All good things must come to an end: Victory in our game

Good day, fine Sirs and Ladies!

Welcome to our fine Blog once again. This is one of Mythwing’s Developers, Searonik, And I would like to explain a little bit about what we’ve been brewing on the back burner as we get out game into a state where it functions. As you may have guessed, I wanted to specifically cover our end-game; Where it is all headed, and what it will be like late game.

Now, I would like to remind you, this is not a final decision, just a direction we wanted to take. We want the player to have a choice, but the goal of the game is to survive. But survival is a never-ending struggle. So, how do you measure how you “win” at something that never ends.

The answer is, you don’t.

But all good things must come to an end. Many people will make their own goals. Some people will want to keep going forever. But, most people will play to achieve. And we want there to be defined goals.

Take for, example, Rimworld. We take huge inspiration from this game. Rimworld has one goal : get your survivors back into space and back home. Sure, the group of survivors may change, but at the end of the day there is a singular focus from which all action you take are derived.

Your industry, your food and shelter, your defenses, your colonists – including your recruited prisoners and refugees – all end up being secondary to this one singular goal.

The game becomes much more about that. But we too, have a focus – survival. Survival in a hostile world as a species with the threat of extinction looming over it. This us bit a goal with an end. Because Rimworld, too, has survival. So there has to become something greater.

And that, in our case, is securing your colony as a permanent political entity. Ambiguous as it is, becoming respected enough that your survival is no longer threatened is a valid goal. It means, at least for the foreseeable future, your kind is saved.

That is, in essence, still survival. And that is the goal. This leads to many possibilities. This leads to the option of diplomacy, making alliances. Perhaps growing so large that your group becomes a bastion of success and might that threatening it becomes no longer an option. Or maybe you wipe all of these hostile creatures form the earth, exterminating humans because they are a threat. We had a few ideas, and we think this is the direction we want.

But to do that, you must not just survive, but thrive. Which is the real meat and potatoes here, what will be drawing people back in. That is our challenge. The goal is to become so powerful that you no longer risk being wiped out. Not the concrete goal of say building a spaceship, but it is a goal that we can give concrete conditions to. And it gives the option of letting the player choose how they will survive.

To do this, we will have a lot of work to do. This is just an idea, but it’s something that, even in simplistic form, gives people the power to shape their own destiny. We’ll have to flesh out how the human factions work, and how to earn respect, it will be a long road. But in any game like this, it’s about the journey, the fun you have just playing the game, more than the destination. The destination is there for it’s own end, it is a focus. So it can be whatever. But we like the idea that the player gets to choose, and while it may not be some clear-cut ending, we need to have a sense of victory, and where the struggle is over.

And that struggle is over when you have a victory. A victory over dying out. And that is why we are looking at these kind of win conditions. You lose when the colony dies. Simple enough. These two foci are what give our ideas form, though. And to reach them, the player must deal with their primary threat – the humans. And that, my friends, is a story for another time.

I hope you all enjoyed this blog, thank you for reading. If you aren’t already. please follow us on twitter, or via e-mail though the hand links on the right-hand side of this page.

-Searonik, Developer