Week 7 is nearing it’s conclusion and with that comes our Systems Lock. It’s been a crazy journey so far with some great developments in all aspects of the game. That being said, it’s finally time to stop adding big things and get to cracking down on fine tuning the things that are already present within the game. I’m really excited for this next step in the development process because even though we didn’t get everything we wanted in, we still got plenty of things into Guilded that really bring it to the next level. As a Narrative Designer specifically, I know there’s still plenty of work to be done for Guilded before the game can truly “ship”. Speaking of which…

There’s been talk recently of actually publishing the game to a big platform like Steam after development ends. Not only do I think this is an insane opportunity but it’s kind of unbelievable to me. I never even really considered being able to fully publish a game before I got a few years in the industry under my belt, and now here this offer stands. Anyway, the team still isn’t sure if this is the direction we’ll be taking Guilded, but I did want to touch on it because I think it was a really important moment for me in these last few weeks. The excitement I got when I heard that this was even a possibility, it just felt like all the hard work I’ve put into both this game and my education as a whole was finally coming together, and it felt incredible.

Anyway, moving on to the specifics of what went down over the past two weeks. We’ve continued to make big changes in the Narrative department and things have continued to move along smoothly. We’ve mainly focused on getting narrative information across to our players in better, more efficient ways. We decided to go about this by adjusting the way that our Quests worked and by moving some information within them around so they all ended up being more readable.

Something else we’ve begun working on is tuning up the content generation pipeline. Currently in Guilded, the narrative work is somewhat constrained by the current system and using a rework that the Narrative team drafted up would not only remove this bottleneck, but it would also allow us to design more unique content for Guilded. Speaking to content generation in general, we’ve been getting a pretty consistent stream of content into Guilded as time has gone on. Both Narrative designers dedicate about 6 hours each sprint just to adding new content into the game, this has quickly expanded the amount of things a player will see in any given play session.

As a Narrative Designer, I will continue creating interesting content for Guilded as it is essentially the heart of the game. In addition to that though, I want to continue to improve the design pipeline for Guilded and hopefully follow up on some more of my overall goals for the game. A big part of that would be getting our Monthly Quest system into the game, but we’ll see where we end up over the next few weeks.