With Arc 9 done and the story complete up to the grand finale, you may be asking yourself: What does that finale look like? And how will this game look on full release? Well, we have some thoughts to share with you on that.
The finale itself
Our Discord has been buzzing a lot more than usual about where the finale is going, and what it might entail. Without spoiling anything about the story, we want to say three things:
- There is hope.
- You can grasp it.
- It will NOT be easy.
Mechanically, the finale is going to be set up very differently than the chapters up to this point. Each chapter has given the Custodian slightly more agency than the one before it, but even in arc 9, the Custodian's agency is fairly limited. The rules completely change in the finale, and a unique set of mechanics will open up on the order of 25 different ending types. We have always intended for this story to be what you make of it. Endless Dark, from the inception, has been an ode to those of us who work - long, hard, and thanklessly, without anyone telling us what the goal is. The only way we can reasonably end that ode is to give back what the grind has stolen from both us players, and the Custodian: Choice and purpose.
As a much more successful game developer with a similar love for story says: Please look forward to it.
Art revamp
As we briefly touched on in the 0.9.0 update post, we have gotten much better at working with our artists as the overall style and aesthetic of Endless Dark has become more clear during the EA period. We have our early adopters to thank for a lot of that. The genuine feedback and earnest thoughts you give us are more valuable than gold. So, in order to make good on that faith, we will be re-evaluating every tile and graphic in the game, based on our better understanding of our own style. This effort will also touch a few other headings, not the least of which is the next one...
Meta-consequences
0.9.1 and 0.9.2 have already added a few hints as to what our intentions are for this. Choices should have consequences, even and especially if you don't expect them. Some of these things will require new art, some of these things may require more utility sections of the ship (like the recently added Incinerator). But in general, if something seems like it should have a long term effect, it ought to. Has anyone ever made the rust painting in Creeping Corrosion? What if it left a mural of rust for you?
There will be more examples of mechanical meta-consequences, too, some of which will relate to the progress of your memory core. And then, also, there's the obvious one.
Roguelite mode
We've teased this when you acquire the memory core since our first release. Do you want the ultimate in consequences? How about being responsible for the Memory Core?
One of the primary things we conveniently forget at the moment is that there are numerous ways to lose the Memory Core, which is the only reason the Custodian is not booted as a blank, naïve clone every game. We intend to keep forgetting that, in general, because it's just not fun to play 15 games and lose all your progress to a combination of inattentiveness and bad luck. Or, even worse, because you dared to challenge yourself in a game designed to be challenging. That's now how we roll. But we've been very diligent about keeping promises, so Roguelite mode is happening, and its implementation is really quite simple.
- 1.0 will support multiple profiles.
- You can switch between them at will.
- When you create a profile, you choose whether it will be a roguelite profile.
- Endless and Sandbox mode will be exempt from the loss of the Memory Core, as there is no way out of those modes except to "lose".
In addition to the Memory Core consequences, score will also be handled slightly differently on Roguelite mode. But that leads into a bit of our next topic...
Difficulty and scoring
Endless Dark was always meant to be a challenging game, and that threads through into the scores you all have been getting for most of your runs. The score is deeply intertwined with the narrative, and the headings we use for the score are very specifically chosen. However, it prompted a larger discussion among the team about difficulty, and how you use it. The discussion ended with trials of the difficulty toggles screen you've already seen in game, which we got tons of great feedback about.
We're getting ready to close that feedback loop. We're going to keep the basic concepts we have in place, and keep expanding on the difficulty toggles we have. Those toggles will have a couple of 'developer recommended' presets so you don't have to think about them too much if you don't want to. But ultimately, we like you being in control of the difficulty, and we like you being able to turn off something that's ticking you off.
And there WILL be some things that will tick you off. The beautiful thing about the toggles we've come up with is that we can make some new and radical changes to the game that you as a player can simply choose not to interact with if you don't like it. As an example: Ever though about Endless Dark, REAL TIME MODE?
Sound awful to you? Good news! You never have to play it like this. Sound awesome to you? Good news! You can play it like this as much as you want!
The added wrinkle: By 1.0, your difficulty decisions will give you a score multiplier, if your score ends up being positive. These positive scores will be persisted on your bot profile, so it will be a matter of record how many points you've accrued as Robbie, Annie, or FRANK. Negative scores will be discarded, in normal mode, for the same narrative reasons that make a positive score so difficult to get in the first place.
In roguelite mode, however, those negative scores will count.
There may be other scoring tweaks that happen on the road to 1.0 as we keep getting feedback from players, but these principles are going to continue to guide what we do.
Also, the visual representation of difficulty kinda rules:
Actual proper Steam integration
Anyone who's opened up the game recently knows that we have achievements in game. Those will be made into proper Steam achievements, including the negative memories that can make your game harder. It also shouldn't be a surprise that our art team has come up with some outstanding trading card material. So that absolutely needs to happen.
We have spoken off and on about Workshop integration in our Discord. To make a clear statement on it, we firmly believe that Workshop integration is extremely valuable, and really important for a game that, under the hood, has a decent bit of modular design already. Every event we make is the same data structure that a modder could easily copy, most of the functions we use to make them work is in a file we literally named "modapi.lua", and even our main narrative arcs are nothing more than chains of working events, most of which only call functions in modapi.lua.
Despite these early good decisions to make modding easier, adding Workshop support is liable to be a lot of extra work. So for 1.0, we will only be investigating what we can and cannot do with Workshop support, with the hope of adding it after 1.0's launch. In an ideal world, we would give you the keys to pretty much everything we are doing and letting our engine tell dozens of other stories. That is what we are going to strive to deliver. But we don't know enough at this time to promise that.
Soundtrack release
A decent number of people have asked about the release of our soundtrack. For good reason, too - our composer, Ish Fuseini, is an absolute dean at what he does. Ultimately, this is another Actual Proper Steam Integration thing that we will have sorted out by 1.0. Ish deserves accolades and proper release of his spectacular work bringing the atmosphere to life in Endless Dark.
Schedule
Seeing all of this, you may be a little stunned. How long will all of this take, with everything that's clearly in the hopper?
Well, the good news is that for most of what we've been talking about in this post, the hardest, slowest work was done in the massive amount of effort we've put in over the last 9 months or so. The finale itself will still be a big lift, but many of the other major points are easier than they might seem, simply because we've spent a ton of time tinkering with what works and what doesn't.
So, the target date (WHICH IS SUBJECT TO DELAYS AND CHANGES), is March 2024.