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.

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.

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…

Week Five has come and passed, and what a week it was. There’s a lot to talk about this week so I’ll try to keep it on the shorter side. To give a quick update on the game as a whole, we’re making solid progress! The whole team has been working super hard to get their stuff in and content just keeps on coming. Our communication skills continue to prove as well as we begin to move forward from Greenlight and onto Alpha development. There’s still a lot to get done in the coming weeks, but that’s for another time.

Three weeks into development and we’ve hit the ground running. I mentioned in my previous blog post how well the team overall was working together and that has only continued to improve. In previous weeks, we had split the teams into two different scrum groups which ended up causing a bit of issues for the team as a whole in regards to communication. Since then, we have instead kept the whole team together which has significantly helped with our communication.