Endless Dark, a psychological horror roguelite, now on Steam

[soulmata]

Built in LOVE, obviously.

Endless Dark is a psychological horror roguelite-like I have been building with my buddy for the past 8 months or so. The core premise of the game is very simple: You are a robot tasked with keeping a sleeper colony ship intact. Every turn, various systems on the ship will break, and you must repair them. The longer the game goes on, the faster the ship breaks down, and it's up to you to repair it. That's it! The complications arise as you, yourself, start to wear down - your robot becomes tired, becomes stressed, and starts losing his mind. It ends up being a race to the cross the finish line before you dive into total psychosis or end up accidentally killing all your passengers.

There are no enemies, no NPCs, no one and nothing at all to help you pass the time - just the endless drudgery and toil to keep you company as you whittle away the decades in isolation, hopefully staying sane until the end.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2290890/

Mechanics in a nutshell:
* Turn-based roguelite-like
* Extremely heavily narrative driven
* Hundreds of random events to keep each iteration interesting

Since it was built in LOVE, if anyone has any questions about what methods I used or how I built it, feel free to ask. Some of it might be obvious to veterans here who use the engine regularly.

The game is currently available on Linux and Windows (including Steam Deck), and is fully playable with a Gamepad, Keyboard only, mouse only, or any combination thereof. We've paid a heavy attention to accessibility, targeting color palettes that are highly visible and suitable for a wide spectrum of play. While it's in EA, we have 3 of the planned 9 story arcs available, over 100 random events, 3 Crisis Arcs (a variant of stories), 1 custodian, and an estimated gameplay length of about 10 hours across 10 sessions (approximately 1 hour per game).

As the game progresses, the ship will begin to break down around you faster and your robot's sanity will slip. You can manufacture Modules to upgrade your robot to try and keep pace, though ultimately entropy will always win out: Your Robot will start to disobey your orders or deceive you, will succumb to insanity more frequently, and may even decide its time for his journey to be done. You need to cross the finish line as fast as possible to avoid either going completely insane or having all your passengers die.

[soulmata]

My last major update before I am leaving EA is now in! The game is feature complete, has all of the original promised narrative arcs, an immense amount of additions based on community feedback, and more. More than 1000 people have played it so far and that has been such an honor to see my story get told.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app ... 6319002829

I also now attribute LOVE in the title screen:

[BurrickSlayer]

Nice looking game with a refreshingly original idea behind it. Well done!
According to the reviews your players seem to enjoy the game as well.

You wrote that this is a turn-based game. The gameplay in the trailer looks real-time though. So when does a turn end exactly? Is it a set amount of time?

And another question out of curiosity: How did you create the level map? Did you use a third-party tool like Tiled or a custom editor or is the map generated procedurally?

[soulmata]

Thanks for the questions! Yes, it's definitely a niche game, but the people that do like it *really* like it, and we (my co dev and I) both participate in a lot of niche gaming communities so we were able to get a few streamers play it for us.

So, the game is turn based in that nothing happens without player input (outside of real time mode, which I'll quickly explain below). When the turn starts, you see the state of the ship, and you can choose to resolve or not resolve any of those tasks in any order you want. Nothing progresses without the player making a decision. You can sit there for 20 minutes deciding how you want to play things out while walking around the ship, or go exploring and looking for loot while making that call. The game does not throw any random events at you or hit you with random damage or anything like that except when you take an action. Every action you take will consume some amount of Fatigue/Stress, but only at the moment you decide to resolve that action. There are no enemies, NPCs, or anything that is disrupting you - there's just you doing an action. Walking is a free action, as it were. However, walking around is the ONLY free action - literally everything else, even opening a door, can be a trigger for the ship to respond. Once you've decided you are ready to end the day, you go your station and hit "End Turn". Kind of like Harvest Moon, if you remember? You can do as much or as little in a given day as you want, but the day only advances when you decide to end the turn.

There IS, however, a real-time mode that you can optionally enable. It is exactly the same as above, except it has a turn timer that, when it expires, just immediately ends your turn regardless of your progress through your tasks.


For the ship, I entirely wrote the level editor and designed it myself. I didn't do the art, we paid a friend of ours to draw the art for us, but I did not used Tiled. I wrote my own tiling system, and it's really awful, but it is the bare minimum that works for our game, so it is what it is.

I use ONLY 3 love libraries: SUIT, Gamera, and lightworld. SUIT is the most crucial of those - every single UI element is SUIT, but I did hack it up a bit to make it work for me. Gamera is used for the minimap - I actually wrote my own minimap first, but I found gamera's was so much more performant and easier to use. Lightworld is for the lighting and shadows.