It’s the start of the new year and with that comes new projects and new opportunities. Unlike my previous project, I’m actually able to take a much deeper dive into Narrative Design over the next few months so I’m incredibly excited.

The new game I’m working on is called Guilded! An NPC management game where you take the role of a Guildmaster and that’s it. Guilded is specifically about managing your Adventurer NPCs and sending them on Quests together. There’s a lot of fun mechanics that tie into this process as well, but the biggest piece is that it’s all procedural generation which makes it a very interesting challenge for a Narrative Designer.

The full team has been together for just over a week now and I think we’re actually getting along really well! I haven’t worked in a team of this size since around later 2018 so I’m really glad to see we’re off to a good start. I can’t speak for all of the disciplines but myself and the other Designers have had essentially no issues getting right into the work. Not only are we doing a great job of staying on the same page with each other, there is also a very clear vision of the final product that we’re all working towards.

For myself in particular, I spent the last week working on the restructuring of the NPC Job and Skill System. In previous iterations of the game, a Job would be assigned based on that individual NPC’s skills. While this is still functionally in the game, it has been changed to allow for future development of quests to be much less painless and to also give the NPCs some extra diversity.

A big thing for me during this sprint was ensuring that I was not butting heads with any of the other Designers. I’ve never been in a position where I’ve been drafted onto a team before so I’ve tried to be cautious when it comes to adjusting work that has already been completed. Although, I really didn’t have much to worry about in this department. One of the things the previous team members wanted from the oncoming Narrative Designers was a complete overhauling of existing systems. This gave me a lot of freedom to work and it’s really helped me to feel like I have a place on the team.

While I don’t have much in the way to show of actual content (apart from the 44 new Jobs I made) I think I’ve made some decent progress in setting up a solid foundation for the work to come. I’m very excited for what both myself and the team will be accomplishing with the game and I can’t wait to dive even deeper into Guilded.