Author: Jeffrey Friedman

Getting My Feet Wet

Weekly Updates

It’s been quite a while since this blog got an update and I think now would be a pretty solid time to do so.

So, what have I been up to for the past couple of months? Excitingly enough, I actually have stuff to talk about!

As many of my peers have been doing, I am also still working to get my first full industry position. In the meantime though, I’ve kept myself busy. I’ve spent most of my post-graduate time trying to expand my horizons, looking into areas of the industry I hadn’t considered before. This mainly came in the form of an opportunity that was presented to me by Weathered Sweater, an indie company in Vermont. I was given the opportunity to act as a contracted QA tester.

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Guilded – Postmortem

Postmortems

Guilded was a video game made over the course of a six month period, I was involved with the project for three of these months. Through plenty of challenges and the start of a pandemic, the team managed to produce a fleshed out game experience that would be released on Steam in early May of 2020. I am sure the whole team is proud of their work on Guilded and it was incredible learning experience for everyone. For myself specifically, I know that I was excited to work on my first team-based project where I was in a primarily narrative position.

During this postmortem, there are a few key things I would like to touch on, both from a personal and a team perspective.

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Locking up the Features

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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.

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Quarantined Development

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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.

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Systems Lock

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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…

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