From the soapbox #10

Something funny happened on the way to bomb your Smithy…

Throughout the weeks, we’ve been talking about the various features, old and new, that will be in The Guild 3. One of them we haven’t talked about much: the multiplayer element. A good reason why is because multiplayer is pretty much a given – it’s expected to be there and forgotten, to just work and not be in the way.

So we’ve been play testing various games for the past few months to both test and stabilize the technology, but also to just try out the game itself! And it enabled us to discover hidden sides of certain of our coworkers, those damn sneaky ?%$#…

The difficulty right now is double: the game isn’t fully balanced, so some actions have disproportionate effects (either too much or too little). And Mathieu, who among the programmers is the one that knows the most the effects of every action, is using these expanded effects to maximum impact. For months, he’s been making fittings to generate insane amounts of money, the price of fittings containing an error. Of course, as soon as it was discovered, he fixed the bug…

Another example: on the artists’ side, Pierre-Olivier is probably the most experienced player of all. He’s part of the team that makes all the maps, and he knows the optimal routes and occasions in each one of them. His main flaw, though, is that he’s a nice guy. Too nice. He just wants to do his thing: build his dynasty and businesses, and not bother anyone. And even though he makes it too easy, shooting the sitting duck is still satisfying…

In the coming weeks, we’ll go into details about these multiplayer games and the various things we’ve discovered, along with the different ways to play the game. We’re happy how it’s turning out, though; how various paths can coexist in a single game, and the feel of interacting with other human players, both as enemies or allies (or both).

And no “out of synch” bugs 🙂

GolemLabs