Release date for text-based RPG 'Roadwarden' announced

YuseiFD · Aug 17, 2022

What's with all these non visual novels coming out at this age and time ??

gaga941021 · Aug 17, 2022

YuseiFD said:
What's with all these non visual novels coming out at this age and time ??

Don't like it? Close your eyes.

Xzi · Aug 17, 2022

Interesting. Doubt it will live up to the likes of Disco Elysium, but obviously they don't have even half the budget of that game, nor is it going for the same vibe.

YuseiFD · Aug 17, 2022

gaga941021 said:
Don't like it? Close your eyes.

Lmao that doesn't answer my question, also mind your own business please, tyvm

ChiefReginod · Aug 18, 2022

YuseiFD said:
What's with all these non visual novels coming out at this age and time ??

I can think of at least a few reasons.

- Porn dominates the visual novel genre. People who are just looking for a good interactive story can usually expect a game that ditches graphics altogether to not be porn.

- Cookie-cutter romances dominate the traditionally published novel industry. Even if you're a great writer, your story cannot and will not compete in that space.

- If you want your game to stand out in the sea of bedroom indie games today, you have to do stuff that others aren't doing. Big, bold moves like going text-only stand out.

FAST6191 · Aug 18, 2022

YuseiFD said:
What's with all these non visual novels coming out at this age and time ??

The optimist (who knew I had one of those within) would wonder if this is a way of pushing limits a bit -- open world had been repeatedly shown to be a pale imitation of choice, mega budget titles from massive companies that promise choice have been repeatedly seen to fail (it has been more than just cyberpunk, though that is a good example).

Text adventure is text which is still not trivial but way more achievable by a small team, and you can reasonably do all the scripted events, mega branching game that is not all roads lead to Rome*, try to recreate all your favourite dungeons and dragons events that can go right off the wall because it is humans participating in it and creating the story with their flexible human brains and stand a chance of it actually working, tell a story not necessarily as constrained by mechanics (though this gets into interesting game design questions) and much more that follows from all the previous stuff.
Spice it up with a few context sensitive or derived animations**, as well as some prebaked for certain scripted events, and your small indie studio could well pull something off that people crave (people still play dungeons and dragons, gurps, pathfinder and a whole bunch more despite computer games being a thing) and make a lot of money.

*most games promising choice having maybe a different level or two, different path through a level or something similar, this is as 5 generations of merely 2 choices if you do some kind of tree map gets huge, never mind 50 generations of say 9 choices corresponding to the D&D style alignments.

**we saw it for audio some years ago now. Bastion in 2011 probably being one of the more noted examples.

ChiefReginod · Aug 19, 2022

FAST6191 said:
The optimist (who knew I had one of those within) would wonder if this is a way of pushing limits a bit -- open world had been repeatedly shown to be a pale imitation of choice, mega budget titles from massive companies that promise choice have been repeatedly seen to fail (it has been more than just cyberpunk, though that is a good example).

Text adventure is text which is still not trivial but way more achievable by a small team, and you can reasonably do all the scripted events, mega branching game that is not all roads lead to Rome*, try to recreate all your favourite dungeons and dragons events that can go right off the wall because it is humans participating in it and creating the story with their flexible human brains and stand a chance of it actually working, tell a story not necessarily as constrained by mechanics (though this gets into interesting game design questions) and much more that follows from all the previous stuff.
Spice it up with a few context sensitive or derived animations**, as well as some prebaked for certain scripted events, and your small indie studio could well pull something off that people crave (people still play dungeons and dragons, gurps, pathfinder and a whole bunch more despite computer games being a thing) and make a lot of money.

*most games promising choice having maybe a different level or two, different path through a level or something similar, this is as 5 generations of merely 2 choices if you do some kind of tree map gets huge, never mind 50 generations of say 9 choices corresponding to the D&D style alignments.

**we saw it for audio some years ago now. Bastion in 2011 probably being one of the more noted examples.

Some really good points here.

And speaking generally of the way text adventures work, for the player to get just a 10,000 word story, there's probably at least 100,000 words written overall to account for the other choices and paths. It's a massive undertaking even without the scripting part of it. It's a shame some people see it as a lazy genre for the lack of graphics, because it's very far from it.

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