Shadow of the Road News

It takes a great team to make a great game!💪🏼 To let you in on some of the personalities behind the game we'll be doing a series of Q&A with our team🎤 Today let's hear from our Character Artist Rafał Dobosz and see one of his recent works:

Introduce yourself!
- Hi! My name is Rafał and I am working as a Character Artist at Another Angle Games.

What’s the last thing you worked on for Shadow of the Road?
- I am currently creating the in-game model of one of the East Nippon Company officers. Not long ago I also finished a set of Villagers you'll be able to meet throughout the game ;)

What’s the one thing in Shadow of the Road you can’t wait to show off?
- I cannot wait for players to face the guardian of the waterfall that I've created. You better get ready, my friends!😏

What’s the one thing that’s always on your work desk?
- I am a minimalist, but I always have a coffee mug with me!

We will be in touch to bring you more Q&A from members of Another Angle Games. Join our Discord here https://bit.ly/3pPaC7A and stay tuned!

Shadow of the Road will lead you to many different areas and environments!🏯 Among the first is the residence belonging to aging nobleman Sugiyama Kenjiro. Kenjiro's Residence will introduce you to some of the most significant combat challenges that await your party in the game! Take a look at how it came to life from the ground up! More on the game coming soon😏

Join our Discord to ask us curious questions and just chat about the game -> https://bit.ly/3BIHhR0

You may be wondering where we’ve been all this time?

Were we led astray by the cries of Kawa akago, the red children of the streams? Did the invisible wall Nurikabe block the entrance to the office? Have several of our keyboards come to life as Tsukumogami and tried to bite our fingers?

Well, no. The truth isn’t nearly that mysterious, so let us tell you why we’ve actually been quiet for a while!

Shadow of the Road is an ambitious project, and the scale of the work done for it is appropriately large. The entire team worked restlessly to bring it to fruition and our silent period comes with all sorts of cool milestones and achievements to show for it.

We have completed character dialogues for the entire first half of the game. We have diversified the game with levels set in gloomy underground passages and treacherous uncharted forests. And of course, put significant work into the characters you will encounter as you play Shadow of the Road!

Let’s put a number to some of the things we’ve wrapped up as of late:
- Wrote roughly 50k words of dialogues and other in-game texts;
- Finished modeling over 30 different characters and enemies;
- Finished 4 levels with 13 more in the pipeline and waiting to be braved.

There is much to look forward to, so stay tuned!
You can also join our Discord server to keep up with everything that is going on with the project!
See you there -> https://discord.gg/MADNsptA

Q: Are you planning to release Shadow of the Road on platforms other than PC?
*A:* There are indeed some plans related to console versions of SotR, but for now our top priority is the PC version.

Q: What is the price of the game going to be?
*A:* It will be decided later on, but we think that the base price will be somewhere around $30.

Q: Is there going to be a multiplayer option?
*A:* Probably not, for sure not at the time of the initial release. We have done some tests and even made a playable multiplayer prototype but for now we are focusing on a single-player campaign.

Q: Are you working on macOS and Linux versions?
*A:* Due to some technical limitations and performance issues on those platforms it is very unlikely that SotR will appear on macOS and/or Linux, although we have prepared a MacOS version for internal testing purposes. If we notice high user demand for those versions we will however take it into consideration.

Q: Are you planning any open/closed tests?
*A:* Yes, definitely. We are unable to handle all the QA by ourselves so we will rely heavily on the support of our community.

Q: Are you planning to release a demo?
*A:* Yes, but we don't know at what phase it’s going to happen. It can be tied to various events that depend on Steam.

Q: Is the game going to be available in Early Access?
*A:* We haven't decided yet if will it be hard launched or put into Early Access. There is plenty of work to be done before even considering release in any form.

Q: Who is working on this? / Who are you, guys?
*A:* We are a small independent studio Another Angle Games based in Warsaw. This is our first big title so we rely heavily on our community. We hope that our players will have a significant impact on the development process.

Q: I have a suggestion. How can I pass it on to the dev team?
*A:* If it is a game related suggestion you can submit it to a channel on our Discord server and let others put it to vote. Once in a while we dig through the suggestions and select those with positive feedback from our community and put them onto our roadmap.

Q: Where can I find the latest updates?
*A:* We post the important updates to the Steam Community but you can find more internal content on our Discord server. We also run SotR profiles on various social media platforms:
• on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sotr_game
• on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shadowoftheroad/
• on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sotr_game/

Q: Is there any official knowledge base available for Shadow of the Road?
*A:* Yes, we recently set up a Fandom wiki that is available here https://shadowoftheroad.fandom.com/wiki/Shadow_of_the_Road

Q: Why is the release date so distant?
*A:* You haven't seen all our ideas yet! Jokes aside though - we have to expand our team a bit more, and we would like to make SotR not only content-rich but also (and primarily) fun to play so that takes time. A lot of it.

The last ten weeks have been incredibly hard on us. We have been working on an update that is going to concern exploration and the narrative.

## Narrative updates

We have successfully managed to complete our first gameplay that is over an hour long and consists not only of enemy encounters and skirmishes, but is also heavily focused on the story.



We have added a dialogue system that gives us different options on how to progress on multiple levels. The aspect that we are especially proud of is the fact that any member of your team can take part in a conversation - not just Satoru, the protagonist. As mentioned before, the choices you make will influence different aspects of the story - including relationships between characters and the narrative in general.



We have also designed alternative paths that can be taken by the player and these actually influence much more than just dialogues. The mechanics we use in combat, the enemies we encounter, and the way the story unfolds are all going to depend on which path we decide to follow.




## Barks

We want to make sure that all characters are aware of their surroundings and that they're not indifferent to everything happening around them. Barks are something that we want to use to cover this aspect in Shadow of the Road. The characters are going to make comments on different events, locations etc. in real-time, helping us understand their views and personalities.



## New locations - sneak peek

Beautiful hills



Graveyard and a shrine





Caves



## Inventory etc.

Here's our first ever look at the inventory. What's important is that weapons can be enchanted to add some new features, a crafting system is also going to be in place and every character is going to have a separate equipment stash that is going to be manageable outside of combat.






[h2]
## New Mechanics[/h2]

[h3]# resurrection[/h3]

It's better to stay alive if you have the choice. Luckily not everything is lost - as long as at least one of your team members is alive during combat, you should mostly be fine. Of course the characters that have been knocked out get brought back after the battle, but we have a very special revive mechanic that we're planning to share with you in the next update.



[h3]# opportunity attack[/h3]

This is a passive skill called Opportunity Attack. Exiting any of the red fields will result in the opponent performing an extra free attack. This is a penalty for disengaging from combat with some of the melee foes. The visual info & feedback from such actions is still in development.




[h3]Join our discord server & see what will happen next![/h3]
Your insights are invaluable for us and it helps us to deliver something extraordinary.