Broken Roads’ 2020 End-Of-Year Wrap-Up

2020’s been a hell of a ride for everyone, but we’ve made it to the end of this challenging year and wanted to give a quick rundown on some recent dev and design highlights before we close up shop at Drop Bear towers and the team get a much-deserved break.

Over the last few months, we’ve been working on a bunch of new features as well as improving some existing UX and gameplay elements, from the inventory system through to character attributes. We completely reworked one of the quadrants of the Moral Compass back in August and have of course been carrying on with character and location design over the last few months.

As a way of closing out the year, we wanted to share some of the progress we’ve made on a few parts of the game.

First off, those of you not following the new Broken Roads game account on Twitter might not have seen our reveal of the day/night cycle. And for those who did see it, it’s no secret that Twitter’s video compression leaves a lot to be desired – so please enjoy that same clip in high quality!

We’re really excited about what we’re able to do with this and will have much more to show in the coming months.

Next, we have been reworking our Fog of War system from the ground up.

The first vid below shows how this works within the editor. You can see the line of sight mechanics, both in terms of how far the character’s sight reveals and how there’s now a ‘discovered but not in sight’ area. Yes, yes, it’s a particularly short distance for them to ‘see’, but this is just a proof of concept while we work out the best proximities.

The previous solution we used was restricted to a handful of shapes for revealing Fog of War - pretty much just a basic collider shape, as it was all math driven. The new method allows us to display anything or any form we want because it’s based on a camera/rendering system. So for example, the player reaches higher elevation on the map, the fog will lift from the rest of the map. Basically, now if you can draw it or model it or paint it, it can reveal FOW.

And here is a short clip of the new Fog of War system running in-game:

We’re also happy to show off the first glimpse of our improved inventory system working in-game. When we first posted our reveal trailer in October last year, some of the community were (quite rightly) horrified that our brave heroes could defeat those raiders and run right off without looting their bodies.

Well, worry no more as we’re now working on exactly how containers, looting, bodies and party inventory management all work. You can see the looting UI in the header image of this blog, and a quick look at the sorting/filtering functionality below:

That’s it from us for 2020 – thanks to everyone for following, supporting and commenting on our progress on Broken Roads. 2021 is going to be a big year for us, so we’re going to rest up and catch you all again in the first week of January.

Have a good one!

- The team at Drop Bear Bytes