leader, and my fatal flaw is that I'm too nice. I want to be able to be a strong leader in the future so that I don't let things slide as easily as I do now. If I had been a bit tougher and voiced my concerns early on, we might have been able to do a little more level design than we ended up getting done. 

That being said, I would still like to thank my team for making this project a reality! It's been a blast!