Articy: Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the team at Drop Bear Bytes working on Broken Roads
Craig: I’m Craig Ritchie, Game Director on Broken Roads and co-founder of Drop Bear bytes. At the moment there are 15 people working on Broken Roads. We’ve been a fully distributed/ remote team working across multiple time zones since the project began back in early 2019. The team are spread between South Africa, Europe, the USA as well as four states in Australia. We have also formerly had people working with us from Canada, China and the UK.
Anniemay: I’m Anniemay Parker, a Narrative Designer for Broken Roads. My role has me working closely with all departments at Drop Bear Bytes, with a particular closeness to the writing team, art team, and programmers. I mainly converse with the Australian side of our team due to similar hours and our fully remote structure.
Articy: Broken Roads is a narrative-driven RPG set in post-apocalyptic Western Australia and filled with hidden secrets, political intrigues, and moral dilemmas. How did the story originate?
Craig: It was originally going to be very light on story and very heavy on random encounters and tactical combat, given it was going to be a road-trip-style, post-apocalyptic Oregon Trail. It was also not even Australia right at the start, but just ‘generic post-apoc place’. The more Drop Bear Bytes co-founder Jethro Naude and I discussed what we wanted to happen in the game, the more we started veering away from that road trip game into a traditional cRPG influenced by our favourite games – titles such as Baldur’s Gate 2, Planescape: Torment and the early Fallout titles.
So, things just grew from there – we were expanding on the characters, giving them back stories, their own goals and the like, and also settled in early 2019 on setting the game in a future Western Australia. There are surprisingly few titles set in Australia, and it just made sense to do a post-apoc story here. The post-apoc setting has so much potential for thought experiments and writing up scenarios that you wouldn’t find in the real-world.
Articy: The players are faced with impossible dilemmas and have countless paths ahead. How big of an impact do player choices have on the way the story plays out?
Anniemay: Player choice has an added level of complexity in Broken Roads thanks to the Moral Compass, our signature mechanic. While not all options are written as inherently moral, we believe these moments act as a great chance to roleplay and have a more expressive reason as to why the player is saying or doing certain things.
We’ve worked especially hard to make our player choices intersect with the feelings and mentalities of the party members players can bring with them along their journey through the Outback. Acting in certain ways can impress some, while losing respect with others. Your choices can even lead to some party members refusing to travel with you. I think these smaller outcomes help us build a reactive world as it isn’t just quest-givers judging you, it’s your party members, too.
In a broader sense, the choices players make can decide how they access or lose access to certain locations, whether they’re a pacifist or engage in combat, what companions trust them to the end, and the ending they get for their playthrough of Broken Roads.
Articy: The game features a unique morality system influencing dialogue, quests and character development. How did you manage to keep track of all these effects of player choices on the game world?
Craig: articy:draft global variables are basically the engine underpinning the majority of the game. Your character in Broken Roads has a location on the Moral Compass, and this data is stored as a set of variables. We then have variables for every possible quest objective, and create some for each significant dialogue moment we want the game to be able to draw upon later (be it for companion reactivity or to open/restrict future choices).
Every moral dialogue option the player chooses affects their Moral Compass and World View in one way or another, and these are all stored in articy and can be viewed in the Moral History within the game. Here’s an example of one of the first encounters in the Hired Gun origin story.
Above, you can see the dialogue node in articy:draft along with the three that are currently hidden from the player (but can be revealed by changing a setting in the game options – we leave that decision up to the player). Below are the properties of the node, a custom dialogue fragment made for the Moral Compass, and then further below is a screenshot showing what it looks like for the player:
After making the choice, the decision is written to your Moral History. You can see here a small degree change (reflected as 1°) because I was already Machiavellian:
So instead of rotating my World View, this actually narrowed the left and right edges of the World View and made me slightly more narrow-minded (which opens up higher-level moral options later in the game).
Articy: At which point in development did you decide you need to use a professional tool and what made you opt for articy:draft?
Craig: We basically knew this from the moment the game’s major influence changed from Oregon Trail to Baldur’s Gate! The scale of what we wanted to do and the need to have a proper and proven tool was there from early 2019. We looked at a few options and the games that had been made using articy:draft plus the way it could already play nice with Unity was the clincher.
Articy: What kind of impact did articy:draft have on your development process?
Craig: Well, it made the whole thing possible. We went from using it as a narrative design tool to having it be the ‘engine’ for most of the data in the game. There are some things that we felt it wasn’t suitable for (such as companion and enemy level up stats, item and inventory management, and combat scenario definitions) and that data is all in Unity, but the vast majority of the game runs on articy:draft.
Articy: What kind of impact did articy:draft have on your development process?
Anniemay: The way articy manages and displays your variables keeps things organised along with making things easier to troubleshoot should any problems arise during playtesting. I especially love the different groups of variables we could make that worked great to separate quest and location variables from one another.
Craig: Custom dialogue fragments basically drive Broken Roads. Each of the four moral quadrants has their own custom DF, we created a walkable DF (sending characters either to waypoints, specific coordinates or to other characters in the scene), a shop DF for interacting with vendors, a travel DF, teleport DF, spawnable DF, destroy speaker DF… so many game functions where the narrative designers needed things to fire in a particular way without having to do too much work in Unity to make it happen.
The other thing that comes to mind is managing the day/night cycle using different waypoints and strings of logic to check that each character is at the appropriate waypoint depending on if the scene loads in the day, night or if the game switches between day/night while the player is in that location.
Articy: If you were to give a small piece of wisdom to a new studio, what would that be?
Anniemay: Nail down your design principles as soon as you can. Understanding what your game can and can’t do keeps future designs and planning within a tighter scope that keeps the pressure off of your team. It also keeps your game from becoming diluted or stretched thin from adding too much without dedicating time to perfect the mechanics, story, or art.
Craig: Understand your scope limitations. Budget, team experience, timeframes, and the state of available and upcoming comparable titles should all factor into what you are designing – if you are making a commercial product, of course. If not, and you don’t intend to run your studio like a business, then just have fun! But if you are planning to start a studio to develop and release a commercial product, then accept the realities of the state of the industry and be aware of industry and genre trends.
If you’re realistic about how the games industry actually is and not how you can imagine it being, then use that for an honest appraisal of the competitive landscape and where your product might fit in, then you can plan your development and launch accordingly.
Broken Roads is available on: Steam Epic Games Playstation 4 & 5 Xbox Series X|S
