Salutations, Industrialists!
Today's video is the second half of Dev Diary 22 on Events. In this video, the devs respond to questions fielded by our online community. Most questions are related to Gilded Destiny, but others cover a wide range of topics. This video is an informal question-and-answer style chat among four of us from our studio in London.
Also, Check out our eighth Alpha Roadmap Update:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2189430/view/4445711438670989141
You can find the full script for the Dev Diary below.
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Let us know if you have any questions or feedback over on Discord. And be sure to wishlist us to stay up to date!
Join our Discord community today!
https://discord.gg/3d77T9gxDF
Speaking of Discord, we have started rolling the Discord roles to our Kickstarter backers! If you have not yet completed the Kickstarter survey we sent out, please do so. If you have filled it out, and are not yet in our Discord server, join and say hello in the main channel to let us know you're there to claim your role!
Our Kickstarter officially ended in April, and brought in a total of £31,974 GBP, which is 159% of our goal! We offer the most gilded appreciation to all of our backers and our community. Your support, positive feedback and encouragement, and our growing vibrant community of industrialists motivates more than ever to make Gilded Destiny the most moddable, immersive, fun, and grandest GSG out there.
You can access the survey on the Kickstarter website:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gildeddestiny/gilded-destiny-a-grand-strategy-game?ref=bjurrh
Finally, if you are interested in what we do and want to join us but do not see a relevant job, send us your resume at [email protected]!
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Script for Dev Chat Q&A:
Salutations Industrialists!
I'm Marc, a producer working on Gilded Destiny—and currently with a cold.
As promised, I'm happy to share the second part of the discussion from our London studio. If you haven't watched the first part of our discussion about events yet, be sure to check out our 22nd Dev Diary on the Events system.
This Dev Diary features questions from our community about the game, the Victorian era, and a few random topics. We had a lot of fun recording this part of the video, so we will certainly plan to do one again in the future.
Without further ado, let's get started.
MARC
All right, so we may actually circle back to events a little bit, but now we actually have some player questions directed towards us. So let's move into that.
JOHN
Yeah, these are fun. Fun. Yeah. Yeah. These are from the discord.
JAMES
And we actually have players.
MARC
Yeah. These are from our discord and also from our community across the Internet as well. So submitted via various channels. So first question actually is which events, innovations or facts from the Victorian era? You find most interesting. Well, I'll go first. I think it's fantastic that the saxophone was created during this time period. I play saxophone and you know.
JOHN
Are less enthused, but yeah.
MARC
Yeah, yeah. My neighbors aren't so happy about that invention, but I am. So yeah, yeah.
JAMES
Telephone. Yeah. Something I learned during the research for our events was that. My home state of Missouri actually remained in the Union during the civil. Thanks to a regiment of that was composed of revolutionaries from the German 48/49 revolutions. That they were able to seize the arsenal before secessionist forces could, and that kept Missouri in the Union.
JOHN
Ain't a really cool thing. I found out about, which I didn't know before, and I tell anyone who will be willing to listen. Is about Victorian plastics, which I found out about when I was doing research for technology. So just just the number of kind of organic plastics that the Victorians invented is and how early they invented them. It's quite surprising. Obviously you got things like that to purchase, but you've also got plastics from cellulose and plastics from milk protein long before PVC and and we actually represent a little bit of that in our game as well. In the tech some of. Are in the. Tree. So yeah, I found that kind of fascinating, you know.
KENNETH
Ah, for me, definitely. Just how dangerous a Victorian household is the amount of things that can kill you is incredible.
JOHN
Yeah, yeah.
MARC
Anything in particular?
KENNETH
The way they use electricity for 1:00 and also. Uh. Even Wallpapers can be poisons.
JOHN
Yeah, true.
MARC
Like lead based or.
KENNETH
Yeah. Arsenic, arsenic.
MARC
Even. And I think you were just telling me the other day, speaking to the electricity aspect they had.
Speaker
True.
MARC
Place table clothes with a wire mesh in there and you could just stick a lamp in there and it would turn on.
KENNETH
As. Cloth.
JOHN
This idea did not catch on so much.
MARC
Although maybe not so different, but maybe it's less dangerous today than just wireless charging. They were thinking ahead of their. A little bit, yeah. Steam locomotives. Also fantastic. Advances in medicine.
JOHN
Steam engines are cool.
MARC
Yeah, they are. They are all right so. Why did we decide to use a globe?
KENNETH
Kind of the the primary reason is actually we want to sort of accurately reflect sizes. It's ultimately kind of what it comes down to. It's important when we're talking about if you're invading a country like Russia, for example, if you if you're using a normal projection, it definitely looks way bigger than it is, right? It gives you a very distorted impression of how big or small things are. One one thing that, of course, in school and kind of just looking around on maps, you always know that Europe in comparison to how they appear on map is smaller. But it's actually it wasn't until that we kind of putting them on hexes.
MARC
Yeah.
KENNETH
That we start to realise the differences is much bigger than even we imagined.
JOHN
It caused problems. Yeah, yeah.
MARC
Yeah. I mean for example, comparing if you just simply look at Europe versus North America or the United States, the density in which we have to play cities or. Other things is so in Europe, everything's on top of everything else in the United States, everything can be nice and spread out. So. Yeah, well, this question has been asked many times, but let's reiterate, will multiplayer be added to the game?
KENNETH
Yes, but this will be something we we try to implement after. Release of the game, mostly because I think for us we want to make sure that we have a flush out game mechanics before we consider sort of adding multiplayers to it. This, however, also means that even now, when we are creating the code as well as just design considerations, we do have multipleres in mind.
MARC
OK. Great. One player asks. Can I still have the alpha test before Christmas? How long will it take for the alpha to be released?
JOHN
No comment.
KENNETH
No comment. We're now doing this.
MARC
It will be ready when it's ready. In essence right now. With the pre alpha out, we are based on player feedback, so depending on how that goes we are under producing to the wider alpha community.
JOHN
Yeah, yeah.
KENNETH
It's always going to be. When it's ready, we do not want to release something that's not enjoyable in any way. We want to make sure that. Kind of feedback is important. So we want to get it out as early as possible, but if it's not fun, no one's gonna give us feedback, so it's going to be it's ready when it's ready or soon TM.
MARC
Great. So how many ways this is another question. How many ways are there to interact with leaders in the game? Can we poach talent from other countries?
JOHN
Oh, you know. I'm not entirely sure whether we've, whether we've fully done that yet.
JAMES
Well, that was something I had suggested in our recent event discussion is that we need a way to transfer leaders from 1 country to another.
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
JOHN
We definitely have. It is something that the event system is designed to be able to do, but in terms of something that you can do just on your own without outside of the scope of any historical events, no. It was an idea we had a while back, but unfortunately the number of considerations that required for it meant that it. Very practical. Maybe one day we'll revisit it, but it's certainly not on the cards for now.
Speaker
Hmm.
MARC
Yeah. Alright, well another. Speaking of cards, another member of our community asks what are your favorite board or card games?
JAMES
Well, personally I like a lot of leader games. So for example, I've played a lot of oath. I recently got arcs, very excited to get more into that. But yeah, the kind of asymmetric kind of board game. It's my kind. Deal, right?
JOHN
Yeah, D&D is general TT RPG. I'm also a big fan of the Firefly board game. If anyone's ever played that, it's a cracking game.
MARC
I we need to play that together. I I haven't played it myself yet, but huge firefight, Firefly fan so.
JOHN
Yeah. Yeah, it's a very good game.
KENNETH
The only one that I really play frequently is actually Cards Against Humanity.
MARC
Yeah. Have we played it together? I think so.
KENNETH
Yeah, it's something.
MARC
We must have many years ago.
KENNETH
Yeah, I mean, grad school. We definitely did.
MARC
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. So yeah, that would actually be one of my favorite games as well. Let's see. Growing up, I really enjoyed the game. Chutes and ladders. That was fun. I haven't played that in many, many years, but I remember it fondly, said Lords of Catan is also fun.
KENNETH
Australia.
Speaker
Classic.
MARC
Yeah. And of course also exploding kittens.
Speaker
Yeah. So bad.
MARC
Yeah, let's see. All right. Next question is. Umm. Will there be a way to back the game and get access to the alpha now that the Kickstarter has finished?
KENNETH
So our intention has always been we will. Allow others or people who have not backed us on Kickstarter to join Alpha. That we will do. We just will likely do that at the same time when alpha is fully released.
MARC
OK, great.
JOHN
Working on it, yeah.
MARC
Yeah, exactly. What has been the biggest challenge you've? So far. And what feature mechanic are you the most excited to show off in the pre alpha?
JOHN
Answer that. The biggest challenge we're still facing it. We're coming up with ideas for how to fix it. It's the. The economy is very complex. And obviously it's very important. Needs to. It needs to work in a way that people expect. We are making progress, but it is tricky and also you know it is something that can be computationally heavy. There's a lot of processing required for it. Too much? It breaks the. I mean some of those of you who kept track with our dev Diaries, I mean, you know, the original plan was to have trade happen in real space. And that broke the. It was 22 prices intensive, so we've been working on other things since then, but obviously you know with a number of goods, the number of countries, that's a major challenge. And to be able to reflect kind of things like the supply and demand and prices rising and falling and freight costs and all that sort of thing, there's, there's a lot of things going on and and also things like tariffs, embargoes need to have a have an effect. Need to have an effect. Shortages caused by famine and such need to have an effect both on the availability of goods and the price of goods, and so all of these kind of considerations need to be taken into account in order to have a simulation of a closed economic system likewise. Money shouldn't be disappearing. It should always be going somewhere. There shouldn't be any kind of money holes in the game, and when we find those we need to plug them. So yeah, that's another big concern. But yeah, that's big challenge.
MARC
Right. So next question, anything else?
JAMES
Oh, I mean, it wasn't kind of like for everyone.
Speaker
Yeah.
JAMES
Yeah, it's the most cited for.
MARC
So go for it. What's yours?
JOHN
And if. Got if you've got a most challenging or most exciting.
JAMES
Yeah, something I'm excited for is that the is just establishing logistics networks. Always kind of been obsessed with that. I'm excited to be able to specialize in a certain good and become the dominant producer. So that everyone has to like come to me if they want it. They can't compete, that kind of thing. Is something I'm really looking forward to.
KENNETH
For me, the most exciting part is definitely warfare. I think it's something where we depart from other similar games. It's it's decisively more technical. You as you can see from our previous dev Diaries, kind of having a province like California for example, you have various terrains, you have different paths that you can take. I think if if we do it well, it can be meaningfully different from what's. There today.
JAMES
Yes, I definitely agree with that. The fact that. Essentially, our provinces have multiple terrain. That's something you don't really see in a. Of branching games right now. So it adds a lot of tactics to combat because.
JOHN
Obviously, a lot of the. Focus is, of course, on cities in terms of capturing cities and all that sort of thing. But there are also buildings that exist that are rural production buildings. Destroying those can have quite a big effect on on countries as well, so sometimes you might need to choose where you're going to position your soldiers in terms of what you're going to try and defend what you're going to try. Attack within a province. Even so. There's quite a lot of tactical depth available.
KENNETH
There just by having the terrains it also means. That in certain provinces, there are choke points.
JOHN
Yeah.
KENNETH
That makes defenses either harder or easier.
JAMES
Yeah, you can have choke points within a province, not just as a province.
JOHN
Yeah, exactly. So probably the thing I'm most excited for is the something we're working on at the moment, which again relates to the economy. Which is the ability to use the national stockpile as a way of manipulating the global market of trying to stockpile goods and then release them both to create artificial shortages and artificial surplus. The other thing is that we currently are still. On. But it is sort of partly done. Is A is a banking system as well. So your countries will have their National Bank and can loan to other countries and make money off the interest. Both these. Kind of quite exciting in terms of just it gives you a different way to play. It allows you to play as an economic power without necessarily needing to rely. If you don't want to play that way.
KENNETH
Nothing will do this, but I think 1 interesting thing that we can think about is if if we can allow some players to just play as the bank.
JOHN
That'd be cool.
JAMES
That would be cool.
JOHN
Yeah, I still want to make a game that's basically that.
Speaker
Much.
JOHN
And there is one that exists, but it's because.
JAMES
Of the stockpile by creating artificial demand is another way to subsidize your factories and things like that.
JOHN
Yeah, sure it. Yeah, I mean essentially you can and countries did this historically countries? I think it was coffee at one point. They there was a surplus of coffee, so they bought it all up just so that they could keep the price high. I mean, I believe that something that the British Government did in the not too recent past as well with. The whole thing of butter, butter, stock piled or something, but yeah. It's it's a. It's a valid economic tactic and it's something that governments use to to enable their businesses to survive in certain economic conditions.
Speaker
Mm.
JOHN
So yeah, it's and you know again the the idea is to enable our game to simulate that sort of thing.
MARC
Right, something as well that I'm a bit excited to show off in the alpha and Pre Alpha. We worked on a while ago was this. Oundtrack we've of course been teasing it a little bit, but yeah, now it's officially in the game thanks to our great composer that we worked with John Skoog so.
JOHN
Just a thing. Obviously these are the things we want and are working on, but there's an extent to which we might find their intractable problems and we need to scale back some of these plans. They're what we're hoping to do, basically, and they're what we've started doing and made progress on, but we can't ever guarantee any of them yet as, as we say in all of our dev Diaries. Working. You can splice that in whenever you want. It's just I feel it. Be worth saying.
MARC
Yeah, although being the nice work in progress thing down.
JAMES
Yeah. Anyway so, but yeah.
MARC
Bottom of the depth diary. So yeah, just a couple more questions. That we have. So do capitalists take into account things like the price and cost of goods? Potential profit, availability of workers and other factors that would actually be important for the operating of a business.
JOHN
The plan is yes.
Speaker
Yes.
MARC
OK.
JOHN
Yeah, ultimately. We're currently working on this as well, but but so far we have managed to get them to take some of these things into account already. But yeah, they're also the plan is for them to take into account things like whether other capitalists have also built a bunch of businesses of the same type recently so that they weren't all spam the same thing. And when I say the plan is, I mean it's what we're currently. It's it's, you know, ultimately actually that sort of thing is not generally not too hard to. But yeah. No hard promises, but it's certainly the plan, yeah.
MARC
OK. So we're down to the final two questions. Kind of fun ones. Would you be open to doing community challenges when the game is released and an example would be giving the community a week to find out the fastest way to form Germany? Maybe as we mentioned before, finding the 12. Pentagons.
JOHN
I mean, yeah, it sounds. I'll be down for doing something like that.
MARC
Yeah, it seems pretty fun, yeah.
JAMES
I've always been a fan of Haiti, given it its very difficult starting position, trying to create something that. Is try and get out from under Francis debt, that kind of thing is a nice little challenge.
MARC
Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, sounds. Or starting is like a small state any anywhere in the world. Forming a country, unifying a country or.
Speaker
Yeah.
JAMES
Finding your economic niche.
Speaker
Fine. All right.
JOHN
I mean the posters idea of you know. Faster to. Germany is pretty good too.
MARC
Yeah, yeah.
JAMES
Fastest to do the Meiji Restoration. Japan, yeah.
MARC
FS is to unify Italy or anything like.
JAMES
Fastest world conquest.
Speaker
That.
JAMES
One do the one religion challenge convert to everyone. Sounds good.
MARC
Yeah, all. And so down to the last question, which sounds like a great idea. Will you guys do monthly mod spotlights?
KENNETH
Yep, absolutely.
JAMES
Yeah, that's the goal. If we build it, they will come.
MARC
The game of dreams.
JAMES
Yeah.
JOHN
You Americans.
KENNETH
I mean, I mean one way that I think we definitely want to do this is also something we've been talking about for quite a while ourselves as well, which is we we would like to host competitions for wonders to encourage people to find new ways of building things. Using the tool that we. Have given our sort of heavy emphasis on the editor. That's kind of the thing we want to encourage people to do.
Speaker
Hmm.
MARC
Yeah, yeah.
JAMES
So anything we can do to bring more people to Montgomery, we'll be considering.
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
JAMES
Surely.
JOHN
I I'm always interested to know what people are playing, what they enjoy. Especially as well, if there are features that they particularly love from certain games. Just and also as I remember we posted a while back, certain polls on what sort of game would you wanna see next after you know any any if you imagined any time any setting what would be the thing you would find most exciting. Always keen to hear what. Of things people like, but yeah.
MARC
All of our questions for the day, as always, if you have not already subscribed to our YouTube channel, please do so and wish list us on Steam. So that's all for now. Have a gilded day. Yeah, yeah.
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Also:
Be sure to listen closely to the backing tracks in all our videos—they are the pieces you will come to hear in the game, composed by John Skoog. Also, the solo clarinet on this track was performed by yours truly, Marc.
Listen to some of John Skoog's other work on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3PGd3lmURa72oFasqK3N7N?si=nDl4DUTRQGKKLaDtGcHBJw
John Skoog Music: https://www.johnskoogmusic.com/