Feature Deep Dive No. 1 : Adventurers

👋 Greetings, Guild Masters!

Today, we’ll take a look at one of the core components of the game: Adventurers: who they are, what they do, and how you can help them succeed!
[h2]1. What are Adventurers?🔮[/h2]

"Adventuring" is a job! Like carpentry or soldiering, its main goal is to provide an income for those doing it, ideally without them dying in the process.
It’s a well-compensated, regulated job. The pay matches the risk, but the right to wield weapons, throw fireballs, and venture into the unknown means someone has to keep an eye on them (that’s you!).
You provide them with quests, support them in various ways (see below), and nudge them in the right direction. If they succeed, you will too!
They are not your employees nor simple customers and even if you don’t control them directly they are at the center of your operation. That’s why your staff, facilities, and management tools will be crucial in keeping everything running smoothly.
And finally, adventuring is in demand! Even if you start with a dozen applicants, expect this number to steadily grow to reach several hundred.

🎮In-game: Indirect control of hundreds of adventurers through most other systems.

Can you guess who these adventurers are ?

[h2]2. Get to Know Them! 🔍[/h2]
No two adventurers are the same! To unleash their full potential, you will have to get to know them better than they know themselves (literally).

It’s up to you to call them by their names or by their ID, but even if you don’t need to recognize each one of them, getting a sense of who is a mage and who can wield a sword by looking at their outfit could come in handy!
Don’t worry, your staff will get their background, affiliation, and, after some tests, might even be able to determine their potential or their exact attributes & skills!
A well-kept secret is that the Adventurer ID is embedded with a tracking and appraising spell. While they have it on them, you can track where they go, what they do, how much they have, if their stamina is low, and so on!

🎮In-game: Basic data on adventurers is always available but to dig deeper and get a full picture, effort and resources will be needed!

Current version of the adventurers' needs updating dynamically in the ledger

[h2]3. Help Them Grow 📈[/h2]
A good Guildmaster knows that first impressions aren’t everything! Some of your best adventurers might start as complete nobodies while others may fail to live up to expectations.

Everyone starts with some stats! Whether it's from a past job or some training on the side, you don't really care, as long as they put these to use ASAP.
Quests, training, haggling, even having a chat at the tavern are occasions to grow along the path you choose for them.
But should adventurers focus on their current strengths or on what they could become based on their potentials?
Training could even help them learn new skills and the worst of the bunch could, in time, exceed their potentials!
Adventurers’ ranks are a big deal! Higher-ranked adventurers will have different needs but will face higher challenges. Promotion tests are required but you could also use your Guild Master authority to jumpstart a protégé!
Injuries, death, or a lack of questing opportunities might lead an adventurer to become “definitely unavailable”. There are some things that even a reviving spell can’t solve!

🎮 In-game: Adventurer attributes grow based on their potential and their assigned role. Training can influence potential and skills. Rank promotion is distinct from levels and is a whole event in itself.

The attributes on an adventurer card (this Ui is a bit outdated and is being reworked to include an emphasis on potential for each stats instead of a global value)

[h2]4. What Do Adventurers Actually Do? ⚔️[/h2]
Adventurers aren’t just waiting around for orders; they have their own routines, needs, and ambitions.

Adventurers arrive in the morning and then decide what to do: go on quests, train, stay at the Guild, or return home.
Before and after quests (or while staying at the guild), adventurers will automatically try to meet their needs (rest, healing, gear, entertainment, etc.). An injured adventurer will seek healing services, but if your infirmary is overcrowded or the prices are too steep, they will look elsewhere!
They decide what is best for them based on their adventuring attribute and how much to spend based on business traits. It’s up to you to decide whether you should keep them in the dark or help them make more informed choices.

🎮In-game: Adventurers are independent. Most will choose a path that mitigates risk while ensuring enough earnings to buy gear, heal, and set some money aside. But some will look for riskier options or spend all their money at the tavern instead of upgrading their gear. That’s where you (and your staff) come in!

A test on using animated sprites as feedback on what adventurers are doing (here training) sprites and animations from LyanSek

[h2]5. Deeper Dive: Adventurer Quest Choice🎯[/h2]

Each quest and training session has an appeal score, based on your guild’s facilities, marketing, and events.
Adventurers evaluate all available options and assign an Affinity Score by combining their preferences (e.g., hates mountains), adventuring stat (matching quest requirements), and the quest reward (while deducting travel and gear costs).
The highest-affinity adventurer picks first, but quest slots are limited, so adventurers may have to go with their secondary choices.
At some point, if they can’t pick many of their choices or if the affinity score for remaining quests is too low, they simply won’t pick any.

🎮In-game: The appeal system lets you control what is globally interesting, while the affinity system makes each adventurer decide based on their own goals and needs.

An illustration of the process. In game with up to 300 adventurers choosing from 50+ quests that would be too chaotic to display like this! Currently, adventurer sprites simply move to their chosen quest without showing their thought process, but I’m working on improving that!

[h2]6. How to Shape Adventurers Then? 📋[/h2]
Adventurers might act on their own, but you have plenty of tools to shape their journey.

The first step is to choose wisely who can become adventurers. Through the recruitment process, you can exclude certain backgrounds or traits, choose who to dismiss, and assign roles to those you admit based on their recruitment tests.
Ensuring (through clever promotions) that adventurers’ ranks match their capacities is the simplest way to make sure an adventurer takes the right quests and doesn’t buy stuff they don’t need.
Adventurers tend to follow your staff’s advice, and you can use “tags” in the ledger to nudge them in the “right” direction (after all, perhaps you do want them to buy stuff they don’t need! 😉).
Meeting their needs and investing in better facilities is a good way to make sure they grow to their full potential, but with limited funds and staff, you will have to choose what path to take.
Finally, you can turn your hard-earned prestige into Guild Master authority to send them on mandatory quests, promote them, or fire them, but beware of the potential consequences.

Current WIP of the recruitment system...

...and here is the WIP of the tag system!

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What's Next? 📆

✅ All adventurer mechanics are fully implemented.
✅ Quests, training, and decision-making work as intended.
✅ The Adventurer Ledger updates dynamically to reflect status changes.

Current focus No. 1: Improving feedback on decisions, including reports, logs, and more visual cues like thought bubbles or animated UI elements.
Current focus No. 2: Making the guild feel more immersive by refining visual sequences with more varied adventurer sprites and animations.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 💬 That’s it for this deep dive! Have questions? Drop them in the comments or join the Discord!

✨ Wishlist the game on Steam & stay tuned for an upcoming epic announcement coming this month!
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/3297040/Adventurers_Guild_Inc/