Guilds of Greybrook

Systems Designer / Project Manager

Guilds of Greybrook is a strategic worker placement game where players are placed at the helm of a work-for-hire guild and asked to navigate the choppy waters of business ownership in a tumultuous frontier setting. 

Guilds of Greybrook won recognition for its Systems Design during the 2025 Collegiate Games Challenge organized by GGP. 

As lead designer on this project, I created a majority of the systems that make up the current game. I also was in charge of managing our team's taskflow, turning feedback into new tasks and managing our marketing/convention appearances. 

Guilds of Greybrook started off as a board game before we began to digitize it. This process came with its share of design issues.

Rolling a ton of dice was plenty fun in the physical prototypes, but something felt like it was missing as we transferred to digital. A handful of dice isn't quite as fun when you can't feel them rattling around in your hand before you roll. 

So I went to the drawing board and came back to the team with a system that would both make dice more interesting and simultaneously solve an existing desire amongst playtesters for more customizable members. 

That system would become Guilds of Greybrook's customizable dice, something I can't imagine the game without today. 

The final version of Guilds of Greybrook can really be broken into four gameplay segments, a loop that would see players taking jobs for money and then reinvesting that money into their guild and employees.

It took a lot of iteration to make the game work as tightly as it does, largely organized through a comprehensive array of design spreadsheets in which we adjusted the values of our members, their dice, contract difficulties, item prices and more. 

I was able to keep game balance entirely within these spreadsheets thanks to a tool that allowed us to upload csv files into Unity to automatically update our game's over 500 scriptable objects all at once.