It's finally here, friends. There have been a toothgrinding number of delays, but today, we are proud to finally present you 1.0, the full release of Endless Dark. We'll dive straight in.

Metastable

The thing everyone's here for - the final arc, named Metastable, is in this patch. For 9 arcs, you have done little but learn and react. In the first 3 arcs, you learned about yourself. In the second 3 arcs, you learned about the ship. In the last 3 arcs, you learned about the mission. No more reacting. No more learning. No more passivity, and no more tomorrows. Now... is the time for action. With 21 different potential endings (which have a massive 16,500 words collectively), Metastable is when you, and the Custodian, take matters into your own manipulators and become the change you want to see in the universe. And the endings aren't just the only twist thrown in - prepare for fundamental changes and unforeseen consequences. You will require the perks you've earned, the modules you've built, and all the ingenuity you can salvage to complete. Metastable is more than just a victory lap, it is a final exam of your skills and your will to power. Own your decisions and own the future you carve out. This is your moment. Never let it go.

OST Release

We've had many requests for the fantastic OST, composed by Ish Fuseini, to be made available on Steam. We are just waiting on Steam's final approval to put up the soundtrack as optional DLC. We expect it will be available within a day or two, it's just waiting for Steam's reviewers to approve it. Thank you to everyone who has consistently followed up on this point, and has provided input on how to best handle the soundtrack's release on Steam. It's been a huge help!

More Nightmares

We've included another 2 new nightmares in this release, bringing the total up to 14. The algorithm for serving up nightmares has also been further tweaked to make them more unpredictable, while still making sure that you see at least one in a normal game.

First Discount

Just in time for the winter sale, we are keeping the price at its EA low, and discounting it further, to give everyone who has been watching a chance to pick up the game. As we have always noted on our EA notes, the price will be going up! You can expect to see a price increase in January. For now, though, give the gift of existential horror for the holidays, or something!

The first major mod

We've been putting in a lot of work over the last few patches making sure that the modding framework is both functional and well documented. This has culminated in the first major mod that we're delighted to showcase: Say hello to Ellie!
As an early personality experiment, Ellie is dogmatically dedicated to ship protocol. The mission commands are there for a reason, and we ignore those reasons at our peril! This well-structured mental modeling makes it easy for Ellie to feel actualized - all personality gains from events are doubled, so gaining the top tier perk, with its stabilizing and stress-curing glory, is that much quicker and easier. However, this rigid thinking makes Ellie prone to memory-holing anything that does not adhere to the laws of the ship. If Ellie ignores a task for too long, it will be entirely forgotten, and the task simply becomes a gray blur of question marks.
If it wasn't up to code, it wasn't that important, anyway! Head on over to the Nexus to give Ellie a go. We do have a known bug where Ellie's end screens do not show up appropriately on the character select screen. This is on us as the devs, and we will be fixing very soon. We caught it late in the dev cycle and did not want to risk crashes by changing it at the last minute. But, as always, we remain dedicated to helping out anyone who wants to try their hand at modding!

What's next?

A couple of things. First and foremost, we will be taking a bit of a break. Soul and myself (Coolguy) have had in immensely trying year, as we have periodically reported in these news updates. It has been many months since both Soul and I were healthy and not worried about fulfilling commitments we've made - and frankly, we need some time to decompress. The holidays for us will largely be spent playing video games rather than making them, hugging our families, and eating hearty. As part of this, we have both been known to stream on Twitch every now and again. Salient information will get posted on our forums if you would like to follow us so you can drop in. Secondly, we haven't forgotten about the single major feature we haven't gotten in the game yet - the roguelite mode. Upon discussion, we realized that to do this best, we needed to enable multiple profiles in the game. That is a decently sized lift, and we were uncomfortable with delaying the completion of the story any further to put it in. This feature, along with bugfixes or modder requests, will comprise a series of 1.X patches that everyone can expect to see in the coming months. We also still have a few insanity and nightmare ideas that we want to implement. I, personally, also want to revisit the Endless Mode a little bit in 1.X. The Endless Mode currently is a solid offering, but there were a number of hints and atmospheric points that I feel aren't hitting quite the way I want it to. It will require some guess and check, but I have a good idea of how I want to go about this. Above and beyond that, a Mac release is also in the cards. Endless Dark relies on an entirely open-source resource chain, so there is no major technical issue blocking us from releasing on Mac. The real problem has always been logistics; especially in the last 12 months, when we were struggling simply to get content done, we simply didn't have the time to research, publish, and support a completely different build for Mac. With changes slowing down, this is more doable. Ultimately, though, something that a lot of people have asked us is both very heavy, and very flattering: Will there be a next game? In one word: Yes. Despite all that life has thrown at us, Soul and I have really enjoyed working together, and the team that has grown around this project has been a joy to work with. We have literally a dozen interesting ideas with design documentation internally, and we've boiled them back to a couple major candidates for development. Failing even more severe tragedies than the ones that impeded us in 2024, Little Light Studios will be back with another game. However, while we may do something else in the Endless Dark universe, there's no plans for an Endless Dark 2. Endless Dark was always intended to be a single game, and we think it works really well as we've presented it. Now, can you expect bold writing, curious mechanics, a focused gameplay loop, and interesting ideas? You bet! We will keep everyone as posted as we can through news updates on our next project as we make progress on it. Until then - carpe diem, Custodians!

[ 2024-12-19 06:04:05 CET ] [ Original post ]