Broken Roads Interview with Drop Bear Bytes
Broken Roads Interview with Drop Bear Bytes text over two characters in a wasteland with a bomb blast in the far distance.
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of drought and flooding rains.
An excerpt from Dorothea Mackellar's famous poem "My Country" 1906
The excerpt above is to many within Australia (of which I am one) as perfect a verse as exists to encapsulate the beautiful and unforgiving nature of the Great Southern Land. Of course, Australia is much more than this, both now and for the estimated 65,000 years of its human history, and to those ancient inhabitants, it is a land of many nations with distinct cultures and identities. What does the future look like in such a land? And what would that future bring if some apocalyptic reset event occurred? Many stories and films have pondered this, the most prominent and influential example being George Miller's 1979 film Mad Max. The world of Mad Max is chaotic and amoral, where death is king and mercy is myth.
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Answers were provided by Craig Ritchie (Game Director), Anniemay Parker (Narrative Designer), and Tim Sunderland (Composer and Audio Lead).
RPGFan: I'll start by asking you to introduce Broken Roads and share some insight into its original conception.
Craig Ritchie: In its earliest form, Broken Roads was going to be a road-trip SRPG with tactical combat. Far more focus on the encounters and the combat, but we couldn't help ourselves in adding more to the world and the characters' backstories and so on. It wasn't even Australia at first -- just some generic post-apocalyptic location.
As we dug further in, well, we realised we were designing something closer to Baldur's Gate 2 (both my and my co-founder's favourite game) or the early Fallouts, and we dropped the "S" part and focused on a traditional isometric RPG in the style that we love.
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