However It Ends
The third game I am working on has been ticking along quietly for a while now. It is called However It Ends, and the pitch is short: it is a survival game, but you don’t know what you have to survive!
First it is just a city
You pick your character and some skills, then get dropped into their life. It’s a normal day in a normal city - cars work, shops are stocked, people are living their lives. You can drive across town, wander into buildings, see your home, plan out your survivalist future. Perhaps steal gear you think you might need and avoid the police - it would not go well to get caught and have to survive the apocalypse in jail!
Nothing is trying to eat you - yet. That is the point. Most survival games hand you a burnt-out world, and I wanted the opposite: a couple of hours where the world is fine, so that later you are not looting an anonymous ruin, you are looting the convenience store you drove past on your first day. That is also why the city has taken most of my time this year. Every shop is fitted out and stocked.
You set the clock
At world creation you choose how long the normal world lasts: anywhere from twelve game hours to ninety-six, with forty-eight as the default. But it is not precise: what you do not get is the exact minute. No countdown in the corner. You get a rough sense of how long you have and a strong sense that it is nearly up.
The city tells you what is coming, and it is not always right
How it ends is decided when the world is created, and the game spends the whole pre-apocalypse telling you, in the way a real city would: badly, from several directions, and with a confident wrong answer mixed in.
It comes through the news feed on your phone, emergency alerts, radio and TV, people talking near enough for you to overhear, and things you just see happening: a convoy going through, panic buying at the shops, traffic all heading one way out of town.
What changes is how much any of it gives away. Early on nothing names an ending; it is all just background noise that could mean anything. Then it narrows to a family of endings. Only in the last stretch is anything allowed to say the specifics. And some threads are simply false, which is the bit I am most pleased with: a false alarm is not flagged, and there is no little icon telling you it was rubbish. Working out which story to believe is the actual pre-apocalypse gameplay.
Your phone keeps a log of everything you were told, and helps you plan for the worst!
The Turn
Then it happens, and the city does not get swapped out for a different level. The apocalypse is here, and you have to live through it - and survive!
The people in the world are records rather than props, which means the crowd on the street after is the same crowd that was there before, tagged differently. The person who was queuing at the shop you robbed on day one is still that person. They are just a problem now.
After that it is survival, and it is finishable
The back half is what you would expect from a survival game: hunt, gather, farm, build, fortify, recruit, fight and try not to die. What I did want was an end to reach. You claim a place and start on the basics: water that keeps coming, food that you can grow, and friends to help you.
Multiple apocalypses, one set of systems
To start we are shipping a few endings: zombies, a massive flood, and an attack by an army. They are not different games sharing a launcher, they are alternate configurations of the same systems, which is a rule I am sticking to. If an ending needs its own bespoke system, that means the shared system is wrong, and I fix the shared system. Zombies and attacks by an army are similar, but a massive flood that makes a third of the map uninhabitable… what would you do to try and get the good gear that is lost beneath the waves? Can you hold your breath long enough?
Where it actually is
Not far enough to show any art, but the systems are getting feature-complete as we speak.
There is a real build, and playtests are ongoing to work out the kinks. Some real design gaps I had been walking past for months are finally getting filled in.
I will have more info within the next few months, including art!