I've completed the main structure of the library and must now focus on the decorations. The design of the library is inspired by the real one I used to work at, I've attached some pictures of it above. There is also now a complete NPC quest, working elevator, and refined controls. The playtesting on my playable prototype helped me identify some flaws in my controls and readability.

I had noticed that requiring the player to use WASD, E, and the space bar was a bit overwhelming and it was easy for players to forget what key did what. I remedied this by removing the use of the space bar all together; previously I had it so that the player had to press the space bar to enter shelving mode, but now it does so automatically when near an intractable shelf. Someone suggested that I have tooltips to remind players of the controls, so I implemented those as well. My design process from now on will revolve around implementing additional NPCs, creating main and endgame menus, and creating the game timer.

For this alpha build, I focused on completing the mechanics that would be most difficult and/or most crucial to my gameplay. Of my NPCs, the one featured in this build is the most complex in regards to its behavior, and now that I have that one I can build the others off of it. I have a game manager object in the world that is able to keep track of which bookshelves are completed and which NPCs have had their quests completed, and I can connect these stats to my endgame screen to inform the player of how well they played.  

Making sure that each component of my game can be iterated on makes it much easier to add new components. There is almost like a hierarchy system in my mind with many of my components. For example, the game manager is on top, knowing about all the bookshelves in the game, then the bookshelves know about the books themselves and the book cart, and vice versa for the books and book cart.