Guardians' Legacy
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Guardians' Legacy is a linear old school RPG with turn-based combat where the power is given to the players. They are given a plethora of options to play the game. The flagship of our design is the Node System or our skill crafting system. This lets the player create skills they will use both in combat to fight but also in the overworld to traverse and solve puzzles. The next way was how we utilized a classless system where only your gear mattered to decide your play style. This lets the player change their whole play styles on a whim if they got some kind of new gear that piqued their interest.
Project Gallery
The Journey
Paved with lessons
This was a project that I joined during the very early stages of its development so I had a ton of freedoms in my design space and that was what drew me to the project in the first place. I was chosen to be the lead designer and it wasn't something I was sure I deserved as it was the first time I was put in that role. I ended up agreeing and tried to do my best to be worthy of the position. I worked with both my lead as well as my designers and my fellow discipline leads to make something we could all be proud of.
The designers sat down and decided on the two biggest needs for the first milestone. We needed to figure out what we wanted this game to really be and then fill out an asset list for the artists so they could get to work. We spent as much time as we could talking and planning things out over the next couple of weeks. We had a large asset list created and the first hour or so of the game strung together in our heads and several different notebooks. These were then brought up to the lead and then added to the GDD with time. Looking back at the beginning it was a lot of ideas in an open box with no roof. I started white boxing while the other designers worked on paper maps and UI mockups. From there we just kept on moving.
Next thing we knew it had been three months into production and we were chugging along. There were little bugs and communication issues that we had along the way but we kept on working through them and became a really tight family. My days were spent talking, planning, and designing with the other designers and then I would hear my name called and I'd roll my chair back to talk with the programmers and answer a question or two before I was back working with my designers again.
The Node System
So many choices....
The node system is out flagship feature where the player picks up nodes in the overworld and then can use those nodes to build a skill. These skills can have a variety of effects from burning to freezing or giving yourself evasion to increasing your intellect and so on. That is only for combat though as when we take a step back and look at the overworld the player now has a different set of tasks before them. Depending on the skill's element the player can traverse the world in different ways. Some players may use their strength to knock down a door while others dip into the shadows and step between them, closing most gaps. Some players can use the storm to make a great leap over an area to difficult to traverse and others can cleanse corruption using divine light and return things to how they were meant to be. This even extends to things like the skill's critical hit rate or the damage of sed critical. You can even mess with your accuracy to give yourself more/less damage and so on. Regardless of what they do the player has many choices and at a drop of a hat they can swap their playstyles and try out a different swing of life. The nodes picked up are all stored in a 'bank' and with a button press all used nodes can be returned and the skill made empty for you to create something new and exciting.
Now with designing all these nodes and potential skills there is a lot of combinations and it was pretty clear early on that anything could be useful or strong in the right situations but if used poorly even the strongest skill can be rendered inert. All this work could not have been done without my other designers and all the hours we spent working with the project lead and our programmers to make something we could all love and be proud of. There were a lot of debates over the smallest things and we even pooled outside opinions to decide some more difficult decisions. At the end of the day, we created a very in-depth skill creation system and I couldn't be prouder of it.
Design Space
What path will you walk?
As I have said, when I got on this project I had a lot of freedoms and opportunities. Some of our very first discussions and decisions were about where we were looking to take the game and how we wanted it to look at the end of our development cycles. Looking back, it is crazy to see how things have grown and changed from the early stages of development. From the start of the game, we decided that skills would be broken up into both magical and physical as we were building the node system in tandem with most of the combat system. This quickly became a glaring issue as we all realized that there wasn't enough of a point to split them due to the lack of physical elements and we ended up consolidating them together and fixing the formula somewhat to make everything flow better. In the end, it was a better quality update and feedback showed the same answers.
The overworld puzzles were something that we never stopped working on. Every time we touched or changed something we had to think about how it could impact the overworld skills. Initially, there was going to be a lot more and our scope wasn't looking too good. I ended up coming to my designers with the idea to streamline it to make the system better for both us and the player. The new idea was that based on the damage type of the skill, the effect on the overworld it had changed. This reduced the number of overworld skills to eight and allowed us to make better and more interactive puzzles for these skills. It even allowed us to weaver some skills together for potential combinations or alternatives to one another. This was something everyone was on board with and we worked to make a handful of interesting and different puzzles.
The story and narrative of the game is something that I wish we could have delved deeper on. We started out with a very straight forwards two-sentence idea for what the leads goal for the narrative was. From there we worked to create and dive into something we all found interesting and different. I remember spending hours coming up with ideas and sitting with our narrative designer on the origin of the world and how everything got to where it was now at the start of the game. All this information that the player may only have gotten fragments on due to our small development cycle. From there we built a story and the character from the ground up, creating NPCs, story characters, and areas that would have been different for the genre's norms. We wanted to combine some of our favorite themes and settings together to make this grand and epic story but we just didn't have the time to create all this. A lot of it ended up sitting on a document while we ended up having to scrape entire areas and characters to make the deadlines we set for ourself. I will never forget all I learned about the proper need for scope and control while working on this project. That was one of my biggest takeaways from Guardians' Legacy.
Postmortem and Breakdown
The end of an era...
This was a long and hard road and it took a lot out of all of us but we got here. The project is just about finished and I couldn't be prouder of both my team of designers but everyone overall. We even had a crunch a bit in the end there but hey, it happens.
What Went Right:
Where should I start? The project was a hit. We all loved it from the bottom of our hearts and the extra amount of time we put it shows. It wasn't perfect and we all know it but when you have to work on a deadline you only have so many options. We cleaned up what we had and spent a nice amount of time polishing up everything we could. A great part about working on this team was how well we all melded together. When we all got together there were a lot of communication issues and within a few weeks, we managed to break down the biggest barriers and work on what mattered. Something I am super proud of is how well we communicated and especially how the disciplines spoke to one another. If my programmers had any issues all they had to do was call and I was there and helped out with whatever they needed. Things never really needed to be repeated since we were always on the same page most of the time. When the artists got new art in, I knew minutes after it was uploaded and started getting it into the build. I will never forget the memories I made with this team.
What Went Wrong:
The biggest issues that ever came up during development were issues either revolving around the skill system or our source control, GitKracken. We didn't have a got of Git issues as all the programmers (designers too by the end of the project) knew how to operate and pull correctly. Build days were a blast too. When we had issues with the skill system it usually was resolved by the designers getting together and fixing an issue we missed when creating the massive skill system. The other big issue was that we ended up cutting area and we over scopped. That is something I see so much and it is a shame but at the end of the day, it was a great learning opportunity for us. Beyond that the worse thing was not being able to get all the content into the game. When we made our final build, there was so much more we wanted to add. Scope is key and we clearly needed a reality check.
Lessons Learned:
I learned so much on this team. I didn't think I was the leader type but when given the opportunity I did my best. I worked with my designers to make the best game possible and along the way got better at communicating and directing/helping those you needed help. I also learned a lot about scope and the need to control your vision. I wanted to do so much more but we only had a year to work and we did the best we could.