These past few weeks have been, interesting to say the least. With the COVID-19 pandemic hitting the world in full force, our development process has changed quite significantly. The team has transitioned from an in-person development setting to a completely online infrastructure following our week-long break from development. While the team had planned for this potential outcome slightly, I don’t believe that we were at all ready for how much this would affect development as a whole. That being said, now that the team is shaking off the break mentality, we are transitioning much more smoothly into an online work-space.

Speaking to the actual development of Guilded itself and where the project is currently headed, we needed to cut back on some features. We are now currently in a very volatile development state which means we need to be much more careful when it comes to planning out the scope of Guilded. We do still plan to do a full release of the game and we have even planned out a small linear story line through the addition of Monthly Quests that will help guide players through the world of Guilded.

As for the things that we’re cutting, none of them are full features. Instead, we’re mostly just attempting to slim down the remaining features that need to get into the game as we all pretty much agree that they are still fantastic systems, they’re just unfortunately too big for our current scope. In other news, we’ve decided to start working on more of the balancing aspects of Guilded as opposed to focusing on adding content. This will ideally be a temporary focus change, but definitely a very necessary one. As a designer that is currently specializing in Narrative and Systems Design, I think this is a very beneficial opportunity for myself to gain more experience in tuning systems.

The next few weeks will definitely be an interesting experience, and I think it will be incredibly beneficial for myself personally as I learn how to work in a new environment.