Spry Fox Making Happiness

Hi folks! We’re pleased to announce the first major FREE update to Road Not Taken! Today’s Steam update includes:

• New “just for fun” Timed Mode: try to rescue all the kids within four minutes! You lose time whenever you take damage, and you add time to the clock whenever you eat food and rescue children. Timed Mode has no impact on your career, so it’s a great way to enjoy Road Not Taken for a few minutes with limited stress. 🙂

• New creatures: the Forest Kraken and the Golem (and for those who haven’t yet noticed it in our previous micro-update, the Ninja Bear!) These guys add a little spice to the early years of your career!

• “Easier” mode and hard mode: In our previous micro-update, we split the game into two modes, Normal and Hard. “Hard” is basically our original gameplay mode with a few tweaks; “Normal” is more generous with energy and had less crowded rooms, among other changes. Checkpoints are also less punishing to use now. We’ve done more work in this update and now consider these features “complete!” This should make the game much more accessible to new users.

• Mod support!: Now you can edit everything about the game, including the properties of objects and levels, make your own hand-crafted puzzle rooms and more, and share your work with your friends! Running a mod will prevent your game from uploading scores to the leaderboards (to keep them pure/fair.) Also, please note that using mods is something you do at your own risk! We’re a very small studio and can’t be expected to prevent or to fix every issue that could arise in the zillions of possible mods that can be created. We’re excited to see those zillions of possibilities emerge though. 🙂 Detailed instructions on how to use and create mods can be found here.

These changes (except mod support, sorry!) are coming to the PS4 for free as well as soon as they clear QA and certification! It’ll be a few weeks, but it’s definitely coming. 🙂

Hey everyone,

I’ve got a whole lot to say today, but first and foremost: Road Not Taken is available for download today!! You can get it worldwide on Steam (PC & Mac) and in North America on the PS4. And hey, we’ve put together a snazzy launch trailer to whet your appetites:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg7XSGNKySg&w=600&h=338]

To celebrate the launch of Road Not Taken, we’re offering a limited-time 20% launch sale on Steam, where players can pick up the game for just $11.99! We’re also thrilled to be partnering with Sony, allowing PlayStation+ subscribers to get Road Not Taken absolutely free during the month of August. (For PS4 fans who live outside North America: the European PS4 launch is tomorrow, the Asian launch is the 7th, and the Japanese launch is the 20th, as per the PS+ release calendar.)

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Hi folks! We’re thrilled to announce the official release date of Road Not Taken! It’ll be coming to Steam (PC & Mac) and the Playstation 4 on August 5th, 2014 — just a little more than a month from today! And to celebrate this announcement, we’ve put together a new trailer! This one is a bit, er, unusual. You might need to have lived through the late 80s or 90s to really get it. 😉

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIqYzSX_JKw&w=600&h=338]

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We’ve hit a snag while adding sound effects to the creatures in Road Not Taken. The problem is, we’ve got no idea what this critter should say:

So… we’re holding a contest!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwet29G3Lvk&w=600&h=338]

Help us out by creating a sound effect that you think would sound good when the player bumps into this fox. If your sound effect is chosen as the winner, we’ll put it in the game, put your name in the game’s credits page, and give you a free copy of Road Not Taken, too. 🙂

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Lately, we’ve been doing a ton of playtesting of Road Not Taken, particularly with fellow game developers. (If you’re ever looking for brutally honest feedback, other game developers are a good place to start.) In general, the feedback has been pretty positive: people love the game’s basic mechanics, art and audio. But one big issue repeatedly crept up in many of our playtests: people weren’t sensing the depth of the game and weren’t feeling a strong sense of progression. This blog post is all about how we’ve been fixing that. 🙂

I like to think of Road Not Taken as an iceberg floating in the ocean: a tiny percentage of the total game is visible above the surface when you first start playing, while the vast majority of the game lies unseen, waiting to be discovered. A large part of that depth comes from all the unusual creatures and objects you can encounter as you explore the enchanted forests of the game. Another large part comes from all the secret tools and boosts you can create if you know what you’re doing. (For example, if you combine the right number of red and white spirits lurking in the forest, you can create a useful magic axe.)

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In previous blog posts, we’ve talked about the procedural system we use to create the enchanted forests that serve as your proving ground in Road Not Taken. That system is what makes Road Not Taken a fun game to play repeatedly, and as with any good roguelike you’ll need to play RNT many times before you’ve stumbled upon every interesting object and creature lurking in the forest.

But a purely random system, even a very rich one, can start to feel repetitive over time. Every snowflake might be unique, but after you’ve looked at a thousand snowflakes it’s easy to stop appreciating them! Our roguelike developer ancestors have invented a few solutions to this problem, one of which is to change the look and feel of the environment to signal when something new/important/dangerous is happening. Sewers transition into dungeons, dungeons become underground caverns, etc. And in Road Not Taken, peaceful glades might lead to blizzard-ravaged woods, haunted glades and dangerous ice caverns! The changing terrain is both a marker of your progress as well as a warning of new challenges to come.

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As we’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, Road Not Taken has procedurally-generated levels. You get a completely new experience every time you venture into the forest. When designing a game like Bioshock or God of War, a designer must hand-select the placement of every corridor, every object, and every enemy in the game. With Road Not Taken, we’re not hand-selecting anything. We spend our time creating interesting objects and enemies and then carefully defining the probabilities of when and where you will encounter them.

The process reminds me of Duchamp’s painting ‘Nude descending a Staircase, No. 2’. For thousands of years, humanity painted a single instant, captured in time. Duchamp, inspired by advances in motion pictures, decided to paint all the possible states of a woman walking down the stairs in a single painting. To me, designing a roguelike is a little bit like that. Instead defining a single level, we use algorithms to define all possible levels at once.

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Over the past several days we’ve been polishing up and experimenting with lots of little different bits of Road Not Taken. Trying out new behaviors and objects, fleshing out the details of the player’s career; that sort of thing. We also made the mysterious forest a bit more, well, mysterious. Enter the ghost child:

The boosts we previously described are almost all implemented at this point! In the process, the little house we were planning for the main character has exploded into a not-so-little house full of cosy rooms, lazy cats, bear rugs, and of course tables and desks to hold all the aforementioned boosts. This is one of those situations where design drives the narrative I guess; there are so many totems and trophies you can collect that the main character simply needed to have a more spacious home to put them in.

But then again, the size of the home seems to emphasize its emptiness. It’s full of stuff, yes, but almost completely devoid of people. In that regard, it’s far from the stereotypically “perfect” home. That feels appropriate for Road Not Taken.

There is a repeated theme in our upcoming game, Road Not Taken. The characters in our little northern town have all lived their lives according to the same plan: first you go to school, then you get a job, then you fall in love and finally you start a family.

But life doesn’t always work out that way.

I grew up expecting to live a very traditional Norman Rockwell-style life. We had a little house on a lovely winding road in rural Maine. I did well in school; checked all the official checkboxes. Then upon entering the real world, things fell apart.

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This post was written by Brent Kobayashi, our lead artist for Road Not Taken, who is currently enjoying a much-deserved vacation so I’m posting on his behalf. -d

Meeting a few of you in person and talking online to others excited about Road Not Taken, I’ve been asked the question a number (2 is a number, right?) of times what the inspiration behind the look of the game was. Obviously, the style borrows heavily from kawaii aesthetics. The dot-ier the eyes, the higher the mouth, the happier I am. But that’s sort of a rule given my Japanese background. So, I’ll briefly mention a couple of specific points of inspiration behind the look of the game as well.

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For the past week or so we’ve been fleshing out and implementing the progression system in Road Not Taken. The premise we’re running with right now is that your character has a “career” of # (20? 30?) games. Once your character has completed that many games, he/she will retire and pass away, and you will take over a new character who succeeds them.

Each career will give you an opportunity to unlock certain boosts that you can use from game to game. A boost, for example, might make the game a little easier by decreasing the spawn quantity of a particular type of troublesome forest creature, or it might make the game more difficult but also more rewarding. Boosts are represented by everyday objects that you collect. Here’s a mockup of what the boost room (where you collect your boosts) might look like:

Additionally, as you successfully rescue lost children through successive campaigns, you’ll encounter new forest creatures and objects. This will serve the dual purpose of making the game more interesting and challenging over time, and also scratch that progression itch (because you’ll have a scrapbook of sorts that you fill up by discovering every possible forest denizen.)

Lastly, you’ll have relationships with townspeople and forest denizens that you will try to juggle and enhance over the course of many games. We’re particularly excited about that system and how it plays into the narrative; we’ll share more in a future update!