However, choosing a decision outside of your world view will have the largest effect on shifting your golden arc further, and make a character more broad-minded. Each time a decision is made in a particular quadrant, that tendency increases slightly. Lower-level choices fit in here and are available to all players. One change we’ve made since we first designed the Moral Compass was to add a small, brighter coloured ‘tendencies’ area at the centre of each quadrant. If decisions are made within the centre of a character’s world view, the golden arc narrows but its radius extends a little further towards the edge of the compass, allowing for more ‘higher level’ decisions as the character becomes more narrow-minded. Instead of being static, however, the compass shifts towards that decision, just by a few degrees clockwise or counterclockwise. Any choices within the player’s World View, indicated by the golden arc you can see on the compass, are then available to them. How will this play out in the game?Ĭraig Ritchie: When the player faces certain difficult decisions, or sometimes when they may have a particular motivation for an action, we place those decisions somewhere on the Moral Compass. Referring to something the player did when they thought the game wasn’t watching is one of my favourite storytelling tools.Ī new type of morality system is an important gameplay mechanic in Broken Roads. We get feedback on each others’ story and quest ideas, and try to create threads between them where a natural link would occur. Mostly we make sure our variables have meaningful descriptions and stay organised by location or quest, and we collaborate on larger documents like asset request lists. Leanne Taylor-Giles: As an international team, it can be tricky to communicate the finer details of what we’re working on. How are you handling narrative progress in the game? Australian culture is unique, though of course not a monolith, and after 10 years living overseas I get to come home with fresh eyes and re-experience all those little details I never knew I’d miss until they weren’t there. I’ve said before that post-apocalyptic settings can be love letters to our favourite parts of the society we live in, and Broken Roads is no exception. What we’re interested in is what kind of societies would rise from the ashes of a national government, without electricity, telecommunications, or most of the comforts we take for granted in our everyday lives. The apocalypse was 100 years ago – people have rebuilt, populations have stabilised, and for the majority of the people you’ll meet, this is the only world they’ve ever known. Leanne Taylor-Giles: Broken Roads is more post-post-apoc than post-apocalyptic.
What does your vision of post-apocalyptic Australia look like? I’m really proud of the talented people we’ve attracted and the culture we’ve built up over the last four years.īroken Roads is set in an Australian post-apocalyptic setting, which makes our mind wander to Mad Max. While many of us have worked on games before, this has been our first title for Drop Bear Bytes as a team. In fact, when we travelled to Gamescom in August of last year it was the first time a lot of people on the team had ever met in person. We’ve been able to grow the team steadily to the almost 20 people we have today thanks to publisher support and government grants available In Australia, and have also done nearly everything fully remote. What can you tell us about the development team and how you got to work together?Ĭraig Ritchie: We started out in January 2019 creating the studio from the ground up, with a barebones team on the classic shoestring budget. As we’re looking forward to some of the most interesting titles of 2023, we checked in with the team to find out more, and spoke to Game Director Craig Ritchie and Narrative Director Leanne Taylor-Giles. The team at Drop Bear Bytes is working with publisher Versus Evil on Broken Roads, which is a narrative-driven RPG that takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of Australia and includes exploration, strategic turn-based combat and an interesting morality system that promises to offer players ‘meaningful philosophical choices’.
During Gamescom in August, one of the signs that the industry was opening back up a little was running into a development team that flew in all the way from Australia.
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