RoadWarden - RPG/Visual Novel/text adventure hybrid

[cyborgboy95]

#screenshotsaturday A statement and an update. I'm still around - just offline. And I won't give up on #Roadwarden.

 

[Readher]

#screenshotsaturday A statement and an update. I'm still around - just offline. And I won't give up on #Roadwarden.

Spoiler

trying to endure the fascist rule of the Polish government

Do indie developers really?

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1155970/view/3115934230468745864

Roadwarden Devlog - Growing and Evolving


Greetings, travelers!
The game’s development goes smoothly, especially content-wise.
Since the last devlog I added 5 large settlements, more than doubling the previous amount, and it’s a delight to see how the areas and quests on my task lists get marked as “finished”.

Spoiler

The break from social media has been a relief. Spending less time on maintaining an online presence took a huge weight off my shoulders, allowing me to focus on what’s going to matter the most to the players. I hope you can forgive me for keeping a few surprises until the game’s release, and for now here are some highlights! : )

Interface updates
The shops are now denser, using fewer buttons and having an option to display more items at once:





The sleeping / resting spots no longer require any memorizing or guessing on the player’s side, instead explaining directly how they will affect the character stats:





What also affected the healing ritual for mages:





Also, the game no longer marks the “distanced” Attitude as the default option during conversations. The player has more freedom in looking at the options they find any interest in, without being pushed to seeing one of them as “the regular one”.





Due to popular demand, the game now highlights the Trade / Rest (Seek shelter) / Travel buttons to make it clear the player isn’t “stuck” in a conversation or interaction.



And while there’s much more, let’s end with this tiny adjustment:





The character sheet
As the game gets more complex, it requires better tools to explain its rules, especially to the players who take longer breaks between play sessions. The character sheet allows the player to learn the rules in greater detail while also keeping track of various actions.




The map key
Thanks to the new icons, it’s easier to keep track of various services and opportunities. Unlocking new options and areas adds more icons to the key, so getting used to them takes little effort.



The upgraded inventory
Speaking of icons - how about a glimpse of the current item set from the game?



I recently redrew about 1/3 of them. To those who’ve been following the game since its oldest demo I offer this humble reminder how things used to look like a few years back:



To some encounters, mostly the combat scenes that are not a result of an ambush, I added an option to use the healing potions mid-action. The game keeps track of the possessed potions and reminds the player about them if it sees the PC is currently hurt.




The glossary
I added a classic lore-explaining glossary to the journal. This way, the player can quickly learn about the setting if they feel lost in their journey. After all, it can be difficult to introduce all this information organically in an RPG with this amount of freedom.





As the game grows, I find more ways to make its rules transparent and the events easier to follow. I still have to redesign the quest journal and I hope to simplify some of the rules after I thoroughly test the game in its entirety, but I believe that Roadwarden successfully adapts to its new environment. : )

Thank you for taking a look at this devlog, for your support and kindness! I hope you’ll agree the changes seem promising, and that they explain why the work takes me so long!




See you in the wild, Roadwardens, if you dare!

Until the release of Roadwarden, stay healthy, and stay tuned!


-Aureus (Moral Anxiety Sudio) & Assemble Entertainment-

 

[cyborgboy95]

A few late-game screenshots + the difficulty selection! If everything goes well, #Roadwarden should be released on Steam this September! Link below!

 

[cyborgboy95]

So many paths to take in #Roadwarden... Big announcement next week. : )

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1155970/view/3386163525220556012

Roadwarden gets Release date! - New Trailer and new Demo on Steam available now!
Roadwarden, our illustrated text-based RPG by indie dev Moral Anxiety Studio is hitting the old dusty trail on September 8, 2022, coming to Steam with support on Windows PC, Mac, and Linux.

Today, Roadwarden’s release date announcement is accompanied by an all-new trailer and an official demo now available on Steam.

Roadwarden merges elements of high fantasy and medieval adventure and is punctuated by a distinct isometric pixel art style. Combining mechanics borrowed from RPGs, visual novels, and interactive fiction, Roadwarden tells the tale of an explorer hired by a powerful merchant guild, tasked with journeying to a mysterious peninsula to spread the guild’s influence. With over 40 hours of gameplay, dialogue choices that branch into hundreds of thousands of text lines, and progressively upgradable character abilities, Roadwarden is a truly epic and unique adventure experience where no two playthroughs are alike.

Roadwarden’s features

• Explore and change the world!Discover the secrets and face the vast challenges of a hostile fantasy world – inevitably unveiling its uniquely fierce lore.
• Grow with the challenge! Create your own background, abilities, beliefs, and personality to shape your very own future as a roadwarden.
• Classical attitude! Prepare yourself for an adventurous journey, either as a warrior, mage, or scholar and define your character‘s attitudes, like friendly, playful or intimidating, during interactions with NPCs.
• Get lost in conversation! Immerse yourself in profound dialogues and sidequests with dozens of NPCs to gain their trust and support.
• Mysteries unfold! Use your savvy and be witty when investigating and drawing your conclusions to understand the true nature of this world.
• Overcome your weaknesses! The world is full of dangers and nobody can be trusted. Be the roadwarden you want to be and find your path to success against all odds!

Developed by Moral Anxiety Studio, a solo development operation from Poland, and published by Assemble Entertainment, Roadwarden will launch on Steam September 8, 2022.

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1155970/view/3360268461449471660

New Roadwarden Devlog - Road to Release on September 8th! 
Greetings, travelers!
Now, here’s quite a jump forward — Roadwarden will be out on Steam on September 8th, 2022!

It’s an illustrated text-based RPG in which you explore and change a hostile, grim realm. Roadwarden has been in development for almost 4 years now, and we’re on the final stretch!

The last few months were all about tying up the loose ends and hunting for bugs — but there are still a few new features to talk about!

Difficulty Selection Screen
The time limit is the most restrictive system in Roadwarden. Given enough time, the player can heal their wounds, earn coins to buy useful equipment, or gain trust of the locals. However, some of the quests are time-sensitive and players who repeatedly fail at preparing themselves for exploration and combat may reach the game’s epilogue without completing some of the major storylines.

While it’s possible to complete all of the major quests in less than 25 in-game days, most newcomers will struggle to efficiently optimize the Roadwarden’s systems. Adding an “easy mode” for players who are not used to RPGs (or video games in general) and the “hard mode” for returning players is meant to open the game up to a variety of expectations and playstyles.


Updated Quick Menu

After many months of being untouched, the buttons in the top-right corner are not only reshuffled…

…but I also replaced the Trade button with a quick access to the Character Sheet.

When tested, it turned out that it’s a bit too easy to omit the Trade option while talking with various NPCs. From now on, the trading is available through the dialogue options, always staying in the player’s field of view:

The Ancient Bug
This annoying line of code has crashed the game more times than I can count.

Here you can see how it should look like:

The reason why it destroyed me is that the game didn’t break when this bit of text was loaded. Instead, it could lurkin the shadows for minutes, until it appeared in a completely different area or conversation. I spent many hours tracking down the source, especially after it crashed the game of one of the demo players.
“Is it a memory leak? Is the game simply falling apart after some time? Am I going crazy?”
But now, the bug is no more! I’m FREE!
And all sorts of tiny, yet important details

And what is this just below the quick menu? Is this the new, fancy clock?
Why, yes it is!

It’s less distracting and offers more information at once whenever pointed at, with fewer space restrictions.
The item list in the inventory is now more flexible. In the early stages of the game, it remains small, but…

…once the player gathers enough items, it resizes, usually filling the entire screen without forcing the player to scroll down to see everything at once.
Also, while the owned coins are still meant to be displayed together with the other “Merchandise”, the game now recognizes when there are no other items from this category. In such cases, the coins are moved to the Misc section, instead of occupying the entire row by themselves.

While some quests may still need updates in the journal, they now more often use gray font to hide outdated information, and horizontal lines to divide quests into sections, for example — separating the old part of a quest from the new one, which gets pushed to the top of the entry.

And last but not least — autosaves occur more frequently, after roughly 20 dialogue choices. It’s still not recommended to play without manual/quick saving, but the game is now more resistant to unfortunate crashes and bugs that would punish players who forgot to save in a long time.



Thank you for taking a look at this devlog, and for your support and feedback over the years!

You can also find me on socials, and Roadwarden has Steam and GOG pages where you can add it to your wishlist — I hope it will be available on September 8th!

Have a great day!

 

[Infinitron]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1155970/view/3338877706787536298

Roadwarden gets more polishing - Release rescheduled for September 12!
To offer the best-possible game-experience to the players, we push the release few more days for more polishing!

Roadwarden!

Being a Roadwarden is a dangerous path, and as you might already know from the demo, the journey is never easy.


Like the life of a Roadwarden, game development can be challenging, too!
As we want to provide you with the best-possible game experience, we would like to spend a few more days working and polishing the game and thus pushing the release of Roadwarden to September 12!


Thank you for the patience! - Stay sharp, Roadwarden!

-Your teams at Moral Anxiety Studio & Assemble Entertainment-

In the meantime, please feel free to play the free demo here on Steam and wishlist Roadwarden, to get notified as soon as it will be released!

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/roadwarden-review

Roadwarden review: a beautifully written visit to a mystery-filled peninsula​

With a very good horse

I keep thinking about Roadwarden like a tourist city that I visited for not quite long enough. Sure, I saw the main sights and had a great time soaking in the ambiance, but I know that I missed so many hidden gems. I want to go back and explore, maybe this time with a local guide who knows its secrets.

At its most basic, Roadwarden is a text-based RPG. You play as the titular roadwarden, who sets out from the city to investigate an unmapped peninsula with little more than their horse for company. Your goal as set by the people who sent you is to investigate the region and report your findings in preparation for the expansion of trade guilds in the area. But you can also set your own goal, shaping your character’s approach from the start in a way that helps with roleplaying a particular kind of adventurer throughout. And once you get to that adventuring, dozens of sidequests open up covering everything from gathering fruit to curing the plague.

The catch is that you don’t have forever. You have to leave the peninsula and return to the city by the autumn, giving you 40 in-game days on the regular difficulty. Travelling takes time, and you need to be somewhere safe at night if you don’t want to be attacked by monsters and beasts on the road. Safe is also not the same thing as clean or comfortable, which can affect your stats. Maintaining health, nourishment, appearance, and armour quality all matter for participating in quests and not dying out on the road.

These considerations and other small RPG mechanics like occasional dice rolls in dangerous situations break up the standard visual novel approach that makes up most of the game. Every area has a gorgeously illustrated pixel art sidebar accompanied by equally gorgeously written descriptions of the area, who’s there, and what they’re up to. Roadwarden’s command of sensory invocation is fantastic – when I wasn’t in awe at the creativity of the consistently detailed descriptions it’s because I was simply immersed in the fantasy feel of a rough woollen blanket and a hearty stew in a wooden bowl.


The writing’s complexities don’t just shine in the moment to moment, but in the entire world-building. The peninsula truly feels like a place with a deep history, and particularly one where humans and nature have an uneasy coexistence. The impact of everything from founding a new village to travellers abandoning a path can be felt in how the land itself is described and drawn.

The peninsula truly feels like a place with a deep history, and particularly one where humans and nature have an uneasy coexistence

As for the humans themselves, there are four villages and dozens of smaller outposts on the peninsula, all of which have opinions on the others, as well as their own internal tensions and NPCs with personal considerations. How you approach any of these is up to you, but it will have complex knock on effects. The game roughly splits itself into two halves: finding and learning about these areas, and then revisiting them all multiple times and seeing the effects of your actions. It adds to that layered effect, with history pressing down everywhere.

This is a good time to mention that Roadwarden is best played with a notebook to hand. There is a quest log which picks out helpful aspects of the conversations and descriptions you uncover, but it’s easy to forget things when there are so many places and people involved. Plus, keeping a journal makes it feel all the more like you’re an explorer keeping track of potential leads and features of interest to report back upon your return.


Then there are the secrets. This is where Roadwarden continues to have its hooks in me even after I finished it several days ago. There’s so much that I know I don’t know, from how I was supposed to respectfully address a druid living alone in the woods to the whereabouts of major missing characters.

On the former, one mechanic that really sparks intrigue is when the game invites free text entries. These usually indicate that you’ve found an area or person that needs a specific interaction, but it could be days – or never – until you figure out why you were being prompted at all. On the latter, and without spoiling too much, you learn early on that the previous roadwarden went missing. For a long time, it leads go nowhere – until they suddenly go somewhere very interesting indeed. But I wasn’t able to follow those threads to their conclusion in time before the autumn swept in and my roadwarden had to return to the city.

Let me be clear: This is not a frustration. And the game’s easy mode turns off the timer, if it would be for you. But the time limit (and there are other, smaller time limited quests, too) makes Roadwarden feel exactly as mysterious as it should. The peninsula is big and complicated enough that it can’t be perfectly squared away on a first try - or really, any try. But returning to the city and getting the ending rundown of what I did and didn’t achieve just piqued my curiosity for more. I definitely couldn’t say that I got a “good” ending, but equally, I’m not sure there’s such a thing. Whatever choices you make are going to create winners and losers.


I could replay the game with a better understanding of what to prioritise. But I’m more interested in seeing others play it and uncover secrets that I couldn’t. This is partly an indication of my own impatience – Roadwarden really rewards a slow, deliberate approach that I unfortunately can’t always afford to spend, particularly when considering a second playthrough. But it’s also a testament to the game’s complexity. I’m still not sure that I’d be able to figure everything out, even with two or three more attempts.

Again, that might sound frustrating. And I do, for entirely selfish reasons, really want Roadwarden to blow up. It’s a game that needs a community that can create a detailed fan wiki that I can treat like a Lonely Planet guide to everything I missed.

But at the same time, if that fan wiki were available, I would want to avoid it, at least for my first playthrough. So much of what I enjoyed about Roadwarden was its unknowability. You’re a traveller in the peninsula for a little over a month, and it reflects that. You can’t fix every problem, you can’t make everyone happy, and you can’t know everything there is to know. Instead, you take in as much of it as you can, try to improve people’s lots slightly, and leave with a journal full of questions and sense memories.

 

[Salvo]

3/4ths of leaders in this game are women lmao, it's so jarring

 

[cyborgboy95]

Released!

 

[Salvo]

Writing's also not very good, many parts read like you're in a New York Starbucks... play Vagrus instead

 

[Johnny Biggums]

Slightly purple prose but looks interesting nonetheless. Can you actually see your toon in-game?

 

[Salvo]

Medieval fantasy btw

 

[Salvo]

There are two male leaders in the game, TWO, the rest I shit you not are all women, it's just dumb

 

[lightbane]

Welp, that drops my interest in this game to 0%. I loathe the current trend bullshit of "modern"/woke fantasy worlds and such.

 

[Sratopotator]

Any word on when the Codex' name change is going through?
I heard that Antiwokedex and Globoheterodex are the leading candidates.

Imagine discussing RPG systems, instead of doing a dick count investigation, CRAZY!

 

[Salvo]

Any word on when the Codex' name change is going through?
I heard that Antiwokedex and Globoheterodex are the leading candidates.

Imagine discussing RPG systems, instead of doing a dick count investigation, CRAZY!

This game is 99.99% reading, and I don't want my leisure time to be reading about trannies or fags or bulldykes, CRAZY!

 

[Johnny Biggums]

Really a shame, it otherwise looks like a fun kings quest type game

 

[Sratopotator]

I don't want my leisure time to be reading about trannies or fags or bulldykes

If a mere mention of shit you are not comfortable with, is enough to cause this kind of butthurt, then you are a shitty excuse for a human being.

If the game is CENTERED around this kind of shit, then sure, I get it, and probably share the sentiment (no, having females in positions of power in a fantasy setting + having token lgbt characters shouldn't be enough for a sane person).
But to learn if this is the case, someone would need to give objective feedback, and not some moronic trigger warnings for people obsessed with sexuality.

Where are all those thick-skinned RPGonauts that used to visit this site

 

[just]

in shoutbox

 

[Johnny Biggums]

I don't want my leisure time to be reading about trannies or fags or bulldykes

If a mere mention of shit you are not comfortable with, is enough to cause this kind of butthurt, then you are a shitty excuse for a human being.

If the game is CENTERED around this kind of shit, then sure, I get it, and probably share the sentiment (no, having females in positions of power in a fantasy setting + having token lgbt characters shouldn't be enough for a sane person).
But to learn if this is the case, someone would need to give objective feedback, and not some moronic trigger warnings for people obsessed with sexuality.

Where are all those thick-skinned RPGonauts that used to visit this site

Do you have some objective feedback for us then or are you just posting while your extra large dragon dildo recharges?

 

[Sratopotator]

Do you have some objective feedback for us then or are you just posting while your extra large dragon dildo recharges?

Oh, I do! But my feedback is mainly about your mom's puss, so I'm not sure if you want to hear it.

I'll say one thing, cause it's hell of a coincidence:
Her puss is so huge, that she started calling me a "roadwarden" few weeks back, cause of my regular maintenance of her nether regions (continents?).

 

[Comte_II]

#screenshotsaturday A statement and an update. I'm still around - just offline. And I won't give up on #Roadwarden.

What a fag

 

[Johnny Biggums]

Do you have some objective feedback for us then or are you just posting while your extra large dragon dildo recharges?

Oh, I do! But my feedback is mainly about your mom's puss, so I'm not sure if you want to hear it.

I'll say one thing, cause it's hell of a coincidence:
Her puss is so huge, that she started calling me a "roadwarden" few weeks back, cause of my regular maintenance of her nether regions (continents?).

She calls you roadwarden cause you fuck (and post) like a tedious pixel art chump. Quit whispering about intersectional storyfaggotry while you take micropumps with your tiny dick and maybe she'll name you after a game that's actually good.

On steam a dev linked to this statement about not wanting money from so-called bigots. Your position of simping for woke buglords continues to shape up well.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattga...to-bigots-dont-buy-our-games/?sh=4d5112c96266