Deep Dive: How to design for impact and narrative variance with Roadwarden
Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.
Earlier installments cover topics such as designing combat to match the beat of music in Metal: Hellsinger, gamifying the process of learning to code with One Dreamer, and curating meaningful choices in multiplayer narrative games in Doomsday Paradise.
In this edition, Aureus Morale of Moral Anxiety Studio discusses Roadwarden, explaining how the game's systems created variance and meaningful impact.
I'm Aureus and I designed, wrote, programmed, and illustrated Roadwarden, the first successful game developed by my Moral Anxiety Studio. While I was working, I had a rare luxury in disguise. I was adding new pieces of content to the game without the need to justify myself, or to split the tasks between the crew members, nor maintain the flow of communication and documentation. And since the majority of the project is text-based, making even grand-scale changes and fixes took me no longer than a few days, and usually just a few hours.
For teams of developers with advanced visuals, such a scenario is not replicable. I’ll put aside personal examples and anecdotes, and stick to the toolbox I used as I tried to fulfill my objective: making an RPG that notices and reflects the player’s role-playing.
To be more specific, I was pursuing a game that feels responsive, adjustable, avoiding epic linear tales that abruptly shift into a single “save everyone / become powerful” decision in the epilogue. I believe that making meaningful choices at different stages of the player’s journey is one of
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