A Living Language for Braided Shore
almost 5 years ago – Thu, Jul 29, 2021 at 04:03:48 AM

Dear Travellers,

Communicating with emotes is one of our favourite features of Book of Travels, and we believe it’s going to play a key role in freeing you from your everyday self and really allowing you to get fully immersed in your character and the game world. Such a feeling can only really be understood through experience, and with only five weeks until that’s possible we can’t wait to set you free to do just that! 

In the meantime, here's an outline of how emotes will be part of your character’s development, and a little look at the way that you, the new denizens of the land, will shape its future course.

Lose yourself in a new identity

When Meadow was born, we hadn’t quite expected it to work the strange magic that it did. Meadow was our first TMO and players shared powerful feelings about running for hours with a player-badger or unlocking obelisks with a player-fox. It became clear that emotes were part of the magic and that these moments shared with strangers couldn’t exist with in-game player chat.  With only symbols to communicate with players came together with a shared sense of purpose and play, forging meaning through a system of rudimentary signs. If you’ve ever visited a place where you’ve had to speak a new language you’ll probably be able to relate to this! Without our native tongue we’re freed from our familiar identity and can let other parts of our personality come to the fore. In Book of Travels you’ll be able to make detailed characters and then set them adrift to be someone new - free of the language and mindset of your everyday self.

Creating meaning together

Just as in Meadow, meaning will be made as players work together. All practical bases have been provided for by way of a ‘starter’ set of emotes, so you’ll start your game with a range of emotes that will allow you to communicate enough to get by. How you use these with other players is up to your and their creativity. This is one of the ways in which Book of Travels will be a dynamic experience - players will bring the language of emotes to life as they combine symbols to share feelings, convey intentions, and communicate knowledge and experience.

Evolving the language for you and for Braided Shore

As you journey through the land your collection of emotes will grow as you unlock the symbols and signs that correspond to the various places you visit and the encounters you have. Your growing collection of emotes will add another dimension to your expressive capabilities and we’re very excited to see how players use additions to build on ways to express themselves.

As your character grows through this language, so too will Braided Shore. Behind the scenes, this is one of many ways in which the team will absorb activity, watching the way that emotes are being used, checking for ways in which they help or hinder your fluency, roleplay experience and gameplay, and developing new emotes accordingly. Evolving this language together is one of the many ways that players will influence the world, and we’re very much in a state of anticipation at how early access will be the start of this long and exciting journey!

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Of course many people will want to find spaces and places to talk to one another in text and speech, and that’s something we’ve heard a lot of requests for. We are very keen for you to do just that and we’re looking forward to watching the game world and the community develop side by side here on Kickstarter, and also on Steam and Discord.

Have you played any games that have a special way to communicate? What do you think about our emotes design? Perhaps you’ve played Meadow and already have thoughts about it? We’d love to hear from you!

Best Wishes,

Helen & the Dev Team xx

A new release date - But it's still so close!
almost 5 years ago – Thu, Jul 22, 2021 at 05:04:33 AM

Dear Travellers,

We are almost ready, we really nearly are... but we've decided to take three extra weeks before we set out on our journey into Braided Shore.

We’ve been listening to your anticipation (it really is the wind in our sails!) and we know that some of you are so ready to get going that you’ve made launch day plans… we’re so honoured to hear it! We hope this announcement leaves you time to make adjustments for our new launch date of August 30th and here's our commitment to the very hour:

• 7pm CEST (Central European Summer Time)
• 5pm UTC (Coordinated Universal Time)
• 1pm EDT (Eastern Daylight Time)
• 10 am PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) 

New screenshots

Every detail that we check now and every final touch that’s made will make your adventures more immersive, more compelling, more rewarding. Thank you for bearing with us! Braided Shore will be all the better for these last few weeks’ attention. Below are some new scenes to show you a little bit more about where we'll all be very soon!

Be with us on our final stretch

Be with us as we try to steer ourselves away from this too-trodden path of travel metaphors onto a momentous course to early access… we have beauty and backstage treats to share in abundance, so follow our Youtube to get notified of upcoming video insights, and of course, keep your eyes peeled for a launch day Kickstarter update with all you need to know to start playing!

We can’t wait to get this game out and share it with you!!

Helen & the Dev Team xxx

Book of Travels in the Words of Others
almost 5 years ago – Sun, Jul 18, 2021 at 03:29:28 AM

Dear Travellers,

As our teams head out for summer vacations, we’ve decided to give them a break from preparing and sharing artworks from Book of Travels. Instead, we’re sharing some of our favourite articles about the game.

It’s quite incredible to me to think that not so long ago, when the name for the game wasn’t even set in stone, we’d search up ‘Book of Travels’ to find only references to an ancient Ottoman literary tradition. Today a quick internet search throws up a wealth of images and articles: some are ours, but many are the work of others, and today we want to say thanks to anyone and everyone who has ever written about or shared any news about our Online RPG.

The articles and features shared here express so well what Book of Travels is about and the ambitions we have for your Braided Shore experience. We very much value words like these – they are our sounding board, our mirror, our friend along the way, letting us know who we are, where we are, and that we’re heading in a direction that’s right and true. 

Words about the date reveal trailer

Here’s what Screenrant's Coleman Gailloreto had to say about our Date Reveal Trailer…

A close look at first gameplay

Rachel Watts at PC Gamer put excellent words to how Book of Travels differs from classic MMOs and shared our first ever gameplay video in her feature last November...

An appreciation of detailed character creation

Loren Morten at Rock Paper Shotgun took a look at the same video and enjoyed the game’s detailed character creation process...

An interview with our Creative Director

In ‘old’ media form only (we do love analogue press here at M&D) Creative Director Jakob Tuchten talked with Chris Kerr at Edge about the studio’s ”punk” ethos. 

Regular and expert angles on these Steam posts

For anyone who hasn't come across Massively Overpowered yet, we'd like to shine a light their way – Bree and Justin's synthesise of our sometimes vague and often slippery reveals have been a great read and always reassure me that we're saying what we mean to! Each fortnight they comment on our Steam post with the insight of true RPG aficionados – so get the kettle on, get cosy and catch up on our their backlog of short reads right here...

We hope you enjoy reading this selection – as always, we'd love to read your words right here… Share anything you like about the game, about these articles, or about your own experience on sharing a project with the world… We’d love to hear them!

Best Wishes,

Helen & the Dev Team x

P.S It's been a long time since we posted anything on Reddit, but we finally made it happen and you can now connect with MMORPG fans and take a look at our developer spotlight post right here, and if you're a Reddit user, we look forward to seeing you there more often in the future!

Every Traveller a Different Tale - all about stories in Book of Travels
almost 5 years ago – Wed, Jun 30, 2021 at 12:34:04 PM

Dear Travellers, 

How does an RPG look when there is no linear questing? We’ve often talked about how the narrative experience of Book of Travels is different from traditional and classic RPGs, and today I’m going to paint a clearer picture of how the game is designed so that you, the player, will go on a story journey that’s unlike any other.

Rare encounters

Book of Travels takes much inspiration from tabletop roleplay games and live action roleplay, each of which evolve story experiences from the beats of randomly generated scenarios. Readers who have ever LARPed, who like to roleplay or who’ve ever taken part in immersive theatre will know the feeling of being captivated by a stumbled-upon dramatic event. This can be even more special when encountered with only a friend or compadre, and perhaps better still as a singular and solitary audience. Scenarios in Book of Travels are threaded throughout the game world in such a way that players will not share a common set of experiences, and there’s a chance that you’ll experience a scenario which is so rare that you could just be its only witness.

The personal pattern of your journey

Scenarios which are less rare may still be encountered by only a few Travellers who, having taken their own path and honed their own world view, will interpret them in that light. Other experiences will be more common, but [b]whatever kinds of encounters you have, their course and pattern will emerge from the choices you make on the road[/b]. Since there is no linear plot through which to advance, Travellers will instead come across many story strands to weave together along the way, but not every player will hold the same threads. Essentially[b] your exploration of Braided Shore will be entirely different from that of any other Traveller[/b] and your adventure will take a shape that's all its own. 

Shifting events in a living world

Should you tell another Traveller about an exciting moment, they should know that they won’t be able to recreate that experience - events in the game are not static and cannot be depended upon in terms of gameworld time-and-space. In many ways they comprise a vast and eternally shifting collection of encounters that together form the body and soul of Braided Shore. 

Shaping chapters

One of the advantages of making a PC game based on Steam is that it allows us to listen to players’ opinions, so over the course of Chapter Zero we’ll be reading and absorbing your responses as well as using game data to observe how Travellers are experiencing and responding to the world and its stories. This insight is something we are really excited to explore, since we’ll be able to respond to the marks that you leave and the tracks you make to craft Chapter One, which we think will help us make it a much richer experience. 

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Thank you so much for being with us - we’re unbelievably only six weeks away from our launch date of August 9th! We’d love to hear what you think about our narrative design in the comments section below where our Narrative and Game Designers Dennis, Andreas and Beta will drop in and answer your questions. What gaming story experiences have made great memories for you? We'd love to know!

Best Wishes,

Helen & the Dev Team xx

Food and Drink in Braided Shore
almost 5 years ago – Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 01:42:47 AM

Dear Travellers,

Today we sample some of the culinary delights available to the visitors and denizens of Braided Shore. Among them are the rudiments of sustenance found, foraged and bartered for, as well as more gastronomical delights to be enjoyed at moments of leisure...

When it comes to food, our design is comfortably conventional, with nutrition and nourishment coming by way of breads and vegetables. And when it comes to variety and distribution, Travellers will find much that is familiar… a socio-economic pattern has been applied, with pastoral regions such as Crossroads consuming much grain and bread and coastal areas like Myr enjoying abundant fish suppers (even game designers should pay attention in Geography class).

Urban Eating

Of course the larger the settlement, the more likely you’ll be to find a variety of imported or cultivated foods, and in Kasa in particular a wide range of regional treats are yours to barter for in local and occasional markets. Among the fanciest of pleasures are Honey Marinated Boar Ribs and sublime dessert, Wanderers’ Joy, as well as a very expensive wine cheese (an exceptional item) which has been marinated in wine for reasons revealed two paragraphs below.

Foraging in the Forest

Having packed a bag full of food for fun and fuel, you’ll be ready to strike out into the wild yonder of the city’s hinterlands. Along the way there will be opportunities to purchase local and more limited food items, but you may find it more fun to forage for your supper. There are lots of edible treats growing in the nooks and crannies and even the wind strung peaks of this land, and most can be eaten raw and cooked.

Drinks and ‘drinking’

Drinks are sweet or savoury and of course a nice cup of tea is the staple of Asken life and can mean much more than a simple cuppa in both flavour and function. But ‘drinkers’ should know that wine is forbidden, being deemed too chaotic and perturbing on the spirit. Cider, on the other hand, is much enjoyed among some and perfectly permitted. But since wine is banned, grapes are also hard to come by. That doesn’t mean that the odd illegal vine can’t be found curling out of a crevice here and there, and there’s a small hatch in a wall in Kasa through which, for a price, one can be served a very fine and suspiciously grapey tasting ‘cider’.

The role playing dimension

When it comes to the importance of food in roleplay joy, there are many games to look to for inspiration, but foremost comes Zelda, Breath of the Wild (and we’ve heard from many of you in this last year about your love of Zelda!). And YES you will be able to cook in Braided Shore! That’s a feature we’ll be working on while you are playing through Chapter Zero, aka Early Access. But have no doubt that there will be plenty of cute, quirky, vile and strange foods to choose from to furnish your character with, and veggie and vegan lifestyles will of course be catered for.

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What food experiences have you enjoyed in your gaming or real life experiences? What kind of food and drink do you think you'll be on the hunt for in Braided Shore? We'd love to know! 

Best Wishes,

Helen & the Dev Team xx