High-level changes & reworks

We have been doing some reflecting the past few days. As a result of that, we're changing some of the key priorities and tasks for Guild Architect. 

Making the game look like a game

One of the key pillars of Guild Architect was also our more anime-inspired visuals. Despite this vision, we hadn't really been working on that over the past few weeks, focusing instead on concepting characters without seeing if our vision of the game was even possible.

To remedy that, we've put the character art on hold for a moment (although we did finish our first main character model)

Instead, we are focusing on configuring our Quibli shader, and getting custom assets implemented for the most visual parts of our game (walls, floors,...), so they can interact with said shader as well.

Making the game play like a game

One of the big issues that has been raised over the past week(s) is that we were adding a bunch of mechanics, but were doing so somewhat aimlessly. We had our lore system, we could see stats about adventurers, but there was still not a single game loop. 

To remedy this, we put a hard stop to any further development work, and have instead fully refocused on working out what are game is actually going to be; what are the different mechanics; what's our core hook...

We're now starting to get a better idea in terms of what's actually in scope (turns out, a lot more than I originally thought), and what our priorities should be. This is kind of boring work, and definitely not visual, but it's something we sorely needed, as we also had no real idea of things like lose conditions, and what the core of our game would even be. 

We've determined about 6-7 game loops now, 2 of which are truly core to the game (quest assignments & tavern management). With these known, we can start working towards actually getting these implemented.

Progress Grab Bag

Some smaller features/additions we implemented over the past week:

• Added animations to our adventurers instead of T-posing, to get more of that game-feel. 

What's Next?

Our artists will keep focussing on the visual style of our guild, getting everything in the apropriate anime-style. We're also reaching a point where most of our mechancis are more thought out now, so we can reschedule our priorities and start working on actually implementing these (more thought-out) mechanics. 

Also, stay tuned for our Patreon bonus video next Monday, where we do a full pre-mortem of the different reasons why Guild Architect would fail as well, and what we would be doing to remedy that (we recorded this before this weekly update, hence why we're changing a bunch of our priorities).