Broken Roads - Interview @ CSH Picone

Chris Picone interviewed Craig Ritchie from Drop Bear Bytes about the post-apocalyptic RPG Broken Roads:

Drop Bear Bytes

We have a special guest today; Craig Ritchie, founder of Drop Bear Bytes and director of Broken Roads, an isometric post-apocalyptic RPG set in Australia and one of my absolutely most-anticipated games of all time. We got to have a long chat about his team, what it takes to run an international game studio, their experience with Film Victoria, marketing plans, and of course, Broken Roads.

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CSH: First tell us a bit about your studio. I’ve been keeping an eye on your dev blogs and couldn’t help notice that you have managed to gather what looks like an incredibly talented team with loads of gaming experience and qualifications - but this is your debut game, so what’s your secret?

Craig: Thanks a lot. Yes, we are incredibly proud of the team we have. I think it’s really just come down to having been in the industry for a while prior and having been lucky enough to get some good recommendations really early on. Jethro Naude, co-founder of Drop Bear Bytes, and I have been friends since we were like 14 years old and he’s got a ton of experience in start-ups and finance, as well as previously having worked as a game economist.

I was recommended our art director, Kerstin Evans, by a mutual friend and I also spent a ton of time looking at and reviewing many, many CVs and resumes over the last two and half years. Most recently we’ve had the incredible fortune to attract even more experienced talent in our narrative lead, Leanne Taylor-Giles, and her husband James Giles, another gameplay animator, who both joined us this year from Ubisoft Montréal.

Some people were hired because I saw them post some of their work on Twitter, others posted to Reddit boards for game devs looking for work, while others I just reached out to out of the blue to see if they liked the look of the project want to work with us. I’m really happy with how the team has grown and continues to attract great talent.

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CSH: Onto the game then! Let’s start with the fundamentals. In this day and age, why did you opt for isometric? Why turn-based?

Craig: For quite a few of us on the team, isometric RPGs are our all-time favourites. It really is as straightforward as that. It’s a proven approach that has worked incredibly well for decades now, again looking all the way back to the Ultima games and many others from the late 80s and early 90s, through to the giants such as Fallout and Planescape: Torment, and more recently Shadowrun and Pillars of Eternity. I love the perspective; I love the way it can both inspire nostalgia and still have room for innovation. Isometric RPGs allow for, in my opinion, the best instantiation of tabletop role-playing on a computer. The raised position view of a single portion of the map, seeing a little bit more of the world at a time, adventuring through and uncovering the fog of war… We love all these things and we know that the kinds of players we’re connecting with love them too.

Broken Roads is turn-based quite simply because we all prefer more cerebral combat and the strategic & tactical thinking which that style of gameplay offers, where your decisions and your smarts matter more than your reaction speed. There is absolutely room for awesome action RPGs and other action titles or fighting games where it’s all about how good you are with the controller, how well you can react in a moment, and so on. We love those games too, but we knew from the outset we wanted Broken Roads to feature turn-based combat and be a narrative-driven, very story-heavy game.

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