Two more weeks fall behind us as we get closer to our projected release date and we have quite a bit to show for it too! These past few weeks have been really interesting for me as someone doubling as a narrative designer and a systems designer. This is mostly because I’ve had ample opportunity to actually dive into both aspects of design within the past few weeks. The main highlights of the past few weeks definitely falls to the monthly quests and the game balancing that we’ve been doing as designers.

Not only was I given plenty of good opportunities to revisit systems design in the form of balancing Adventurer levels and how quickly they grow. While I still love and enjoy narrative design, it has definitely been nice going back to systems design for a short period of time. I’ve especially been enjoying it because it specifically focuses on a system that I helped to revamp early in this development cycle. It’s been really fun tuning the adventurers so they have a nice, healthy leveling rate and it also means I get a lot of opportunities to play the game. This helps not only in finding new bugs and issues now that we’re short on QA, but it also allows me to appreciate all of the work that has gone into the game.

Like I talked about in my previous blog post, the monthly quests present in Guilded have provided the narrative team with the interesting challenge of creating a loose linear story within a game that specifically indulges in randomness. With that being said, I feel that both myself and my fellow narrative designer have done a pretty solid job of not only crafting interesting scenarios for our players to go through, but also introducing new challenges that come packaged with unique benefits should the player complete them each month.

I am very much looking forward to continuing my work on Guilded, almost now more than ever given the current quarantine situation. This is the biggest project I’ve been involved in to date and I’ve been loving nearly every second of it.