I'm Ryan, the game director, and in these dev diary posts, we'll be discussing everything from details about all aspects of the game - things like combat system design, our ever-growing soundtrack, behind-the-scenes technology, and our procedurally generated world. Today, I'll be sharing some of the game's earliest inspirations dating way back to 2018 when development first started!
I’ve wanted to make something with an evolving world for a while. Originally that was from a fascination with how things get repurposed by civilization over long time periods. I recall being in L.A. for E3 2014 where we were demoing Destiny multiplayer, and taking a day to visit the Getty Center (If you’re ever in L.A. you should visit. It’s free!) where they had an exhibit or Ed Rusha photographs. There was a series of photos showing the streets of L.A. changing over time, which reminded me of returning home to visit my family each year and seeing the details of my hometown grow and change, while the general shape remained the same. That idea of the world moving on whether you're there or not felt like it would be interesting to explore in a game - the player might start doing something and then return later to see how someone else had finished or repurposed it.
Originally, Never’s End would advance time by many many years with each death. NPCs would change and the shops inhabiting your towns would change. This was the origin of the rebirth mechanic that's still in the game today! However, we have since moved to a system where only a short time passes between deaths. We found that keeping familiar NPCs around better complimented some of the other game systems we had made, and it simplified some narrative problems to let us better focus our efforts.
While your shops no longer swap out during the time you are away, we do still let the world grow and react to your progression. Towns construct over time, terrain can erode, water can settle in new ravines, and the Never can spread.
If you’ve played our previous game, INVERSUS, you’ll know I like the idea of player choices resulting in persistent effects on the landscape. INVERSUS doesn’t have randomized maps, but each shot fired changes the map so you get this butterfly effect where each game unfolds into a unique battlefield. I wanted to bring some of those ideas into a tactics game. This extends back to playing Risk Legacy (which was a large influence on INVERSUS) and my original idea here was that players would keep fighting on their same map again and again. The battles would adjust your map creating an ever-shifting playfield and overtime your board would look nothing like your friends', but it would be due to your player story and not due to random generation.
As Never’s End grew to be a larger game, this shifted more towards you having a large number of interconnected battle grounds, each with their own history. As you learn each school of magic, you will gain abilities with more of these persistent side effects. The result is that the world is rather stable in early parts of the game, but as you grow in power, you are more likely to have permanent effects.
It was very important to me that we make a game you could replay and still face interesting decisions about what to do next. When making a game, you need to play it a lot - again and again - so I find this to be a feature that benefits both the player and the developer. This led me towards procedurally generated worlds. I also really liked that this made the game less solvable. You can't just look up what to do next, but instead you need to engage with the systems and learn how the game works. Adding this to my prior goals of wanting the world to evolve and be modified by player actions, it meant everything needed be very dynamic and reactive.
I needed to write systems for flowing water, eroding terrain, and dynamic weather with temperature, humidity and wind. This meant learning (or re-learning) all sorts of geology, geomorphology and meteorology. I found the interconnectivity of all these systems to be fascinating, and started reading books like Annals of the Former World and subscribing to every science podcast I could find because everything felt ripe for gameplay. I just needed to find the right simplified rule set which would later become the foundation of our magic system.
I was also inspired by a talk that the developers of Legend of Zelda: Breath of Wild had given. They had similar goals of letting the player interact with simulations past standard physics gameplay and they referred to this as their Chemistry Engine.
Around the start of the project, I had been reading the Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin and the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. Both of these had strong influences on the game, but I want to focus on Sanderson's concept of Hard Magic. Hard magic refers to when a magic system has clear limitations understood by the reader. It becomes an interesting tool that characters can use to solve problems and is more grounded than Soft Magic which can basically do whatever the author needs.
Thinking along these lines is what made me want to try making a magic system that was more foundational than I'd ever seen in a game. For example, our fire magic is very different from the series of arbitrary fire-themed spells seen in other RPGs. In Never's End, you only learn one fire spell. It lets you move temperature from one location to another. It sounds simple, but because of the weather simulation, it explodes into a complex set of tactical options and you need to be smart about how you use it or you might just blow yourself off a cliff.
That's all for today. Let us know what parts of the game you want to hear about next in the comments, and join our Discord server if you want to discuss the above!
- Ryan