When you first enter the Terminal in The Endless Mission, immediately to your left is the Hall of Celebration. This is where we will feature the best games created by our community that are ready for you to play and remix in your own way.

Since the game’s not available just yet, the Hall of Celebration was looking a bit empty so we took the opportunity to challenge our devs to create a few community games of their own to feature. What did they create? Read on and find out.

As the name suggests, Lava Runner is our take on the popular endless runner genre. We constructed 15+ unique pieces using temple ruins assets from the platformer and set them to randomly spawn in three lanes and move toward the player. To create a difficulty ramp, we assigned weights to each piece which determined how often it would appear. We then curved up the weight on tough pieces (e.g. gates, lava) and curved down the easy pieces (e.g. squares) over time.



Hilltop Defender is a king of the hill game where you are the kart racer avatar and are defending your base atop a hill from waves of RTS Undead knights. The original concept for this game was going to be a tube-shooter, like the classic arcade game Tempest -- we ultimately decided to invert the formula and attack outward instead. You can see that we put the base up on stilts -- this allows players to attack enemies “through” it rather than having to drive around it.



We’re big fans of twin-stick shooter games, so when we realized that we already had an avatar that could shoot arrows in any direction, we knew what had to be done. All it took was unhooking the RTS controls from the mouse and remapping them to the WASD and arrow keys and spawning enemies in waves. The first prototype had the avatar firing a solid stream of arrows which was essentially a giant laser beam. While we determined it was overpowered for use throughout the game, we’re planning to add it back in as a limited-time powerup.



We can’t wait to see the crazy stuff you’ll come up with once the game’s in your hands later this year. In the meantime, you’ll be able to play all three of these games at the next public demo near you!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Publishers and developers from around the world take to the stage to share what’s in store with announcements abound.

Well, friends, we have a very exciting announcement of our own. This Thursday we’ll be taking the stage on Twitch’s E3 live stream to share brand new gameplay footage from The Endless Mission and do some live Q&A. We’ll be showing the first community-made games in action as well as some brand new mashups.

WHEN: Thursday, June 14th @ 12:45pm PST
WHERE: Twitch’s Official Channel
WHY: Because we like you

Be sure to stick around immediately after our segment because we’ve also got the 1pm slot too. Weird, maybe we’ve got something extra special planned? Maybe something else to talk about? Perhaps we’ve said too much. 🤐

https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/

It’s been two months since we first announced The Endless Mission. Since then, we’ve made a lot of progress with The Terminal -- our hub world -- and thought we’d share some highlights of how it’s evolving!

First, let’s take a look at concept artwork that captures our end goal. The Terminal’s aesthetic is extremely bright and almost ethereal with lots of natural light streaming in through the windows and transparent glass.



When we announced The Endless Mission, the Terminal was still early in the development process. In the images below, you can see elements starting to take shape such as the construct area gate and the trees, but note that the lighting and shadows are quite a bit darker and harsher than where we’re heading. There’s a glass ceiling but we’re still missing the tall, narrow windows that wrap around the entire building.



In its current state, you can see we’re a lot closer to the look and feel of the concept art. For this most recent update, we made changes to three key areas:

• Architecture
  
• Lighting
  
• Custom Shaders

Architecturally, perhaps the most striking additions are the windows above the central area and the cascading windows. These windows let in a lot more “natural” light and in turn create bounce lighting which substantially brightens up the scene.



We also added a statue at the front of each of the halls. The custom translucency shaders for these statues afford a small amount of light to shine through them -- this serves to illuminate the object itself and also adds to the overall lighting in the scene.



Additionally, we refined our light baking process to accommodate the new architecture and simulate more accurately how the lighting bounces off of the direct surfaces to illuminate the darker areas.



We’re really happy with how The Terminal is coming along and this is just the beginning...

Got questions for us? Leave them in the comments below or hit us up on Twitter!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/

One of the most fun parts of creating your own games within The Endless Mission is the ability to fine-tune the gameplay to your liking. This includes everything from cosmetic customizations like color and lighting to gameplay elements like avatar jump height and enemy AI. You’ll access all of these customizations using the Modding Tool.

The Modding Tool allows you to modify parameters of game objects within a game -- all in run-time. To access the Modding Tool, you’ll pause the game and, using a simple graphical interface, modify many aspects of a game’s Avatar, Scene, and Gameplay at the click of a button.

Once you’ve made the changes you’d like, hit “play” and the game picks up right back where you left off. The Modding Tool is available in any core gate game, mashup as well as community-made games. Our goal is to create as much flexibility as possible in tuning the games.



Each set of variables has a number of parameters that you can modify - from the size of your avatar, the damage enemies deal, to the fog and weather. Below is just a sampling of the individual parameters you can modify with the Modding Tool. As we expand into more genres, this list and the possibilities of mixing them together will grow exponentially.

Platformer

• Avatar -- max health, invincibility duration, top speed, acceleration, deceleration rate, turning rate, scale, dash duration/speed/damage/cooldown, dash enemy knockback, jump height, double jump height, headbop height, headbop attack damage
  
• Gameplay -- time limit, red fruit healing, golden pineapple healing, weasel attack damage, weasel view cone length/FOV, weasel pursuit speed, weasel scale, weasel attack damage
  
• Scene -- gravity, fog color, fog density, light color, brightness, time of day

Kart Racer

• Avatar -- max health, hop height, scale, speed before ramming, ramming damage, top speed/braking/acceleration/handling, drift boost amount
  
• Gameplay -- laps, laser powerup damage, boost powerup amount, boost plate velocity/acceleration/duration of boost, AI max health, AI hop height, AI scale, AI speed before ramming, AI ramming damage, AI top speed/braking/acceleration/handling, AI drift boost amount
  
• Scene -- gravity, fog color, fog density, light color, brightness, time of day

RTS

• Avatar -- Humans starting ore, faction color, building max distance from hub; unit scale, armor, max health, walk speed, vision range, attack damage, attack range, attack frequency, building frequency, mining frequency, pickup delay, putdown delay, heal rate, heal range, burn damage, burn length, building health/cost/training/research
  
• Gameplay -- Undead starting ore, faction color, building max distance from hub; unit scale, armor, max health, walk speed, vision range, attack damage, attack range, attack frequency, building frequency, mining frequency, pickup delay, putdown delay, heal rate, heal range, burn damage, burn length, building health/cost/training/research
  
• Scene -- gravity, fog color, fog density, light color, brightness, time of day

Got a question for us about the Modding Tool? Leave it in the comments below or drop us a line on Twitter!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/

If you played our last game, Never Alone, you undoubtedly remember the sounds and the music - the delicate crunch of snow under Nuna’s feet, the elegant piano of the main title theme, and the wind whipping through the snow-ravaged landscape. Impossible Acoustic’s Brendan Hogan and Jamie Hunsdale created a truly awe-inspiring soundscape for the game, and we were so thrilled with their work that we asked them to work their magic again with The Endless Mission.

Jamie Hunsdale is a veteran foley artist, sound designer, and voice actor. He specializes in the organic creation and manipulation of audio. Brendan Hogan is an award-winning sound designer specializing in digital manipulation and synthesis of new sonic textures. Together they co-founded Impossible Acoustic, based out of Seattle.

Joining them to create the music for The Endless Mission is Catherine Joy, a seasoned composer for film and games - including the feature documentary Gold Balls, and the video game The Hole Story, which won the 2016 ID@Xbox Rising Star Award.


From Left to Right: Jamie Hunsdale, Brendan Hogan, and Catherine Joy

In taking on the audio for The Endless Mission, they identified one central challenge: how can each genre’s sound and music simultaneously feel unique and cohesive? We’ll be exploring in-depth how they’re tackling this in a future blog post.

One of the first big moments in The Endless Mission happens within the prologue. It begins by throwing a cube which summons the Terminal - the game’s hub world. The earth rumbles beneath your feet while the Terminal and surrounding world rises up around you.

To illustrate the impact that sound and music have on creating memorable moments we’ve put together a clip that features the scene with and without the sound. You may find the difference staggering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSj4eZdpa7s

We’re thrilled to be working with Impossible Acoustic again and can’t wait to share a deeper look at the audio of The Endless Mission very soon!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/

Developed through a collaboration between E-Line Media and Endless Interactive, The Endless Mission is more than a creation-style sandbox game. It’s a hero’s journey into the world of game creation.

You’ve seen the trailer. You’ve read a bit about the game. You might’ve played it at PAX East or EGX Rezzed. But how did The Endless Mission come to be?

The idea for The Endless Mission stemmed from Endless OS principal Matt Dalio’s desire to leverage the power of video games to support some of the impact goals he had with his business. When asking his engineers how they learned to code, he was fascinated to learn that their answer was almost always the same: “I learned that I could hack my games and it was more fun to hack them than to play them.” The idea of modding games as a driving force in learning to code was an enticing one. Matt recalls obsessing over world-building games like SimCity and Civilization growing up, as well as powerful tools like HyperCard, where he cut his teeth on creating his own technology.  At the same time, Matt was also diving into popular fantasy and technology stories such as Ender’s Game, Harry Potter, and The Diamond Age, enamored with the worlds they built and the protagonists inhabiting them. The vision for The Endless Mission was starting to come together.



These past experiences began informing a dream where he imagined that everyone has learned to code - learned to shape the technology around them, instead of being shaped by it.  Years later that dream sparked another question: What if creating and manipulating code within the Endless operating system could be gamified?

While Matt’s aim was to use games to inspire people to want to learn to code, he wanted to tell the story of coding as a superpower and send players on an incredible adventure into a vast, unfolding world with plenty of secrets to uncover with their friends. “The beauty of narrative games is that the story you follow can become your own,” says Matt. “Our goal is to let every player manifest their own power to their greatest ability, and discover that they are the protagonists in their story.”

With our course set for the emotional reaction we hoped to evoke from players, it was time to explore the game’s experience and design. During the early prototyping process we tried a variety of directions - from Alternate-Reality Games to gamifying coding curriculum within the Endless education products, to turning the entire Endless operating system into a game. While the ideas were interesting, we realized they weren’t hitting the two pillars we’d established as critical: a grand sense of narrative and a visually vast world. We also determined that it would be critical to create a standalone game on a core gaming platform like Steam in order to reach the largest audience possible. From here, the big spark occurred when we asked ourselves one question: what kind of game genre has traditionally been best at inspiring people to overcome great difficulty in non-traditional skills? The answer: creation sandbox games.

A common theme we noticed among creation sandbox games was that players often had to look outside the game environment to learn some, or all, of the skills required to play and create. We decided that our approach would be to build a comprehensive environment that simultaneously offered unlimited creativity and all the tools you need, all without leaving the narrative.

Rather than limit ourselves to any one genre we chose to root ourselves in gaming as a whole with the capability to create any game and any genre. To accomplish this we examined and distilled iconic genres down to their essence, which involved three elements: Avatar (who you play as), Gameplay (the genre and objective of the game), and Scene (where the game takes place). By taking these elements and combining them in different ways, you could build your own completely unique game experiences from the ground up.



In keeping with the spirit of fun, rather than simply selecting these ingredients from a dropdown menu, we opted for something more engaging: grabbing elements in the form of cubes and literally throwing them together to conjure entire game worlds. This mechanic also clearly expressed Matt’s belief in the power technology brings and how it allows you to shape the world around you.

Our goal with The Endless Mission is to provide you with incredibly powerful creation tools and take you on an epic hero’s journey through a rich and mysterious narrative. As we head into the beta and Early Access, we’re excited to hear what you think about how we’re doing. In particular, we’d love to hear your thoughts about what tools we should introduce, what genres we should explore next, and how you think the narrative might evolve. The Endless Mission is a community-driven game and we can’t wait to go on this adventure together!

Not only is Capitán BlackClaw the star of our platformer but also our very first Dev.Vlog:
👇 👇 👇 👇 👇 👇
https://youtu.be/1_XPAi01Z3o

It's been a month since we announced The Endless Mission, and oh what a month it's been! Here's a quick look back at the highlights so far.

• The Endless Mission is officially Coming Soon on Steam and ready to be added to your wishlist ahead of Early Access this summer.
  
• We premiered our first trailer along with the first publicly playable pre-alpha demo at PAX East in Boston.
  
• GamesRadar highlighted The Endless Mission as one of their favorite new games of the show and Sam Prell followed up this week with a more detailed write-up about why he’s excited for our game.
  
• Brenden Sewell, our Creative Director, sat with Shacknews to chat and live stream some gameplay, featuring mashups and the modding tool.
  
• Our team crossed the pond to bring a playable demo to London’s Tobacco Dock for EGX Rezzed.
  
• Capitán BlackClaw is available as an animated GIPHY Stickerthat can be added to Instagram Stories and more.

As we head into Early Access in late summer, we’ll have a beta first as well as some more opportunities to go hands-on with the game at local events as well as playtests. We’ll announce those as they’re confirmed, so stay tuned![/u]Until then, come say hello on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We’d love to hear what you think about the game!

The Endless Mission is more than a sandbox-style creation game. While you’re building and creating your very own games, you’ll also follow a story that explores what it means to shape the technology in our lives versus being shaped by it. From interesting characters to unexpected alliances, nothing is quite as it seems.

To bring the story of The Endless Mission to life, we’re working with a pair of incredible writers and industry veterans from Sleep Deprivation Lab.

As the lead designer and writer for Red Dead Redemption, Christian Cantamessa captured the imagination of players around the world with the legend of John Marston. He also led the writing and motion capture for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Middle-earth: Shadow of War, developing fascinating stories and characters within Tolkien’s beloved Lord of the Rings universe.

Richard Elliott is a writer and show-runner whose most recent work includes Fangbone! for DHX/Disney XD and Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance for Netflix/Henson. He’s a genre-loving nerd on fire - writing and developing projects for the BBC, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and Robert Kirkman’s Skybound.

“For me, I love the world-building,” says Elliott. “It’s about setting up this conflict between two philosophies, two ways of approaching mankind’s future, and making it as real as we can. The characters we’re creating and the events we’re describing will feel like they could actually be happening. In many ways the story of The Endless Mission will be a puzzle, and the deeper the players go, the more we want to reward them with tidbits and glimpses of the bigger picture.”

Clearly these two are no strangers to crafting epic tales and worlds -- we’re thrilled to have them on the team!