Hi! Welcome to the new dev diary filled with madness and gory details from the world of indie development. I apologise for the long silence, but hey, it was summer out there, so I couldn’t resist. I will try to write more often.
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So, let’s talk about guilds. Most of the buildings in the game belong to city guilds. They define an image of the city. Every guild potentially affects every game system, but you need to build floors to unlock these effects.
Every guild has its own fighters, ships, and ways to make money. For example, The Thieves’ Guild can be used for exploring, making money on gambling, or piracy. The player can build new storeys that would further secure the guild’s success at these activities. If you want to be good at exploration, you might want to construct bedrooms for more people, workshops for lockpicking, training rooms for stealth, and an armory to preempt the case where your thieves fail at being stealthy.
It is, of course, absolutely possible to try and excel at all those skills at the same time. But you can only construct so many storeys in a building, so it’s hard to make a guild which is good at everything.
I want to make this system similar to the Job System from Final Fantasy Tactics — with the same versatility and cool combinations, but not only about fights. In this regard, every building is a character and every guild is a class.
All these things need to be tested in-game, as the guilds are closely tied to all the gameplay mechanics, so it’s hard to really say whether this system will work or not before late into development. But I like the idea.
So, what do you think?
