The End Of It All

Play as a disgraced cultist as you try to convert the members of a small Mid-Western town.

The End of It All was a collaborative effort of 22 EAE students, who wanted to make a game about starting a cult.

Engine - Unreal Engine 4.XX

Roles - Narrative Designer, System Designer

Prototyping

I came onto this project after it was done with its prototyping stage. It had a very strong base which you can see here in this trailer.

What I really liked about the prototype is how open ended it was and the number of conversations you could have even when it was limited to just 3 people in the store.

I was deeply impressed by the relationship system integrated into the game, seeing immense potential for its future development.

System Design Work

Insanity

If you see in the gameplay however, there's not much of a challenge or any real stakes. You go around and talk to people until you can convert them. I think it's a really great starting point, but I could see it turning into a spam fest of going up to everyone spamming dialogue and hoping the convert button changes color in order to win.

For the final game, I knew we needed to have obstacles and challenges for players to prevent this spamming issue, but the idea of finding new information to unlock new dialogue had to remain the heart of the game.

This brings me to one of the first changes I proposed. An Insanity system. This concept was inspired by both the thematic elements of the game and the desire to encourage players to engage more thoughtfully with the dialogue.

The theme of the game is very Lovecraftian and gaining more information or engaging in the dark arts in those stories always brings people to insanity, which I thought we should incorporate into our game. Players when presented with a theme have certain expectations that feel weird if not included and insanity was just one of those things.

This would also force players to pay attention to the character relationships we had built and make players stop spamming convert on everyone as it would do them more damage than good.

The basic idea behind this system is that converting a character into a cultist is a constant process as that character would have to have a minimum insane threshold in order to be converted, however if the insanity bar fills up that character is killed. Characters can be influenced by taking control of others and making use of the relationship dynamics to convince people that the cult is real with closer relationships having a larger impact.

However anytime a character being controlled by the player uses one of these options to influence other non-cult characters, they will have a small raise in insanity with more powerful methods of showcasing knowledge increasing the insanity bar faster leaving them closer to death.

This system would keep that core concept of collecting knowledge and finding out the relationship dynamics front and center while also creating an objective for the player to convert people as efficiently as possible and to encourage players to use all the characters present in the game and look at them as separate entities instead of just a renewable resource they can burn through.

However, keeping insanity as a way of just preventing the players from spamming options felt limiting and punishing. I wanted to do a little more with the system to make it a resource that could be both a bane and boon. It's an idea introduced with the minimum insanity threshold to convert people, but I wanted to build upon that a little more and make the game more dynamic.

I didn't want players to save scum and want to reset the game if a character had too much insanity, I then came up with the idea that some actions could only be done if the character was insane enough to do it like reciting the Book of Demons to someone. This is an area of effect move that would make other characters in the area also be influenced so it becomes a good way of using that character to push forth your cult, so it becomes this interesting choice for players to consider.

This also helped with the ideation of the next system.

Change the World

This mechanic was born from playtesting the initial prototype. I was told that I had more cult members in my team, I could switch to them at any point and play, but I wanted the world to react to that progress.

The game needed a way for me to know at a glance that me plan to take over this town was working and that I was getting somewhere with it, which is where the Change the World came into play.

Change the World is one of the interactions that players can do to influence other people and increase their insanity bar. What it does is that it changes an item in the world to have a darker influence that affects everyone in the store.

There's a distinct visual difference as well so it's clear and obvious at a glance that a change has occurred. If you use more of these, you see that people can be influenced faster using other techniques as well.

It just felt like a natural way of trying to convert people that built upon the system that we had in place already. I also felt that by giving players visual feedback on their actions could also be a great way of incentivizing them to explore the levels more and discover more ways of converting. That would keep that core principle of discovering new information to use more efficient means to convert people to the cult.

Narrative Design

Now with a game like this you need an interesting cast of characters to maintain players attention and to be able to create this web of interactions between all the characters that the world feels cohesive as well.

Due to time constraints, we weren't able to put them all sadly, but the ones that we did put in had an interesting relationship and dynamic that made writing them a lot of fun. As we narrowed down the characters, we needed to make relationships clear, so we came up with a system of having the characters placed in the game have Personality Traits which would influence what things convert them the most, and who are their friends/enemies which would also affect how much influence a character would have over another, with enemies being 1/4 as influential as a friend would.

I worked on fleshing out the character Dean giving him his personality traits and the relationships he had with the people in the Grocery Store Level.

Having a physical trait helped artists understand the character and they could quickly make portraits for each of them.

Due to my work on the initial work on the book of NPC's, I also helped make the relationship chart.

Now while the chart does look easy, I had to think a lot about the various kind of interactions and see which personalities would gel well with each other and what kind of interesting stories could be told between them.

This was based on the next document that I'll showcase.

Relationship Chart

Now that I had the characters we were going to use and their locations I wanted to create a guide for how these characters could be converted. Ways of converting were divided into three distinct categories of Relationship, Enviromental Interactions, and Item Delivery.

Went through the levels and characters and came up with unique ways to convert all characters based on locations, relationships, and personality of said characters. It also has breakdowns of how much Insanity/Corruption Points it would take to do each action.

I highly recommend opening a new tab to view it as it's a lot of data.

Criticalpass.drawio

Due to how dialogue intensive the game was I also got a chance to do a lot of dialogue writing present in the game.

Dialogue was a bit of a struggle to find out, how to show it off. We tried using excel sheets, word documents, and more, but we eventually came across Workflowy.

Workflowy which could let us do branching dialogues and break up conversations between people if they were converted or not in an easy simple to parse way, which made implementation for the Engineers much easier as well.

I was responsible for most of Amelia's interactions and some of Dean's as well.

What Went Wrong?

Well, I'm pretty happy with the work I've done on the game, I do feel that we missed out on making something truly exceptional. I believe it's important to look into pitfalls and mistakes amde, so I can avoid trying to make them or see the warning signs on the wall.

These are just some of the reasons I saw and believe why we couldn't make this into a proper GOTY contender.

Producers wanted to polish the level before moving onto the rest of the levels.

In theory this isn't a bad idea, but by denying parallel working on multiple levels especially with a team size this big felt like a massive mistake.

If you look at the diagram for converting people, you can see that I had finished how interactions would go on with other levels and the different interactions that could happen with the scoped down list of characters as well. We had some white boxes for future levels present, but the producers wanted all hands on deck for the market level. There was only so much we could do at that point, so it became a major blockade.

How to fix it?

We should've pushed back on the producers a little bit and tell them that we could work on other levels. We could start modeling of the characters, white boxing, and creating basic interactions for the players based on the systems already in place.

I will mention however is that I did try to whitebox some of the otehr levels, but was told that we already had designers working on it.

Engineers were the only ones who could Implement Dialogue

Had this been a smaller title or not as dialogue heavy this would've been okay but given how dialogue heavy the game was. It would've made sense to have the narrative team be involved with implementing dialogue. It's not that the narrative team didn't want to learn, we learned the first two implementations of the system, but the Engineers kept changing it. They eventually stopped explaining the system to the narrative team saying they'll handle it, and it was too complex.

How to fix it?

The narrative side should've stepped up more and demanded to know how to use the dialogue implementation even if it was as confusing as the engineers were making it out to be. This would have freed them to work on other systems and polish the code of the game.

Kept changing the Win/Lose Condtion

Throughout development of the game, we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted the lose condition to be. If the cult reaches a certain level of insanity the game would end. The initial idea with Insanity was that an average insanity would be calculated based on the number of people in the group so people with higher insanity would be used till they go fully insane and kill themselves as a sacrifice which would reduce the average insanity, but also prevent players from using that character to change people in the future.

Our win condition was initially to convert most members to the cult, then it shifted to converting everyone in a room. While not a bad idea I felt that it held back a lot of our more interesting ideas.

How to fix it?

I'm not sure how I would fix it given the way we worked this time. I think had we been able to reach the number of levels we wanted it could be worth looking into more and made for a unique experience, but for the cuts and down scoping we had to do it was the right decision even if it made the game not as enjoyable as it could've been.

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