Poland-based, solo game dev studio Moral Anxiety Studio has announced the launch date for their upcoming title Roadwarden. This text-based game illustrated with a pixel art style is said to feature mechanics borrowed from RPGs, visual novels, and interactive fiction, that deliver more than 40 hours of gameplay with branching dialogue choices and and character abilities that upgrade progressively. As for the plot, it merges elements of high fantasy and medieval adventure.

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Key features of Roadwarden include:

• Explore & Change the World: Discover the secrets and face the challenges of a hostile fantasy world — inevitably unveiling its uniquely sinister history
• Grow With the Challenge: Create your own background story, personal abilities, beliefs, and personality to shape your very own future as a Roadwarden.
• Classical RPG Attitude: Prepare yourself for an epic journey, either as a warrior, mage or scholar, and define your character‘s traits; like friendly, playful or intimidating, during interactions with various NPCs
• Mysteries Unfold: Use your savvy and wiles when investigating and drawing your conclusions to understand the true nature of this world. Immerse yourself in detailed dialogues and sidequests with dozens of NPCs to gain their trust and support.

Roadwarden will launch on Steam for £8.29 / €/$10.99 this September 8.

SOURCE: GBAtemp Inbox

 

[YuseiFD]

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

 

[gaga941021]

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

Don't like it? Close your eyes.

 

[Xzi]

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]

Don't like it? Close your eyes.

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

 

[ChiefReginod]

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]

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]

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.