[Dev Diary #35] Behind the Curtain: Our Design Process and the Event Editor

Salutations, Industrialists!

I’m Marc, a Producer on Gilded Destiny. Today’s Dev Diary is a little different. Rather than pulling back the curtain on a new game system, we’re pulling back the curtain on how we make the game, specifically, the tools and workflows our team uses to build the event content you’ll eventually be playing.

We’ll be covering our Design Docs process, and then diving deep into our Event Editor, which has seen some significant additions since we last showed it off. One thing that matters a great deal to us is that Gilded Destiny is a game modders can easily understand and enjoy. A lot of what we’re showing today reflects that commitment, showing functionality that veterans of the genre will recognise, wrapped in a visual editor that we hope makes it more approachable than ever.

We also have a video version of this Dev Diary, which walks through the Event Editor in action, and you can watch this below:

If you haven’t already, please wishlist Gilded Destiny on Steam and subscribe on YouTube. You can additionally join our Discord or Reddit community to stay up to date.

First, thank you for your patience, during the recent pause in regular monthly Dev Diaries. We haven't just been hanging fire. Rather, we have been working hard behind the scenes on completing a major refactoring project on Gilded Destiny's codebase to deal with technical debt and optimize performance for future builds. Many new features and systems have recently been added into the game and are undergoing final refinement now. We look forward to sharing more regular Dev Diaries again going forward. We have some big ones planned for the coming months!

Without further ado, let’s dive in

Design Docs

Before a single line of script is written, every major piece of content in Gilded Destiny goes through a structured design process. It’s a four-stage pipeline, and each stage serves a distinct purpose:

The first stage is High-Level Design. This is where the team rallies around an idea and agrees on its scope. For country-based events, this is where we decide which historical events we’re covering and how broadly we’re interpreting them. For system events —those that serve as the content counterpart to a game system or feature, such as Authority or Elections—High-Level Design is where we align on the gameplay loop and its goals, the key player fantasies the content should serve, and the overall scope of what this particular set of events will cover.

From there we move into Outlines: a quick lay of the land for all the event content we have. Here we map out the general flow of events and their effects, getting a bird’s-eye view of how everything connects before we commit to specifics.

Then comes Detailed Design, where we iron out the balance, pin down precise numbers, and write the narrative text. This is where the content goes from a skeleton to something that feels like a real piece of the game.

Finally, there’s Implementation —where it all gets built. By the time we reach this stage, decisions have been made and the work is well-defined. The ideal is that any ambiguity has been resolved during Detailed Design, which keeps testing as clean as possible. It’s not a glamorous process, but it keeps the team aligned and ensures that by the time something reaches the player, it’s been thought out properly.

Summary

• Every major piece of content moves through four stages: High-Level