Guilds of Greybrook

Guilds of Greybrook

Guilds of Greybrook is a strategic worker placement game where players are placed at the helm of a work-for-hire guild and asked to navigate the choppy waters of business ownership in a tumultuous frontier setting. 

Players are tasked with effectively managing their guild, choosing which contracts to take and who to assign to them. The way players run their business as well as their interactions with the peninsula's factions and residents will determine whether their enterprise thrives or fails. 

As lead designer on this project, I created a majority of the systems that make up the current game. They were not always in the state they are now, however. A process of repeated iteration and refinement was necessary in order to find the fun and deliver the product that Guilds of Greybrook is today.

Guilds of Greybrook predates my involvement with the project. The original concept had a large focus on paranormal investigation and auto-battler elements. It went under a different name and was developed by a slightly different team. 

The game seemed to be going in too many different directions, once I was able to get hands on with it it was important to me that we strip away all ancillary ideas and focus on making the core guild management gameplay as strategic and enjoyable as possible. 

In order to do this I wanted to take cue from my background in tabletop game design and prototype the game in paper before starting on the digital product. I developed a few key systems here, some such as member morale, events and guild upgrades were iterations on what was already there in the previous concept while others such as faction reputation, endings, skills, and dice rolling to resolve contracts were completely original.

Initial playtests amongst the team were promising but more feedback was needed before deciding this to be the best direction for the project to go in.

We ported the paper prototype we had at the time to the digital tabletop platform, Tabletopia, and took it to a local game store to get feedback from actual gamers.

We were thrilled to find that they loved it! Players felt a tremendous attachment to their guild and felt like their decisions were impactful in its success. Systems like the events and factions added to player's feeling of ownership of experience and the tactile nature of dice was a super fun way to determine the probability of successfully completing contracts.

Next it came time to create the game properly in digital form, some of the systems we had designed in paper would work differently there and we had to plan accordingly. 

Dice needed to find new ways  they could feel juicy in a medium where they could not be physically tactile, to solve this I reinvented the way that contracts were resolved and made our dice customizable by the player.

Playtesters really enjoyed the choices that our previous event system brought to the table, I wanted to use the digital version of the game as an opportunity to make them more reactive, triggering based on player actions.

Speaking of choices, the previous guild upgrade system was way to linear. I split it into a store where players would have to think about where exactly to invest their money.

Keping expansive documentation became very important as the project continued, I kept every single piece of data in the game on an easy to visualize series of sheets. The game could be easily balancd in response to feedback thanks to an incredible CSV reader tool made by one of our programmers. 

Multiple additional rounds of playtesting contributed to the game's current form.