Poznań Game Arena ’19

For us, participating in this year’s edition of Poznań Game Arena was a huge opportunity, but we only managed to decide on our participation almost right before the show. Even though Shadow of the Road is still in development and it will take a long time to even have an early access version, we figured we have to seize it and gather as much feedback as possible to make sure we haven’t missed anything. So we decided to put together three playable levels, pack two PC sets and a few booth decorations and set out to Poznań for the adventure, hoping that at least a few people would take interest in what we had to show and come by our booth for a chitchat. Little did we know about how many people were actually going to visit us during those three days. Boy, were we in for a surprise.
Shadow of the Road is a tactical, story-driven RPG game developed by Another Angle Games studio, a Warsaw-based group founded by passionate individuals dedicated to games and visual narratives. It follows the story of Satoru, a ronin with no purpose and a strong desire to rebuild his honor, and a bunch of individuals that tag along for the journey with him. The setup might sound simple, but as the entire story is set at the dawn of the Japanese feudal era, it involves a lot of decision-making and basically encourages you to forge your own path among the events unveiling around you. As you are tasked with transporting a young boy to the shogun’s residence, you will not only encounter the forces of both the shogunate and the empire, but also those of East Nippon Company, a British concern planning to get their piece of the cake among all the commotion.

The initial idea of a Japan themed game was born back in 2016, but the original concept was completely different than its current form. In its early days, Shadow of the Road was meant to be more of a logical/puzzle game targeted for mobile devices. We weren’t able to work full time on our game right away so things were going pretty slow back then. But then again, because of that we had a lot of time to experiment, review our ideas and eventually try to come up with something very new, something very different than what we previously wanted. Around 2018 we shifted into the direction that we are following now. We started working on a storyline and some prototypes in our spare time and that eventually led us to the point where we were ready to start the actual development.
As mentioned earlier, SotR has only been brought to life not much more than a year ago, and yet it keeps growing and changing throughout the days. Bringing a playable version of the game to PGA was a huge gambit, as on that stage there was no way to actually follow the story — the players were only able to play a few skirmishes to get the feel of the setting. Luckily, it turned out that these were more than enough for the participants of the event.
We really didn’t know what to expect in terms of feedback, but at least we wanted to know if we were going in the right direction. To our surprise, it just so happened that many people genuinely enjoyed the experience, praising not only the setting, but the choice of genre itself as there’s never too many tactical games. We received a lot of valuable input, catalogued everything on our way back and now we’re making sure that no bugs or irregularities stand in the way of actual fun. Because the most important feedback for us was probably the fact that people called Shadow of the Road “fun, interesting and with a huge potential”.

You can only imagine how happy we were to hear those words. Of course we do realize that the game is far from perfect (even far from acceptable, to be honest) in its current state, but hearing such comments proves to be a great boost of confidence when it comes to programming and storytelling. That’s why we ultimately believe that it was indeed a great idea to attend PGA this year and to meet so many people who took their time to play our game and give us feedback. If you were there — thank you very much for your attendance and for spending a few minutes to help us polish our game. If not — make sure to stay in the loop as we have so much more planned for Shadow of the Road.
You can find all mentions (currently PL only) under the links below:
1) antyweb
2) ithardware
3) Kupka Wstydu (podcast) (around 37:34)
4) benchmark.pl (around 11:25)
5) gry.wp.pl

