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Broken Roads - turn-based Australian post-apocalyptic RPG with "unique morality system" - coming April 10th

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


https://www.brokenroadsgame.com/dev-blog/vegetation-blog

CRAFTING THE FLORA OF BROKEN ROADS
floravfxbloghero1920.png


Our VFX and Technical Artist, Ryan Gee, does a lot of work to breathe life into our representations of Western Australia. In this blog, he discusses differences in vegetation from one end of the Wheatbelt to the other, how he created a tool to paint the correct biomes and unique wind patterns onto existing levels, and how he uses a "non-destructive" workflow to make collaboration between departments as easy as hitting "regenerate".

With Broken Roads being set in the Australian Outback, we knew it was important to create diverse and vibrant environments to immerse players in a truly Australian-flavored apocalypse. Australia has a huge range of flora and fauna that varies wildly by region, and many of which aren’t found anywhere else in the world. As the technical and VFX artist at Drop Bear Bytes, one of the coolest parts of my job has been helping the art and level design teams fill our apocalyptic world with trees and plants across the whole range of the outback, from forests to barren wastelands.

As a technical artist, I get to work in the wonderful area in between pure art, pure programming, and the mysterious art of level design. One of the immediate challenges we faced was how to fill large areas with dense vegetation (without having to place each bush and twig by hand), and how to vary the vegetation according to the different regions and areas of the game. As a Canadian currently living in Spain, I’ve not yet had a chance to visit Australia, so I started off on a virtual road trip, thanks to Google Maps.

wa-google-maps.png

After having visited each of the real-world locations of the scenes in the game, I had a nice overview of what each area’s vegetation looked like. Armed with this, I was able to make some categorizations of the various biomes, and typical plants, trees, and scrub. However, there was still the challenge of filling large environments with regionally correct vegetation, now that I understood what it should look like.

My solution was to create a custom tool, creatively named the Vegetation Tool™ (I’m not the best with creative naming). It allows our level designer, Luke, to paint in the density of vegetation across the scene, and then spawn vegetation according to a pre-defined biome. These biomes are made of a list of regionally correct plants, debris, grass, rocks, etc, and some information describing how they grow and are scattered. This creates a non-destructive workflow; it ensures everything is editable, reversible, and allows the art team to work on or change any individual assets without level design having to redo vegetation every time (just regenerate vegetation with the updated biome). Here’s how that works in practice:

The gray cubes show the painted vegetation density, which can be painted either by hand or according to a pattern as shown above. The tool in the video is using a fairly dense green biome, but this can be modified or swapped out for any other biome set, and just regenerated.

The generation process roughly simulates the root density of each plant, and how various plants form clumps as a result, collecting loose dirt, debris, and twigs around them. The generation algorithm can also adapt to other trees or objects that have been manually placed in a level if more artistic control is needed over their exact locations.

Creating this tool has allowed us to rapidly fill levels with the patchy, scrubby vegetation that’s common across the outback, and facilitates the workflow between level design and art production. However, placing vegetation is only part of the process: it still needed to be animated.

(Beware, there be technical dragons ahead)
WIND
Realistic wind animation proved to be a challenge, and the first version I came up with looked laughably like seaweed rippling underwater. However, we needed something with sufficiently realistic motion, customizability according to environment or game needs, and something that wasn’t too much of a headache for the art team to create models and textures for. Taking inspiration from a GDC talk that Guerilla Games presented on the subject, I came up with the current system.

First, there’s a global wind manager that controls the direction and strength of the wind in every scene. This allows each location to have different settings, and for those settings to be changed if, say, a dust devil or sand storm rolls in mid-quest. Below is an example of what the primary wind vector looks like in-scene:

The tree and vegetation models also have information baked into their vertex color channels: the red channel contains a mask, used if we’re animating cloth or something other than vegetation; the green channel contains an index value for each separate part of the tree, and the blue channel contains a value for overall flexibility. These are quick and easy to apply to each model, and the rest of the animation is done in a shader.

The shader calculates bending, based on height and flexibility, as well as detailed fine movements for leaves, small branches, and grass. The amount of bending is controlled by the global wind settings and texture, and offset by the index in the green color channel, to give individual parts of the tree their own sway and non-uniform movement.

GRASS
One of the final steps in adding flora to our environments is adding grass. This posed a similar challenge to spawning vegetation, as it required an editable system that could be easily modified, but also quick to render to allow for thick fields in some of the lusher regions of the game. To this end I created the Grass Tool™ for easily painting grass into scenes, that can also be hooked up to the Vegetation Tool™ to automatically generate grass based on the same density settings as the rest of the environment uses. Additionally, the grass can be animated using the same global wind patterns as the rest of the vegetation, allowing for ripples of wind to flow through grassy fields.

The difficult part with rendering grass is that in essence, GPUs can render lots of grass, really really fast, but the problem is that everything else about the grass (like where it is, how big it is, its rotation, etc) starts on the CPU, and getting it to the GPU is really slow. To solve this, the grass is rendered with GPU instancing, which effectively bundles up all the information about the grass into one package instead of a zillion small ones, and lets the GPU do what it does best and sort out all the information for each piece of grass.

To make it even faster, we can use a technique called CPU binning (tech artists have very fun lingo). This allows us to limit the size of the package the CPU passes to the GPU (as opposed to passing information about every bit of grass in a scene) by roughly guessing what the camera can see at any given moment. This allows us to have hundreds of thousands of grass cards in a scene with minimal performance impact.

TLDR: GPU go brrr, grass go zoom.

If you made it through all that, thanks for reading! And if you just skipped to the tldr, thanks as well, just a little bit less. Hopefully this article provided a little glimpse into some of the tech that makes Broken Roads tick, and exactly what on earth technical artists do anyway. :)

Ryan Gee, VFX & Technical Artist
Drop Bear Bytes
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.brokenroadsgame.com/dev-blog/greatest-work-experience-of-all-time-gweoat

GREATEST WORK EXPERIENCE OF ALL TIME (GWEOAT)​

willblogheader.png


In early June 2022, we were excited to welcome a local high school work experience candidate, Will C., to join Drop Bear Bytes on our distributed journey through game development. During the course of a week, Will met with the leads of different departments and got insider insight into what it’s like to work across 3 different time zones, give a report in each of our daily standups, and provide reproduction steps for some of our more pernicious bugs.

We sat down with Will on his last day and asked him the hard questions. His responses are below.

What was the most unexpected aspect of your work experience at Drop Bear Bytes?

“That despite there being team members based all over the world the fact that you guys can still keep in touch regularly and always be up to date and connected.”

What's something you learned about one of the disciplines (level design, business, animation, art, narrative design) that you'd never thought of before?

“That even if you specialise in an area that with the modern tools being easy to use you can work on other areas of game design.”

As an RTS fan, what aspects of your playstyle do you think were most beneficial to your time playing Broken Roads, and which parts did you find difficult?

“I found that the skill system in its current state is obviously not finished but there are no clear explanations for the skills but obviously this will improve with time, but all around despite not playing to many RPGs the game was easy to get a handle on.”

Has this experience reinforced your desire to become a games programmer, or has it opened your eyes to other career paths? Why?

“It has opened my eyes to other possibilities like level design, but I will most likely stick with programming but not just programming.”

How well do you feel Broken Roads captures Australian flavour/characters? Did anything stand out in particular?

“You have captured the animals for sure. They are very well detailed and I do like the wombat rider (SPOILERS!!! - Ed) and definitely the slang as well, but I don't think that would have been hard, as most of you do live in Australia!”

Did you have a favourite location / scene in the game, and which characters did you enjoy talking to the most?

“My favourite location would probably be Merredin because it captures post-apocalyptic and people have reverted to the early 1900s. One of them was Jonesy before (SPOILERS!!! - Ed), and probably Mad as well. She was a standout character to talk to, especially at Bally Bally Hall because she doesn't like you at the start, but if you respond correctly she is like, "mmm," and begins to like you.”

Do you agree that you had the greatest work experience week out of anyone in your class, and in fact most likely the greatest of all time?

“I very much agree with the fact that I had one of the greatest experiences of all time. This was a great experience for someone who wants to make games. It very much opened my eyes. This work experience will be contributing to the graphics card I am saving up for.”

Give us a piece of wisdom to round out this interview - anything you want other people to know, that you think isn't talked about often enough.

“That if you want to go into game design/programming whether it's making your own game or joining a larger studio that people are helpful and are really nice and this experience will leave me with a lasting experience.”
 
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Cassandra Lee, our Mid-Level Concept Artist, recorded this video creating the portrait for Tilly, one of the younger characters in Broken Roads. It's been sped up to 4x in this timelapse - enjoy!

Music is 'Koorda' by Drop Bear Bytes' Audio Lead and Composer, Tim Sunderland, from the Broken Roads soundtrack.
 

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https://www.brokenroadsgame.com/dev-blog/praecabj0y9dhut6tjg5l5dhuvc5uc-8prmf

PORTRAIT SPOTLIGHT - TILLY​


This week we are showing off some of the work by our Mid-Level Concept Artist, Cassandra Lee. Cassy recorded herself creating this portrait of Tilly, one of the young girls living in a hidden community somewhere in Broken Roads. The recording has been sped up into the timelapse which you can see below. Cassy then describes her process and guides us through each step when creating the portraits you see in the game. Enjoy!

MY PROCESS​

LINE ART​

Each portrait is done using rendered images of the 3D model and 3D texture as reference in order to keep each portrait looking consistent with the model in game and to create a more efficient work flow.
I begin by importing the rendered images of the model and texture into my Photoshop file and making sure the character’s face fits within the specific guides set in the PSD template I created for myself. I will start by tracing over the 3D model’s face using symmetry at first to speed things up and then later without the symmetry tool on so it doesn’t look too symmetrical and unnatural. I use a tapered brush with a pencil texture to give it that sketchy drawn feel. I might keep the line art all on one layer or draw each element on different layers depending on what works best for me on that particular portrait.
Capture+Tilly+01.JPG

Capture+Tilly+02.JPG

BLOCKING IN FLAT COLORS​

Once all the line art is done I will fill in one solid color on a layer underneath with a big flat solid brush or using the lasso and paint bucket fill tool.
From here I create solid colors on separate layers for each element; the hair, clothes, eyes and so on and then clip each layer onto the main fill layer using clipping masks.
After this I add the rendered images of the 3D model and texture on top and play around with the opacity and adjustment layers until I find what works best for me. I add these images on top of the flat colors to add some ambient occlusion and the color palette from the 3D texture. This is a bit of a back and forth process as I figure out what works best for each portrait.
Capture+Tilly+03.JPG

PAINTING​

I start painting on each separate layer with a combination of different textured brushes. I usually start with the skin and face first to establish the direction of the lighting and the overall color tone and move out from there, using smaller finer brush details on the face and larger brushier strokes on the clothes, hair and other accessories. I will also add various multiply layers on top using the lasso tool to create hard cast shadows in areas where they are needed or soft linear dodge layers on the areas catching the light such as the cheeks, nose and forehead.
Capture+Tilly+06.JPG

Capture+Tilly+08.JPG

At some point I color in the line art layers by locking the transparency of the layer and picking a darker color that corresponds nicely with the lighter color that I’m picking from.
Throughout this process I am continually checking back and forth between my 3D texture reference to make sure the portrait is consistent and I am not forgetting any small details. Towards the end of the process I spend time on small details around the eyes, making sure the eyelashes, shadows and highlights within the eyes look good and make the portrait come alive.
One significant detail to add is subsurface scattering. I add an overlay layer on top of the skin and paint in some reddish brushstrokes along the rim of the nose and the edge of shadows to help bring in the effect of the sunlight bouncing through the transparency of the skin.
For Tilly I made sure to add in some cute freckles!
Capture+Tilly+011.JPG

FINAL TOUCHES​

Now I duplicate all these painting layers and flatten them. On top of this one flat layer I paint in the last finishing touches. I add in separate strokes to indicate strands of free flowing hair and a cool toned rim light on the left side of the portrait, making sure the rim light is not painted as a solid line but helps inform the volume of the shapes I am painting. I ramp up the brightness and contrast with an adjustment layer and start adding in those last few bright specular highlights on the tip of the nose and one or two other places with a sharp edged lasso tool.
I might adjust the hue of the background color to fit better with the colors of the character. I end with a soft warm glowing gradient on a low opacity linear dodge layer on the right side of the portrait to give that feeling of warm sunlight being cast over the character.
Capture+Tilly+010.JPG

Tilly.jpg

You can see more of Cassy’s work on her Artstation portfolio at https://www.artstation.com/cassandra_lee, or follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/_Cassandra_Lee_
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.brokenroadsgame.com/dev-blog/broken-roads-will-be-at-gamescom-2022

BROKEN ROADS WILL BE AT GAMESCOM 2022!​

gamescom-2022.jpg

We’re very happy to announce that the team from Drop Bear Bytes will be at gamescom this year, showing off Broken Roads in both the business area and the entertainment area!

We will be part of the Australian contingent heading over to Cologne for our first in-person event in years and really looking forward to getting the game in the hands of press and players.

We’ll confirm exact booth locations closer to the time, but can confirm the following studio members will be there:

Luke Dorman - Level Designer
Ryan Gee - VFX & Technical Artist
Sara Laubscher - Lead Environment Artist
Cassandra Lee - Mid-Level Concept Artist
Colin McComb - Creative Lead
Jethro Naude - CFO & Game Economist
Craig Ritchie - Game Director
Bianca Roux - Lead Character Artist
Tim Sunderland - Composer & Audio Lead


Hope to see you in Cologne!
- The Drop Bear Bytes Team
 

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Team17 no longer publisher. Versus Evil takes up that mantle. Game is dealyed until 2023.
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I expect to see more games embrace this "Looks like Disco Elysium, but actually it has combat too" aesthetic.
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.brokenroadsgame.com/dev-blog/new-trailer-and-versus-evil-publisher-announcement

NEW TRAILER AND VERSUS EVIL PUBLISHER ANNOUNCEMENT!​


Broken Roads is being published by Versus Evil, launching on PC and consoles in 2023.
We are incredibly happy to announce that Drop Bear Bytes have entered into a partnership with Versus Evil, acclaimed indie publisher of such titles as Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Hand of Merlin and Eville.

We’ve been working with Versus Evil all of this year and are really stoked to partner with them. They've published some of the best RPGs of the last decade and it's great that Broken Roads is joining their lineup.
There have been a number of significant changes and improvements we’ve been tight-lipped about which we will go into more detail next week at gamescom and show off in upcoming dev blogs and videos, including:
  • Major improvements to environment and character art
  • Shift to fully 3D maps (from 2D tile-based scenes)
  • We have revamped combat, but will touch on that in the future
  • Entirely reworked skill system, moving from skill trees to integer-based skills
  • Overhaul and improvement of all animations
  • UI redesign coming in the next few months
  • Additional artists, developers and designers are now in the project
We’re also working with Knights of Unity (the team that helped develop Disco Elysium) who have been doing a fantastic job across the board over the last six months, from Unity tools through to many of the in-game improvements mentioned above.
Please enjoy the new trailer, come say hi if you are at gamescom, and we look forward to bringing you more updates soon!
- The Drop Bear Bytes Team

So it's not just my imagination, the game really has been visually Disco Elysiumized.
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Lots of words here from Craig Ritchie and our old friend CMcC: https://www.pcgamer.com/broken-roads-has-the-potential-to-become-the-next-disco-elysium/

Broken Roads has the potential to become the next Disco Elysium​

The post-apocalypse returns to Australia.

Broken Roads' creative lead, Colin McComb, has a long history with CRPGs. He previously worked on Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment and Wasteland 2. More recently he was creative lead on Planescape's spiritual successor, Torment: Tides of Numenera. McComb is now taking a chance on Drop Bear Bytes, a debut studio working on an ambitious new post-apocalyptic tale.

"Craig Ritchie called me up in 2020," says McComb. "He's the game director. He said, 'We'd like to get you on board with this game', and I was like, 'Sell me on it'. He said, 'Post-apocalyptic'. I was like, 'Done three of them'. He said, 'Philosophical'. I was like, 'OK, sounds good'. He said, 'Set in Australia'. I'm like, 'Intriguing'. And then he said, 'It gets weird'." Suitably convinced, McComb joined the team.

He's not the only veteran on board. "Leanne Taylor Giles, our narrative director, recently joined us from Ubisoft Montreal," says Ritchie, aforementioned game director and studio founder. "She worked with Colin on Torment: Tides of Numenera, so that relationship already exists. She loves Planescape: Torment—she's got a Planescape tattoo. So we're bringing together fans of the genre, and people who've been doing the genre for decades."

I ask McComb what sets Broken Road apart from the other RPGs he's worked on. "One of the big things is that the morality system in this game is not just good versus evil, not just law versus chaos, light versus dark, whatever. What we've got is what's called the Moral Compass." This system maps the actions you take along four philosophical quadrants: utilitarian, machiavellian, nihilist and humanist. "The important thing is we aren't going to judge people based on what they choose."

So a player can go full nihilist, where nothing matters and their only drive is to have a good time. Or full machiavellian, working for the sole benefit of the group that they're with. "That's fine. We'll give them complete reactivity. We're not going to punish them for it, except, you know, logically, people would react to you for being an asshole to them." Conversely, you won't be overly rewarded for being a utilitarian or humanist. While some of the people you meet in the world will be more open to a person with a history of mutually beneficial decision making or a proven desire to help those in need, others simply won't.

Your actions throughout the game will move your position on the compass, represented as a cone that can rest across multiple quadrants. Depending on your current position, certain conversation options will open up to you. And, as in all great CRPGs, your approach in dialogue will have a major effect on your playthrough.

"We want this to be a game about rationality in order to understand other people's points of view," says McComb, "and to understand you don't need to solve every problem with a bullet. I love Wasteland, I love Fallout, but the solution for almost all of them is violence. With this game, we want to make sure that you can have a pacifist playthrough that will feel rewarding, but that if you choose not to go with the pacifist route, it's going to be just as good."

I did not go the pacifist route. I got to play a short hands-on demo as a hired gun—a mercenary who starts the game working with a team of scouts tasked with keeping the local area safe. Origin stories are picked during character creation—which also asks you a series of morality questions to help you find your place on the compass—and there will be four to choose from in the full game. "You can be a member of the barter crews," says Ritchie, "like the merchants and traders that do barter runs between locations. You can be a surveyor, which is like a cartographer or explorer that finds new settlements or sells information to the barter crews—'Hey, I've found a town that you might sell water to'. Or you can be a Jackaroo, which is basically an Australian cowboy. So farmhand, good with animals, knows how to handle a gun, can tinker and repair. So we've got a lot of RPG archetypes—this person is actually a ranger; this person is actually a fighter; this person is actually a cleric."

All of the origin stories will eventually converge—all players will face the same catastrophic inciting incident that kicks off the main adventure. But for now, I'm simply a mercenary arriving at the Kokeby Waystation trading hub. There I meet Tina, the teenager who runs the trading post. She asks me to get rid of the previous mercenary she hired, who's become more of a hindrance than a help.

I walk over, feeling confident in my diplomatic skills. But, sure enough, the merc is an arsehole. I could pay him off—an easy bribe to persuade him to be on his way. But I'm just not inclined to make his life any easier. The conversation turns antagonistic, and eventually guns are drawn.

The fight is quick enough that I don't get to experience much of the turn-based combat system. I'm backed up by two scouts, so even though the merc gets some shots off, he's quickly gunned down before any real strategy comes into play. But I do experience some of the reactivity of the story, as later in a bar one of Tina's associates chews me out for my rash use of violence. There's no omniscient karma system judging my style of conflict resolution, but this one guy now thinks I'm incompetent. Maybe somewhere down the road that will prove important. But also, maybe not.

Kokeby itself has a sprinkling of post-apocalyptic flavour—it's a little run-down and ramshackle, but otherwise nothing too extreme. "The game very intentionally takes you on a journey from the normal into the very, very weird," explains Ritchie. "So the beginning of the game very intentionally looks like it could just be a farming community in Western Australia." These are towns and trading posts where survivors were able to scavenge from stores of the pre-apocalypse world, and that defines their look and feel.

"If you look at just the early game," says Ritchie, "it's kind of normal—where's the post-apocalypse? But as you start to venture out, it gets more and more and more crazy and wacky. That was a big part of it, so you feel very familiar. And then, within the first hour of the game, you're thrown out into this scary, harsh world and you've got to find a new place to be. That's all reflected through the town design, the clothing design and character design."

But as weird as it might get, the team also wants it to feel authentically Australian—both in the kind of problems of the world, and the wry, dark humour that can emerge out of it. Initially the studio wanted to set the game across the entirety of the country, but soon realised that, to pull it off, individual locations would be too shallow to really matter to the player. "We decided that instead we focus on Western Australia, and go deep," says McComb. That means each town will not only have its own distinct look and sound, but also its own narrative vibe—much of it satirical. "We represent different forms of government, which allows for different kinds of moral quandaries to be explored," says Ritchie, "as well as what's reflected in the clothing, reflected in the art, reflected in the feel of the town—everything's meant to have an essence that you can take away."

There's a serious edge to that authenticity, too. "From the very start of the project," says McComb, "before we even wrote a word, Craig made sure he had representatives of indigenous cultures speaking up and saying, 'Yeah, you can do that' or 'We'd really appreciate it if you didn't'."

In terms of the music, too, audio lead Timothy Sunderland wanted to represent his country at the point depicted in the game. A woodworker, he built makeshift instruments to capture the feel of people forced to improvise off the land. "The way you feel when you play them really puts you into the mindset of someone that's not quite got the best instrument and has to make do with what they've got," says Sunderland.

"I've tried to put as much atmosphere into it as possible. From where I'm from, a local elder recorded some didge tracks a few years ago, and he gave me permission to use them and just get them out into the world—because he just wanted to share his culture. And he's very proud about his playing which is incredible. So I layer a lot of didgeridoo in behind the scenes. And when you put a lot of reverb and delay on something like that, the atmosphere just just really opens up. It's been really fun to look at the different towns and speak to the narrative of what's going on in this town—what feel should it have—and find the right stuff for it."

The concept of post-apocalyptic Australia feels very different now—in the midst of the climate crisis—than it did back in the days of Mad Max. "We feel it a lot," says Sunderland. "Almost on a monthly basis, something is going on where—it's right in front of us, you know? Here's the proof."

"You just had floods…" says McComb.

"Exactly," continues Sunderland, "we go from one extreme to the other. We have bushfires that ravage an eighth of the country, and then we have floods that ravage a quarter of the country."

But while environmental disaster is a theme in the game, for Ritchie it's one part of a broader message. "The design was, let's imagine you've got a decision tree for the next 10-to-20 years, and at every single point humans made the worst possible decision, whether it's climate change, political division and extremism, environmental collapse, and another financial crisis—just really being as shitty as you can … we're not we're not trying to make some massive big statement, but looking at all the mistakes that people seem to be making these days."

Inevitably, as a more philosophical CRPG, Broken Roads invites comparison to Disco Elysium, one of the best games of the decade so far. I only got to play a tiny portion of the game—nowhere near enough to tell if it can match such a high bar, or even come close. What I can tell you is that, of everything I saw at Gamescom this year, Broken Roads feels like it has the most potential. If the team can fully realise their absurdly ambitious plans, they've got the chance to make something really special. I hope that they can pull it off.
 

Acrux

Arcane
Joined
Jul 1, 2019
Messages
1,489
It's the game journalist saying that, not the development team.

This is what the devs have said about the comparisons to Disco Elysium. tl/dr: they say thanks for saying it :retarded: , but their real influences were more traditional RTWP RPGS (BG, Fallout, and Planescape).

We were actually in development for about 10 months before Disco Elysium launched, and probably working on the game for... I don't know, 6 or 8 months before we even know DE was being made.

DE has absolutely changed the face of what people understand from RPGs and narrative-driven games, and comparisons between DE and Broken Roads are to be expected (and hey, are flattering).

We had decided on our art style from the beginning (I wanted to have something which felt like 'playing in concept art', with big, loose brushstrokes dominant). I was introduced to Kerstin Evans by a mutual friend, and it was this pic of Ally which sealed the deal for me: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/889kE

Kerstin has been with us since early 2019 and done an absolutely fantastic job (have a look at this, from the middle of last year: https://www.brokenroadsgame.com/dev-blog/the-how-and-why-of-creating-broken-roads-visual-target)

But yeah, when Disco came out, it changed everything, and we've been compared to it many times - which is awesome - but the real influences behind the design and the approach to storytelling are the likes of Fallout 1 and 2, Planescape: Torment, the Baldur's Gate games, and more recent titles like Torment: Tides of Numenera and the Pillars of Eternity games.

Our Creative Lead, Colin McComb, worked on a number of those titles (including both Torment titles as well as Wasteland 2 and 3) and our Narrative Lead, Leanne Taylor-Giles also wrote on Numenera :)

I am incredibly proud of the team we've got and the way the game is shaping up, and it is so encouraging to read comments like the ones on this page - in among dealing with all the to-be-expected trolls and haters that are just part of the job!

Really makes me feel like we're reaching the people we want to with this title, and the strong focus on branching narrative, reactivity and the kinds of situations one can place the player in in a post-apoc Western Australia are just going to be, well, fun!
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
This game has combat.
 

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