Roadwarden [Fantasy/RPG Elements/Pixel Art] [DEMO]

[Aure]

Thank you, Jubal! The sales have been good, but I learned people are finding typos in the game and now I'm DYING. : P

[Jubal]

Well, inevitable in games with lots of text - and at least not too headachey to bugfix!

[Tusky]

Roadwarden is officially released! : )

Hooray! congrats

I shall certainly be picking up a copy

[Aure]

Thank you, Tusky, I appreciate it!

Well, inevitable in games with lots of text

Correct, it's just that my ego is fragile. : P

[Jubal]

Well, after that Eurogamer piece, hopefully the ego is pretty deservedly stoked

[bigosaur]

It's looking pretty good!

Good luck 

[Aure]

Thank you!
The things are calming down now, I can prepare a new patch tomorrow and rest for a bit. : )

[Jubal]

I did a full playthrough on normal mode on Friday. Kudos, it's a really brilliant game. Hugely enjoyed it, the dialogues were good, the pacing was excellent for things being largely brought to a head in the last 10 days of the playthrough, and the balancing challenge of keeping everything together was really interesting.

I'm not sure I did super well at it - died a few times and my endings felt rather mixed, but that's probably normal for a first run. I decided to try and help people which I had some limited success at on a personal level, but did pretty horribly at the big-picture stuff. I was generally poor through the whole game, there were definitely some BIG inefficiencies or things I realised too late to reverse.

The worst of these was the thing at Creeks where you get them to clear the tree and it says need to know the roads and get there before midday, it really wasn't clear how to do this, I eventually triggered it somehow but I had several occasions where I basically wasted a day by trying a different combination of resting place and moves only for it to fail again. Is it that it needs every other eastern road sidequest to be completed? Because I'd assumed from the text that it just needed me to have recently walked all the paths from the tree to creeks, which clearly didn't work.

Regarding my choices and endings:

Spoiler

My biggest error was not tackling White Marshes and the undead somehow. I just didn't manage to progress the story there - I think maybe I needed to tell the guy about that missing purse I found, but I wasn't sure that was a good idea so didn't do it, and at the endgame I decided to try and unseat Thaila (may be misspelling some names) after unravelling the mystery of the ruined village... which I also failed to do so, and wasn't sure why, so that ended up as a lose-lose. At least her daughter got to go off and found an adventuring company, so that was nice. My only gripe about the way that plays out is that it feels really rough if one of the things you've focused on is completing all the Creeks quests - it was one of the only bits I actually felt I'd done well by the endgame because I'd fully cleared the eastern road, so having the village flattened by the undead made the ending feel a much bigger downer than it would otherwise have been.

I did find Asterion and completed the island trip: my company was Thaila's daughter, Dalit the huntress, the sullen forager guy you can hire, and the nameless bandit - but I didn't properly negotiate with the Hidden Tribe first, so I was left still very unsure of what had gone on and what exactly I'd really found there. I wasn't sure how to progress on that one, I assumed when they asked for unusual/good alcohol that this would be something you could get from Foggy, so wasted time there and then didn't work out what else to get them that I could afford (they ask for good blades, but I wasn't sure if better axes counted and those were really expensive).

I cured the plague, that's about the one thing that went unequivocally well. It was really unclear how much blood/magic you had to give the tree and whether it needed some of both, so I don't know if I wasted some valuable resources there by e.g. buying more magic things.

The Pelts Inn did well in endgame, I helped them out plenty. The northernmost village kind of survived OK-ish, the villages in general went for trading rather than full imperial absorption which I quite liked.

I did have one persistent actual bug, which was that bits of game text and labels kept doing this:



Generally unloading and reloading a page or text section, or sometimes rolling over bits of text, would fix it, but it did keep happening seemingly randomly and was rather annoying.

[Aure]

I'm sorry about the visual bugs, Jubal. Do you by any chance have a GSync screen? I've heard they tend to cause issues, but there are ways to fix them. I never saw a report like the one you shared.

I'm not sure I did super well at it

That's only for you to decide. ^^

you get them to clear the tree and it says need to know the roads and get there before midday, it really wasn't clear how to do this

That's a very interesting point, thank you. I'll write this down, maybe I could phrase it more clearly - the idea was you need to do more things for Elah regarding this specific quest, or maybe help him through the mundane work available once it's available. I'll write down I should reexamine this.

Thank you for describing your experience. I think it was a big ask of me to offer people a game that involves so many "fail states", but I believe it's an unusual experience,  and adds to the game's themes.

Spoiler

I wonder - did you enjoy the High Island section?

[Jubal]

Yes, it's the sort of game where the line between "you screwed up" and "was it actually possible to do this right" is sometimes tantalisingly unclear. And part of me likes that and part of it grates on me, but I think you're right, it's important to the game being what it is and it does make some of the points and parts of the game more powerful. It might have been nice to have a bit more emphasis on the small and personal bits in the ending readout in places, I guess: it sort of feels a bit sad that you can't get your character to retain any connections to some of the people you risked life and limb with.

I guess one of my struggles with these things is that I'm too much of a real-life problem solver who's bad at knowing my own limits, and I struggle to turn my moral compass off or down at all in games: so even when it's fictional characters, I find the sense of responsibility weighs on me and I get easily frustrated by my own limitations when it comes to helping people. But that's just a me problem.

Regarding the graphical bug, the readout I get when I looke at my NVidia settings is:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M
Driver 472.19
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700HQ CPU @2.60 GHz
7.84GB RAM
1920x1080, 60Hz

Regarding your spoilered question:

Spoiler

I loved high island. It frustrated me because of how little I understood about what was going on - all I knew was that Asterion had gone there and I was searching for him - but his horrible ending felt... right, in a depressing way, for the story. The change of pace and atmosphere of the writing really worked super well for me though, and I liked having the companions with me a lot. For me it really worked as the climax of the story, with the tail end of being beaten up by Thaila and finally heading home being the sort of crash back to earth moment after that.

If I had one critique it's that thought the graphics for it felt maybe a bit minimalist, I'd have really like a couple of more full scene images.

[Aure]

Spoiler

I'm so happy to hear you connected with the scene. For me, putting such an emphasis on it was just a huge risk. By the way, the island's main theme, the one pre-cave, wasn't a sure deal even 4 days before the release. My publisher really fought for me to get it, and I think it does wonders to the scene. Without it, the game would use an abridged version of the title theme, and it's just not the same.

I don't know much about hardware, but maybe this thread could help you? https://steamcommunity.com/app/1155970/discussions/0/5179725348508845297/

[Jubal]

Not sure I mentioned here previously, but Vicorva, indie author and general good sparkly being of this parish, has for a while been doing streams of Roadwarden at the moment on Wednesday (2pm UK time), which are very enjoyable. Their channel is twitch.tv/vicorva. 

[Aure]

Cheers! It's surprising to me how many people streamed or made YouTube videos out of this game, especially since so often people decide to read out loud everything that's on the screen. I'm not a streamer, but to me it sounds like a torture for my throat.

[Jubal]

I'm sure it's not always easy! But I think it's also why it works really well for some people - V is a really talented narrator and having a game with a lot of well written text depth makes best use of that skill set

[Aure]

Thank you for saying so! Personally, I'm not a big fan of voice acting and narration. I'm now playing Disco Elysium (for the first time : O) and I turned off the new voice overlay after about half an hour. It just slows me down to much, and impacts my imagination in ways I don't enjoy.