Three weeks into development and we’ve hit the ground running. I mentioned in my previous blog post how well the team overall was working together and that has only continued to improve. In previous weeks, we had split the teams into two different scrum groups which ended up causing a bit of issues for the team as a whole in regards to communication. Since then, we have instead kept the whole team together which has significantly helped with our communication.

In particular, I think this change has helped not only myself, but the rest of the team in getting cooperative work done. As for some of the other changes we’ve made in the last few weeks, we also tried to have more interdisciplinary meetings. I know as one of the Narrative Designers on the team, it has helped immensely to be able to sit down with the other Narrative Designer and work through a portion of our planned tasks together. This allowed us to be much more punctual in our work and also allowed us to bounce ideas off each other in real-time instead of needing to wait for a reply on message.

During the last few weeks, I also had the opportunity to engage in more interdisciplinary work, mainly with the artists of the team. I found this to be a really interesting opportunity to take more of a deep dive into the characters of Guilded and what jobs/classes they would realistically have. This led into conversations on how to make charming designs that got the bizarre class combinations across. Things like a Cook + Fighter or a Hunter + Fighter needed to be brought to life in a way that a player could easily see what roles an adventurer has just by looking at them. In order to combat this problem, myself and the main character artist of the team sat down and went through the list of all of the jobs that would exist within the game and created baseline designs for all of them.

Speaking of the Jobs of Guilded, that was another big portion of the last few weeks. The team had a big meeting with basically everyone on the team aside from the programmers trying to decide what Jobs would be for sure in the game, and what would be left to a stretch goal. The meeting was only about an hour long in total, but the whole team managed to get to a pretty solid consensus by the end of it. I think that meeting was a really good indicator of just how well the team works together. There wasn’t any arguing, nobody was being disrespectful, and by the end of the meeting, the whole team was on the same page.

I think the past few weeks have been great so far, and I’m really loving working with the team as a whole. I’m definitely looking forward to getting out of the system revision portion of the development cycle and into more of the brand new content as well.