Broken Roads April 2023 Update

Wow, where did that month go?! April has come around, and it’s time for the next Broken Roads monthly update. This time we’ve got level design progress over the years, the first of our OST drops, a look at some narrative design, updates from our programmers, and more.

“Taylor’s Charm” is part of the Broken Roads soundtrack, written, recorded and produced by Drop Bear Bytes’ Audio Lead and Composer, Tim Sunderland.

“It has stayed familiar but changed into something different,” says Tim. “That’s both an intended experience for the player but has also mirrored my own experience whilst developing it.”

It’s amazing how much the OST has evolved over time, now going on for four years of work, and the journey through the world of Broken Roads is accompanied by a soundtrack we are incredibly proud of. This video is the first in a series we will be putting out each month, and we know you’ll enjoy listening to his work!

This is a spoiler-free snapshot of some of Junior Narrative Designer Anniemay Parker’s work in articy:draft, the narrative design tool used on Broken Roads. Early in the game, players will discover Merredin, a town renowned for its bustling market and growing population. The player will need to prove their worth to Angela Smith, the governor of Merredin, to gain access to the town itself.

“This snapshot shows a bunch of ways the player can get inside Merredin through their origin story selection, items they find along their journey, and certain skills they have upgraded during their playtime,” says Anniemay. “I’m most proud of the level of complexity in this scene as players can speak about certain skills they may have put XP into. Allowing them to receive different responses from Angela Smith.”

Ardath is a scene we have poured a lot of time, love, and polish into, and our Level Designer Luke Dorman provided some comparison shots from 2020, 2021, and 2023 showing how the area has progressed:

Ardath combat arena in 2020

Ardath combat arena in 2021

Ardath combat arena in 2023

The following two screenshots are a bonus comparison of another part of Ardath – the first pic is from 2021 and the second is how it looks now.

Our Senior Programmer, Amos Wolfe, has been deep in the weeds of creating tools to help with the localisation process. Broken Roads is being translated into multiple languages and while tools like articy have good export capabilities for sending the text over to localisers, getting every bit of text in the game properly translated involves a lot of work as there’s dialogue, menus, in-game text, points of interest texts, item descriptions and so on.

Amos has sped things up with a tool, shown in the video above. In his own words: “I made a tool to help spot UI text that needs localization. It allows selecting the text in scene, but then also has an auto localize button which connects up the localization for that UI text.”

Next up, he put together what we’re calling Cthulhu text, on display in that video. Amos, again: “A pseudo language has been added to the game to help spot any is issues with localization. Anything that doesn’t have accented letters in it needs localization, which helps us spot issues in advance.”

Our Unity Developer/Recommender of Good Games/Integrator/Game Dev Guy, Dean Baron, has been powering through the implementation of the quests in Broken Roads. It’s one thing to design the quests and hook up all the logic and conversations in articy, and another to actually get the quests to play as intended in Unity. Dean and Anniemay have been doing a fantastic job of this recently.

“Recently I have been focusing on integration (as you may have seen on our socials) and making sure the game is playable from origin to endgame,” he says. “It has truly been a ride as someone who has been a fan of the game since 2019 to now apart of the team since last year seeing the amazing world and reading the incredible writing and knowing that RPG lovers and gamer are going to have something special on their hands.”

The screenshot above may look pretty, but it’s an example of right characters, right location, wrong conversation, so Dean and Anniemay will go over the logic in articy, the scene setup in Unity, and compare against a test plan (basically, the steps to complete the quest which helps both integration and QA) to see which sneaky variables or conditional checks have gone awry.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!

As always, if you have any content to share or questions for the team, please feel free to reach out. You can stay in touch with me and the rest of the Versus Evil team by joining our Discord and following us on our various social media channels.

~ VS Trippi