However It Ends

It is a survival game, but you don’t know what you have to survive. You pick a character and some skills and get dropped into their life in a perfectly normal city on a perfectly normal day. Cars work, shops are stocked, nothing is trying to eat you yet. Drive across town, see your home, work out what you would want if things went bad, and maybe help yourself to a few things you have not paid for. Just don’t get caught, because surviving the apocalypse from a jail cell would be a short game. Somewhere between twelve and ninety-six game hours from now the world ends. You chose how long that is. You do not get to choose what happens.

Features

• A city worth losing. The normal world is a real part of the game, not a tutorial you click through. Later on you are not looting an anonymous ruin, you are looting the convenience store you drove past on your first day, and you already know which aisle the good stuff is in.
• You set the clock, not the ending. Pick anywhere from twelve game hours to ninety-six. You get a rough sense of how long is left and a strong sense that it is nearly up, but there is no countdown in the corner.
• The city warns you, badly. News on your phone, emergency alerts, radio and TV, people talking near enough to overhear, and things you just see: a convoy going through, panic buying, traffic all heading one way out of town. Early on none of it names an ending. Later it narrows. Some of it is simply wrong, and nothing tells you which bits, so working out what to believe is the whole pre-apocalypse game. Your phone keeps the log so you can plan for the worst.
• The same city, the same people. When it happens the world does not get swapped out for a different level. The crowd on the street afterwards is the crowd that was there before, tagged differently. The person you robbed on day one is still that person. They could be dead, a problem, an ally - or a zombie!
• Three endings at launch. Zombies, a flood that puts a third of the map underwater, and an army coming for you. The flood is the interesting one: how far would you swim for the good gear that is now beneath the waves, and can you hold your breath long enough to get back?
• Then you hold somewhere. Hunt, gather, farm, build, fortify, recruit, fight, and try not to die. Claim a place and get the basics running: water that keeps coming, food you can grow, and friends to help you hold it. There is an end to reach, and reaching it does not boot you out of your own save.
• No quick-time events, anywhere. Holds are holds, or presses if you would rather, never a rhythm test. Accessibility options change how you play, never how hard it is.

On the roadmap

• More ways for it to end. Three ship at launch. Every ending is a configuration of the same systems rather than its own game, which is exactly what makes the fourth one content instead of a rebuild.
• Art. None to show yet. The year has gone into the city and the systems. The screenshots turn up when they are worth putting up.

The devlog has the longer version, and the current state of all of the above.