Last semester I worked on a game called Guilded. With 4 other team members, we made a procedurally generated fantasy sim where you play as the leader of an adventurer’s guild. It’s your role to recruit adventurers to your guild and send them out on quests, accounting for the personalities, quirks, and opinions of your adventurers. I ended up making a rather lengthy twitter thread about my thoughts at that point. Reflecting about my time as a developer and the friends and games I’ve made along the way. If you want to read it, click here. To sum it up, working on Guilded was an incredible experience. When the semester was over and development had stopped, Guilded was chosen to continue into full production by the faculty. Suddenly our 5 person team expanded to 13, and we needed to find a way to onboard everyone fast.
Cut to this week, and I think we’ve been doing pretty well. Everyone who came onto the game was super interested in working on it and already had a ton of ideas on what to add to Guilded. On boarding went really well too, I had made a presentation that covered everything people needed to know, and after a short winter break, we started working.
As the Lead Designer and Product Owner on the project, I really wanted to take a step back from my usual System/Technical Designer duties and focus on leadership and getting a cohesive vision. Thankfully, we had picked up 3 other designers, two narrative and one systems, so I was able to hand off the tasks I usually did into their excited arms. From there, I analyzed my role on the team. Lead Designer role first. The new designers needed direction, so I talked with them about the current faults with Guilded and asked how they would fix this. After a long conversation we came to a cohesive vision that we all liked, and then we created our tasks and split up the work. Later on we set up a Designer meeting as a way for all the designers to meet up in person, catch each other up on the work they were doing, and bring up any immediate issues they had. Our first meeting was a massive success, and everyone present came away knowing exactly where everyone else was in their work. This payed off later once the designers started drifting towards other disciplines, since they were able to talk about the overall design work of the project.
After that, I went around to the other disciplines and talked with them about their tasks. Communication was going to be incredibly important, and I wanted to make sure I was up to date with everything. This way I could help translate any information between disciplines as well as making sure everyone was working on the same vision. I think this was a really helpful part for everyone on the team, and had a very good pay off at the end of the week. As the last task of my sprint, I created a presentation that summed up all the changes that were made to Guilded. You can view it below, but without me speaking over it, it might be a little vague.
This proved to be incredibly helpful, since many members of the team didn’t know too much about the other’s work and the changes being made to the project. We were able to answer questions on the changes immediately, and as a result the team came away (hopefully) on the same page. This is something that I’m going to commit to doing every week, since it made such a large impact. I’m excited for next week, when some of the systems we planned and changes we made will really shine!
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