Guildmaster Story

Factsheet

Developer:

WZO Games Inc.
Based in Toronto,
Ontario

Founding Date:

January 3, 2016

Description

In Guildmaster Story, players take on the role of Guildmaster Ganyo, an up-and-coming entrepreneur with a timeless dream: To let a group of young, energetic adventurers build him an empire that he doesn't have to pay for.

Through a combination of classic puzzle match gameplay, engaging characters and an original story, Guildmaster Story will delight everyone who ever worked an unpaid internship, got steamrolled by the sharing economy, or suspects that the people responsible for it are precisely who they seem to be.

History

Having achieved widespread critical success for outstanding writing with Actual Sunlight (2013) and Little Red Lie (2016), narrative-focused development studio WZO Games Inc. decided to embark on a more lighthearted and commercially-accessible exploration of the themes of economic despair that have largely informed its previous works.

From this, the idea of Guildmaster Story was born: A story-driven experience that utilized the classic RPG concept of 'Experience Points' as a metaphor for the unpaid labour that is increasingly prevalent in our society, manifesting itself not only in the form of directly unpaid internships, but also creative professionals facing requests to create work for exposure, the realities faced by a new wave of self-employed digital performers, and more.

With the underlying concept of the story in place, what remained was to fuse it with a gameplay style that was more entertaining and engaging than the kinetic-novel-style utilized in earlier WZOGI titles. The choice to use a puzzle-match game was driven not only by the tremendous popularity of the genre, but also because of the quick, staccato pacing it could offer that would allow the story to remain in focus.

Development of Guildmaster Story began in early 2018, with none of the contributors working on the project on a full-time basis. A staggering number of licensed third-party assets have been used and forced to sing in perfect harmony.