• Role: Lead Designer, Product Owner
• Team Size: 5 expanded to 13
• Engine: Unity
• Platform: PC
• Production Time:  ~30 Weeks (Sep ’19 – Apr ’20)
• Released: May 2020 on Steam

Guilded is a single player strategy game about characters, groups, and their stories. You play as the leader of an Adventurers Guild, where you send adventurers on quests, accounting for how well they work together based on their skills, personalities, and relationships with one another. With procedurally generated characters, narrative, quests, and items, every play through of Guilded is different from the last, and every ridiculous conflict will have varying outcomes. This unique strategy game is as much about progression as it is about the stories you create by playing.

What I did:

During the first half of development, I was one of two designers, so I was able to quickly iterate on and test my ideas. When our team expanded after studio cuts, I wanted to make sure the new designers on the team were comfortable pitching their ideas for Guilded, so I took more of a supportive role. As Lead Designer and Product Owner, I worked with the team to shape their pitches into something that would help to magnify the team’s vision for the game. I also ran ran discipline specific meetings, as well as created presentations and updates to share with the team about the game’s progress. I called these presentations State of the Game Addresses and they helped make sure everyone on the team knew the current state and direction of the game. You can see these addresses in my blog posts for this project, available here.

Here’s an example of one of the SotG presentations. Note that I would be talking over them, during the presentation, so not all slides will make perfect sense:

Of course, given my skills as both a designer and programmer, I also took on a technical role. I helped implement new features, fix bugs, and adjust values for overall game balance. However, due to my new role as a Lead, most of my technical contributions were in the first half of this project. In the first half we only had 5 people: Myself, another designer (audio/general focus), an artist, a programmer, and a producer. I was the only systems/technical designer, so that was the majority of my job. I wrote documents mapping out how systems worked and interacted, made spreadsheets of numbers and values for XML documents, and gave a general direction of where the game systems and mechanics should go.

The Systems:

When designing the systems, they needed to stay within our three main pillars: the characters, personalities, and quests. All of the systems in the game affect these pillars in some way. The two largest systems in Guilded are the Quest System and Relationship System.

The Quest System

The quest system controls all of the quests in the game. Quests are the driver behind the second-to-second gameplay, and serve to show off the Adventurer personalities and relationships. When I first created the system, quests contained:

• Title
• Description
• Length
• Expiration
• Reward

The most interesting part of the quests from a systems perspective is the description. Since everything is procedurally generated, we needed a way to form cohesive descriptions and sentences out of data. So, I decided to make a MadLibs style system to control this. Whenever a quest is generated, it has a tag. This tag could be food, or crops, or any other skill that the Adventurers could have. Here’s an example of a quest:

“Matthew of Bronzelight contacted me saying that their food is making people sick. Matthew will pay 840 gold to have the issue resolved!”

That’s what the finished product looks like. First, I made a script:

“QUEST_GIVER of AREA_OF_ACTION contacted me saying TAG_SCRIPT. QUEST_GIVER will pay REWARD to have the issue resolved!”

From there, the game filled in the basic details like the QUEST_GIVER (Matthew), AREA_OF_ACTION (Bronzelight), and the REWARD (840 gold). The only thing left now it the TAG_SCRIPT. The TAG_SCRIPT is based off of the theme of the quest. In this case, it was food, so a respective script was chosen from the compatible food scripts.

"TAG_SCRIPT" => "that their food is FOOD_ACTION" => "that their food is making people sick"

From there, the game then reassesses the entire description and replaces any tags that are still needed, and then it’s done. There is also a way to add more tags to a quest so it could have up to three other tags in it, increasing the difficulty and complexity. This MadLibs style of quest generation worked great for the gameplay we had. But there were some downfalls, mainly grammar. This system required a high level of technical writing and focus to ensure that all the random lines would fit nicely together. So once we brought on new members, we had a discussion about how the system should work. Specifically, the narrative designers wanted more freedom to write longer and less restrictive quests. We worked together with the programming team to modify the current system, including making some in house tools, to ensure that they could create the stories they wanted.

The Personality System

All the Adventurers in your guild have a unique personality. Originally, there are 6 traits:

• Caution
• Determination
• Leadership
• Bravery
• Loyalty
• Empathy

These formed the basis of all the Adventurer’s decisions. They also have likes, dislikes, a general opinion of every other Adventurer in your guild. At its core, Adventurers use this information to form relationships with others, and these relationships affect how they perform on quests. Much like the Quest system, it worked great for what we had. However, there were too many traits to balance. We wanted each trait to have meaning, which to us meant that each trait needed a series of actions and reactions tied to them. In essence, we wanted adventurers to have a unique reaction to all of the events on a quest based on their personality.

So going into the next semester, we wanted to bring these down to a level that was more manageable. We decreased the traits down to the three we found the most important: Determination, Bravery, and Empathy. We also replaced the radar graph way of showing off the values with easier to understand positive and negative dice. This way players would be able to quickly understand the personality type of their adventurer at a glance. But we didn’t want to get too far away from the complex characters we had created, so we beefed up two of the other systems that dealt with the adventurers: Relationships and Morale.

The cool thing about these three different systems is that they’re all connected. The personality of adventurers are determined by their personality dice. These personalities affect the relationships between adventurers. If two adventurers go on a quest and one does something not too brave, the other adventurer’s opinion of them would change based on their own bravery. Birds of a feather and all that. And then based on their opinion of the adventurer party that they go out with, their morale will increase or decrease. If you succeed on a quest with your friends, then your morale will rocket up, but if you fail a quest with your enemies, it will plummet. And if your adventurers morale is too low, they’ll leave your guild. There are also Frenemies and Rivals which help to distinguish the gap between friends and enemies. You’ll hate going out on quests with your rivals, but you’ll push each other to do better. Meanwhile, going out with frenemies might be fun, but they won’t miss a chance to trip or back stab you during a crucial part of the quest.

Then and Now:

If you’re interested to see what some gameplay of Guilded looks like, here’s a playthough of the game without any voice over:

Thanks for taking a look at Guilded! If you want to know more about this game or my role on the team, please reach out!