Case Study: Guild of Guardians

Goal:

After years of anticipation, idle fantasy RPG Guild of Guardians announced its global release for May 15th, 2024. As Immutable's second major title, the game needed to deliver a polished experience to meet the blockchain gaming community's high expectations.

With the release date weeks away, Senior Game Design Manager Josiah Wallace approached Superpower to ensure balanced and engaging content for the game's debut.

Challenge:

Guild of Guardians features nearly a hundred guardians, which combine to form countless party combinations. Runes, curses, gear, and artifacts also needed to be tuned across a variety of PvE and PvP game modes.

Balancing thousands of elements was a massive undertaking for Josiah. Guild of Guardians' level of complexity required a dedicated team.

"It's really impossible for one person to go through and make sure the design intent and design goals from day one are carried through all the way to the very end of the balance process."

Solution:

We immediately onboarded 8 competitive players to Guild of Guardians mobile test builds before the global release. Post-release, we identified and hired top Guild of Guardians players and content creators to join our balance testing efforts.

Our leadership team worked closely with Josiah to develop a strategy for weekly content coverage. This included setting clear goals and communication standards to ensure alignment before and after the release.

"Honestly, I can't picture the release without [Superpower] now at this stage."

Josiah estimates that we were able to cover eight weeks of content in just four weeks. In addition to balance and content coverage, we created guides to break down gameplay strategies and closed the gaps in their design documentation.

In summary, Superpower:

- Freed up Josiah to focus on designing future game content

- Sped up Guild of Guardians development cycles by 2x

- Supported Guild of Guardians with content creation services