Endless Reality Finally Released
Author: thothonegan
Tags: gamedev endless
Endless is finally released! Here's the relevant information:
- Main Page - http://hackerguild.com/games_endless.html
- Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/688900/Endless_Reality/
- Itch.io! https://hackerguild.itch.io/endless-reality
- Soundtrack on BandCamp: http://hackerguild.bandcamp.com/
Ok, now for some reminiscing.
commit 03c348be952383d79e69f623c309d47713aa8d9a
Author: Kenneth Perry (thothonegan)
Date: Fri Aug 30 21:40:54 2013 -0500
Start of new endless using wolf
4 years ago, I started working on an RPG using my (at the time new) low-level engine Wolf. Now granted, it was using Gail about a year before that (2012-09-08 according to a screenshot) but thats the real starting point for what became Endless and Tek.
For anything I've worked on for long periods of times, I always tend to fail over and over again until I break through (or fail completely). When I started writing engines, I must have went through 20 engines before ending up with Gail (my first major engine, which I used for 5+ years). Similarly, I have always been working on game projects, most of them RPG engines. Projects like RPE (the RPG engine), were rewritten over and over again, until I ended up with Tek (the current RPG engine which powers Endless). Even learning how to do graphics and music has been a journey over years of trying over and over again until finally I can do something at least usable. For this game, it was the combination of Wolf, Tek, and Endless before everything clicked.
While there was a tiny amount of work on Endless using my previous engine Gail, the git repo started with the version using Wolf, so thats the easiest thing to go by. Most of the last few years has been full time, which has been quite hectic when you have no idea if you'll even get it finished.
RPG's really are a lot of work. You have so many ideas to put into it, and so many storylines to fit in. And while the logic and code isn't too hard, most of the work is content content content. And that really adds up (some statistics are at the end of this post to get a feel for it).
Time is weird at this scale - it seems just yesterday starting on it, yet it also seems forever ago. A project like this becomes your life. It's the thing you're always spending time on, and when you're not, you can't stop thinking about it. Everything you do ends up being related to your work, or gives you ideas for things you can add or storylines that could happen. You also start thinking about giving up, or wanting to tackle other ideas. Or even in the last month, thinking up a new way to do materials and why not rewrite everything core to graphics right before release! (spoiler: I didn't for obvious reasons).
Hard to say what will happen from here. Definitely plan on spending the next bit fixing up issues that come up. But then after that, it's up in the air. But I have some ideas...
Some statistics from the game (Endless/Tek, not counting Wolf at all):
---------------- Statistics for Endless ------------------
# Cloc
2372 text files.
2343 unique files.
255 files ignored.
http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.64 T=8.16 s (260.1 files/s, 40258.3 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
YAML 567 1627 516 122191
Lua 873 18641 7953 55252
C++ 210 13624 5074 41761
Wexpr 115 2680 190 14686
C/C++ Header 265 6731 18306 11556
CSS 2 303 46 1386
HTML 3 23 24 1337
Ruby 11 299 147 1335
CMake 53 262 315 1040
ERB 4 119 0 538
Bourne Shell 10 56 16 141
JSON 7 0 0 100
XML 1 5 9 24
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 2121 44370 32596 251347
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# File statistics
Abilities: 64
Characters: 61
Entities: 202
Items: 153
Maps: 293
Materials: 26
Sprites: 165
Status Effects: 13
Tilesets: 20
# Built files
Lua files: 848
PNG files: 831
Yaml files: 498
WAV files: 110
Wexpr files: 108
# Source files (Endless/Tek)
CMake files: 43
CPP files: 211
HPP files: 265
KRA files: 236
MMPZ files: 74
Git Repo Lifetime: 4 years
Git Commits: 2720
CI Jobs Ran: 12567
Number of Games: 1