The Endless

THE ENDLESS
You don’t know what it is or how you will, but you need to find the truth. You search from root to leaf to find that truth… where is it?
The boat suddenly lurches and the wood planks underneath your feet kick you forward. The water approaches you, cold and hateful…
The hum and the gurgling of machines around you is mesmerizing. Something here is wrong… you feel tired. You need to find that paper, fast…
The clock is still ticking, and any loss of life force will be permanent-- even if you make it back to your time.
THE BUNKER
THE TREEHOUSE
THE LAB

Brainstorming and Inspiration

When we first heard of the theme for this hackathon, “Time is Running Out,” many different ideas came to mind, with one of the most prominent being timed puzzles and escape rooms, such as “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.” From there, we also considered more literal interpretations of time, such as stories with clock motifs or time travel. After thinking about different applications for this theme for more time, however, we became especially drawn to games with more creative interpretations of time, such as Superhot, where instead of being treated as an intangible concept, players are allowed to interact with time directly since the premise of the game is that time moves when you move. We decided to incorporate both interpretations into The Endless, where players are faced with timed challenges while being able to change time itself.

What is The Endless?

Taking inspiration from all of these different sources, we ultimately decided on The Endless, a fantastical game centered around stealing time. Because we wanted time to be a tangible element at play, we landed on the idea of the human lifespan as a finite amount of time that passes, so losing time, or “life energy,” would represent aging, indicated through a gradual decrease in walking speed and a health meter. However, we also wanted there to be factors outside of natural aging to impact that time, leading to the story behind our game: the story people who have been chemically experimented on to age at a faster pace, and to combat this, they possess ability to absorb the life forces of those around them to add to their own lifespan, therefore making them immortal, or “endless.” When the game first begins, we are in the body of a character who had been attacked to forget the cause of the apocalypse and their life’s work. When exploring the bunker, we find camera screens showing how, even though most of humanity has been wiped out during the apocalypse, the Endless are still thriving in their own communities and benefiting from the time they’ve stolen. However, we also find a bomb set to detonate within 5 minutes, along with journal entries scattered throughout that take us back in time. Through the various memories we visit, our character starts to relearn this history - first discovering the existence of these immortals and seeing how some are hiding in self-imposed exile in the woods because they are resistant to the idea of killing others for time, then seeing how other immortals have been weaponized as soldiers to take down a ship, before finally exploring the lab these immortals were created in and witnessing firsthand an argument between the immortals who do and don’t agree with wiping out humanity for their own gain. Through these memories, we are the first hand witness to both the destruction the immortals are capable of and the complexities behind their varying motivation for wanting to live longer. Within each of the memories, it is also up to the user to survive without getting too close to immortals since that will drain them of their life force, making them lose speed or freeze altogether, while optimizing the time it takes to find the scroll and get back to the present before the bomb goes off. Of course, the apocalypse did come to pass, so, with the code to the bomb gathered from secret messages left in each of the journal entries before each memory, it is now up to you to make one final moral judgment: whether to detonate the bomb and destroy the immortals, or… not.

How The Endless was made

We used Roblox Studio and Lua as the main game engine and programming language. By collaborating on Roblox Studio, we were able to have multiple people work on the same scene at once, with some people designing the assets and landscape for the different memories while others coded the logic required for the gameflow. While developing this project, we also utilized a wide range of features available within Roblox Studio, including but not limited to ClickDetector to make workspace models interactable, GUIs local to each client for displaying guiding information and pop-up puzzles, particle effects, CFrame to teleport the player, tweens for animation, and more.

Big challenges lead to great things

One of the major challenges we faced was that none of us has created a game in Roblox before, so there was a lot of troubleshooting involved in figuring out how to implements features like client vs server side GUI screens, sharing variables across multiple scripts, animating the npc movement, and making custom text boxes appear. None of us has had any experience with 3d modeling as well, so we were able to learn some basic blender while making some assets.

What we’re proud of!

We are super proud of how we were able to create a playable game with many different settings and functionalities. When we first came up with the idea, we were worried about how time consuming creating each of the settings for the different memories would be since we wanted to include both pieces of the story along with challenges to make the user race against the clock. Despite this, we were able to not only find creative ways we could incorporate storytelling into the game - from the cells in the ship to messages in the forest -, but also create the art for some of those assets and fully implement them. We are also especially proud of some of the more technically challenging features we were able to develop to make the gameplay more engaging, such as moving “Endless” NPCs that damage the user if they stand too close in front of them, the health bar GUI, and teleportation features for each of the different memories. Finally, we are proud of the artistic design and story development of the game. Even though we all came in with the primary intention of learning about game development from a technical point of view, we also pushed ourselves outside of our comfort zone to create music on GarageBand, learn 3D modeling on Blender, and take the time to create our own 2D art assets.

Developing The Endless taught us some valuable lessons.

Overall, we were able to learn so much about game development with Roblox, from testing out new components we’ve never used before to seeing how we could use existing assets to create new experiences. We learned a lot on the technical side– from the entirety of Roblox Studio to Lua scripting, and also on the art side, where we made our own original assets in Blender, Procreate, and Garageband. All in all, we learned that game development is so much more than one thing— it’s a million different aspects put together to work in a way that’s so enjoyable to millions of people.

What’s happening next time…

With more time, we would like to create additional memories to expand the story and delve more into the history between the Endless and everyday people, such as creating memories from when the Endless first learned of their powers, how they reacted when they freed from the laboratory, and how the apocalypse itself went down. There are a lot of things we’d like to do, even when time is running out…

Notable Assets We Made

3D model of the “Endless”
Images of apocalypse for the introduction
Images shown in the preview for each memory
Gifs with multiple frames for the camera footage
Gif for the final explosion
Images for the final vault and bomb puzzles
All audio soundtracks in the experience → 4 pieces in total
Creating the overall settings: while we used premade 3D models, we still designed the layout for each structure ourselves and decorated each area with assets we selected to create a visually cohesive scene