Greetings, travelers! Now, heres quite a jump forwardRoadwarden will be out on Steam on September 8th, 2022! Its an illustrated text-based RPG in which you explore and change a hostile, grim realm. Roadwarden has been in development for almost 4 years now, and were on the final stretch!
The last few months were all about tying up the loose ends and hunting for bugsbut there are still a few new features to talk about!

Difficulty Selection Screen

The time limit is the most restrictive system in Roadwarden. Given enough time, the player can heal their wounds, earn coins to buy useful equipment, or gain trust of the locals. However, some of the quests are time-sensitive and players who repeatedly fail at preparing themselves for exploration and combat may reach the games epilogue without completing some of the major storylines.
While its possible to complete all of the major quests in less than 25 in-game days, most newcomers will struggle to efficiently optimize the Roadwardens systems. Adding an easy mode for players who are not used to RPGs (or video games in general) and the hard mode for returning players is meant to open the game up to a variety of expectations and playstyles.

Updated Quick Menu

After many months of being untouched, the buttons in the top-right corner are not only reshuffled
but I also replaced the Trade button with a quick access to the Character Sheet.
When tested, it turned out that its a bit too easy to omit the Trade option while talking with various NPCs. From now on, the trading is available through the dialogue options, always staying in the players field of view:

The Ancient Bug

This annoying line of code has crashed the game more times than I can count.
Here you can see how it should look like:
The reason why it destroyed me is that the game didnt break when this bit of text was loaded. Instead, it could lurkin the shadows for minutes, until it appeared in a completely different area or conversation. I spent many hours tracking down the source, especially after it crashed the game of one of the demo players. Is it a memory leak? Is the game simply falling apart after some time? Am I going crazy? But now, the bug is no more! Im FREE! And all sorts of tiny, yet important details And what is this just below the quick menu? Is this the new, fancy clock? Why, yes it is!

Its less distracting and offers more information at once whenever pointed at, with fewer space restrictions. The item list in the inventory is now more flexible. In the early stages of the game, it remains small, but

once the player gathers enough items, it resizes, usually filling the entire screen without forcing the player to scroll down to see everything at once. Also, while the owned coins are still meant to be displayed together with the other Merchandise, the game now recognizes when there are no other items from this category. In such cases, the coins are moved to the Misc section, instead of occupying the entire row by themselves.
While some quests may still need updates in the journal, they now more often use gray font to hide outdated information, and horizontal lines to divide quests into sections, for exampleseparating the old part of a quest from the new one, which gets pushed to the top of the entry.
And last but not least autosaves occur more frequently, after roughly 20 dialogue choices. Its still not recommended to play without manual/quick saving, but the game is now more resistant to unfortunate crashes and bugs that would punish players who forgot to save in a long time. Thank you for taking a look at this devlog, and for your support and feedback over the years! You can also find me on socials, and Roadwarden has Steam and GOG pages where you can add it to your wishlistI hope it will be available on September 8th! Have a great day!

[ 2022-08-19 12:00:32 CET ] [ Original post ]