Broken Roads June 2023 Update

Hello everyone - what a month June has been for Broken Roads! The demo is live, we had some incredible YouTube coverage, the demo received many patches and improvements, and of course… We got the cover of PC Gamer!

This is such an honour and the team are of course so proud of this achievement, and we’re sending a huge thanks to everyone at Versus Evil, Plan of Attack and PC Gamer that helped bring this together. You can read more about the print issue on the PC Gamer website, as well as another piece - also written by Jody Macgregor, who did the magazine article - about the playable demo.

Steam Next Fest Demo update

The Broken Roads demo on Steam has been so well-received and we appreciate all the kind words, encouragement and constructive feedback we’ve heard from the players. There are some lively discussions happening on our official Discord, there was a great r/Perth thread on Reddit, and of course the many Twitch streamers and YouTubers playing the game and sharing their videos - thank you all! We absolutely love seeing the game enjoyed by you and your communities.

Here’s our official Steam Next Fest demo trailer:

The team have worked really hard to patch the demo since it went live, including the likes of:

  • Hold [Tab] to highlight interactables and display NPC names

  • Added subtitles to the opening video

  • Right click to use healing items in inventory outside of combat

  • Support for 16:9, 16:10 and 21:9 aspect ratios

  • Added tutorial pop-ups

  • In the dialogue window, descriptions are grey and dialogue is now displayed in white

  • Many animation, VFX and SFX improvements and additions

  • Added in localisation for our launch languages (this is ongoing and we are patching in more translations as they arrive!)

  • Fixed a bug that prevented audio level settings from persisting once you changed scenes

  • Added in the option to display/hide moral choices to the settings menu

  • Fixed many bugs along the way!

If you’ve not yet given it a try, you can download the demo from the Broken Roads Steam page.

Character profile: Dead Ringer

Dead Ringer is the worst compulsive liar you’ll ever meet, but in amongst his strains of madness and impropriety rest stubborn grains of truth. A consummate Machiavellian, he’s willing to bind himself to anyone who understands the true nature of freedom, as he defines it.

If you recognise him, you’re mistaken. He’s just got one of those faces, hence the nickname. He swears it’s also why he gets locked up so often, because he’s being punished for other people’s actions, but omits the many, many crimes he himself has actually committed. People are so quick to judge, these days.

“Our painterly style and gestural brush strokes is always a lot of fun to use when expressing dirt and tattered clothing,” says Sara Laubscher, Lead Environment Artist. “Dead Ringer is certainly a character where we could really push that aspect of our visual language”. You can meet Dead Ringer in the demo once you reach Brookton, and how you deal with him - or not - is up to you.

Companion Reactivity

One of the things we’ve put a lot of effort into is having realistic reactions from your companions and other significant NPCs, based on their own morality and personality traits. Here’s a snippet from articy:draft of what this can look like, intentionally kept spoiler-free:

Sometimes only a couple of companions need to respond to an event. Sometimes all of them do. Regardless, they'll always remember...

Broken Roads OST - ‘It’s an Existence’

"It's An Existence" is part of the Broken Roads soundtrack, written, recorded and produced by Drop Bear Bytes' Audio Lead and Composer, Tim Sunderland.

“I thought about the people of Brookton in-game,” says Tim, “and how they live a life of neither luxury nor ruin but the average person would just shrug their shoulders as if to say "It's an existence", content but with an underlying melancholy and so that's what I tried to convey with the music. This was one of the earlier written pieces that really helped define the overall sound and feel of Broken Roads.”

And that’s it for now - thanks for reading! We’ve still got the demo live on Steam and deciding if or when we’ll take it down. The team are already back to being focused on working on the full game
- The Drop Bear Bytes team

Craig Ritchie