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Pathway - turn-based strategy adventure from the developers of Halfway

lightbane

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WTF is going on there? Has oasis been possessed?
 

Infinitron

I post news
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https://steamcommunity.com/games/546430/announcements/detail/1710700165000762937

Pathway Devlog #5 - Introducing Brunhilda & More
11 DECEMBER - LETH

Say "Hello" to...
bcd5f117f2c8b381a4a4949f7b9bbeb2be054e2c.gif

Brunhilda, Queen of the Valkyries (aka Helga Bjarnsdottir)
Vitals: 28 year old female
Nationality: Icelandic

Helga was part of a traveling circus where she used to perform as a female wrestler and strongwoman. Formerly known as 'The Female Volcano' (a reference to her nordic origin), she once rescued Jackson and his crew during one of their adventures, and later decided that "somebody that cute" could use her protection. Since that day, she has stayed at his side to protect him from harm.

Tall and buxom, Helga has a very impressive physical presence, and tends to run berserk in the heat of battle. She has a secret crush on Jackson and is not too subtle with it. Subtlety is not her strength - strength is her strength.

"That's just my stage name. It's Helga for you, sweetheart."

Boots On The Ground
Over the past few months, we've had an opportunity to exhibit Pathway at three different events; specifically, we demonstrated Pathway at Twitch Vancouver (on August 19th), EGX Rezzed (on September 21st) and most recently at Day of the Devs (hosted by Double Fine on November 11th).

33dd1689a013b7f62756ec084c160fbe826463be.png


Above are images of our booths at EGX Rezzed and Day of the Devs. Also, we have uploaded an excerpt from an interview with Stefan Bachmann - one of the coders on Pathway and a co-founder of Robotality - that was hosted during our exhibit at Twitch Vancouver[twitchvancouver.ca]

These events have been great for both observing the 'new player experience' in Pathway (or for any unreleased title) and for connecting with new fans in general. Also, conventions tend to be filled with other industry professionals and development studios interested in exchanging those oh-so-valuable 'industry trade secrets', and also with some large publishers/distributors who are scouting new games for their platforms.

On RNG...
In Pathway and other turn-based games, Random Number Generation (RNG) is used to determine if you will hit your target when you fire on them, but this has led to some player frustrations in other games. At the end of the above interview video clip, Stefan took an opportunity to discuss how we have addressed those RNG frustrations in Pathway:

"[RNG is] something that a lot of people that play XCOM get frustrated with... where you can stand next to a unit and you have a 99% hit chance, you still miss them, right? Super frustrating!

So we try to address this in a way that I think is quite elegant. Which is, basically, if you are exposed and open on the field, you get a guaranteed shot... You got a straight shot? 100% hitchance - no matter what.

But if you're behind cover, that's where RNG comes in. So, as soon as you go behind cover, you got maybe a 50% hit chance or a 75% hit chance. And I feel like that's a really neat twist on that system... it makes 'flanking' an interesting strategy. The game becomes a lot about 'how do you position your units to make sure you can optimize on that guaranteed hit'..."


That's just a snippet of information from this interview so if you want to know more - and also want to see some of the game (still a work-in-progress though!) - then take a look at the 14 minute video above.

Give us a follow!
That's all for this devlog! Follow us on twitter, Facebook[facebook.com], or here on Steam to stay up-to-date on any news or upcoming events for Pathway!
 

Zombra

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lukaszek play this game
On RNG...
In Pathway and other turn-based games, Random Number Generation (RNG) is used to determine if you will hit your target when you fire on them, but this has led to some player frustrations in other games. At the end of the above interview video clip, Stefan took an opportunity to discuss how we have addressed those RNG frustrations in Pathway:

"[RNG is] something that a lot of people that play XCOM get frustrated with... where you can stand next to a unit and you have a 99% hit chance, you still miss them, right? Super frustrating!

So we try to address this in a way that I think is quite elegant. Which is, basically, if you are exposed and open on the field, you get a guaranteed shot... You got a straight shot? 100% hitchance - no matter what.

But if you're behind cover, that's where RNG comes in. So, as soon as you go behind cover, you got maybe a 50% hit chance or a 75% hit chance. And I feel like that's a really neat twist on that system... it makes 'flanking' an interesting strategy. The game becomes a lot about 'how do you position your units to make sure you can optimize on that guaranteed hit'..."


That's just a snippet of information from this interview so if you want to know more - and also want to see some of the game (still a work-in-progress though!) - then take a look at the 14 minute video above.
 

lukaszek

the determinator
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But if you're behind cover, that's where RNG comes in. So, as soon as you go behind cover, you got maybe a 50% hit chance or a 75% hit chance.
so you are saying to play barbarian?
 

Galdred

Studio Draconis
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Some people do complain about RNG, but most attempts to circumvent it have seem to have backfired so far.
Maybe it's just a vocal minority after all...
 

Jinn

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Damn, this looks a lot cooler than I thought it would. Really like the looks of those party selection, character sheet, and inventory screens.
 

Cross

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Combat looks really shallow. I guess I shouldn't be surprised since their last game, Halfway, bored me to tears.

Nice music though.
 

thesheeep

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Randomly generated levels. This art style and gameplay deserves a proper story focused approach, divided by movie title chapters, narration, big set pieces. Fuck this ftl indie shit.
Oh yeah, so we can play through the game once and never look at it again once done.
No, thanks. I prefer my games with at least some form of procedural content (even though that doesn't necessarily mean levels) so that the game remains interesting even after the first time.
More like a long-term relationship than a one-night stand, you know?

This doesn't look like a game that allows a great variety of different builds to carry an always-the-same playthrough (in contrast to something like Pathfinder, at least if you build the entire party yourself).
 

JarlFrank

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Randomly generated levels. This art style and gameplay deserves a proper story focused approach, divided by movie title chapters, narration, big set pieces. Fuck this ftl indie shit.
Oh yeah, so we can play through the game once and never look at it again once done.
No, thanks. I prefer my games with at least some form of procedural content (even though that doesn't necessarily mean levels) so that the game remains interesting even after the first time.
More like a long-term relationship than a one-night stand, you know?

This doesn't look like a game that allows a great variety of different builds to carry an always-the-same playthrough (in contrast to something like Pathfinder, at least if you build the entire party yourself).

Hand-made content with an actual design to it: cool, fun, interesting to play through, actually offers some genuine variety.

Procedurally generated content: grows stale very quickly because it's very formulaic. Generic instead of unique encounters and level architecture, no true variety because it's just variations of the same thing cobbled together by an algorithm with no creativity behind it, unlike hand-placed content made by a human.
 

thesheeep

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Hand-made content with an actual design to it: cool, fun, interesting to play through, actually offers some genuine variety.
Yes, for playing through it once. Don't get me wrong, I like well-made hand-crafted content, it's cool.
But it's new exactly once and doesn't invite another playthrough at all.
That's not saying you cannot invite another playthrough using different means (like a very varied character build system, C&C, etc.), but the more incentive to replay, the better.

Procedurally generated content: grows stale very quickly because it's very formulaic. Generic instead of unique encounters and level architecture, no true variety because it's just variations of the same thing cobbled together by an algorithm with no creativity behind it, unlike hand-placed content made by a human.
Only if your procedural generation sucks.
Which it admittedly often does as some developers either don't know how to do better or are afraid of a few seconds longer loading times (proper procgen does take some time, it's unavoidable).

A good procedural generator can reach a quality that might not quite be what a good level designer can do, but close enough, while offering something else: Innate replayability, variance and production speed.
Btw. a good procedural generation also mixes human input with the algorithms, the level designer might not place every single object, but will tell the algorithm for specific place X how to do it instead.

I'd rather have an unlimited amount of levels at ~80% quality, than one level at 100%. Not even going into detail in how it makes a lot of sense from a production perspective.
Depending on the game, of course. Something like Pathway lends itself perfectly to procedural generation, others don't at all (e.g. something like Dark Souls just wouldn't work, see Harebrained's Necrosomthing game), it depends a lot on the exact type of game.
 

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