Month: March 2025
Language and Engine
At this development stage, I plan to write this game using Python and the Ren’Py story engine. This is because The Endless Rooms is narrative-heavy heavy and I have a little experience with Python. Not a lot of experience – the only complete project was a driver for a 7-seg display written in MicroPython.
I’m taking a few departures from your average Ren’Py visual novel.
- Art style – as I hope you can see, my art style is fairly unique among visual novels and related media.
- The narrative is non-linear – the story is not so much divided into paths as such and can be explored in a number of different ways to get a range of endings.
- The focus is on exploration – you are encouraged to explore the rooms in whichever way you wish.
- Hidden secrets – there will be a fair amount of hidden options, items, and choices.
- Attention is key – ideas, clues, and easter eggs will depend on your attention to some details.
- I like to subvert expectations – expect your assumptions to be open to question.
- Fun fibs – I like games that fib (tell lies) in a way that is fun when you discover the truth
As I begin to get into the guts of the coding, I will release code snippets and screenshots.
Exploring colouring ideas
These little dudes with the fancy masks form the bulk of the characters you will interact with. As such, I’ve been sketching a bunch of them to explore ideas. I’ve also been experimentally colouring those sketches.
From my sketch book
As I work out the visual style and designs for my game, I sketch them. Here are some photos directly from my sketchbook.
Catish
Colouring of one of my sketches.
World Map: Array decisions
I’m going back and forth at the moment on the subject of the world array. In The Endless Rooms, there are endless near-identical rooms. For what I hope are obvious reasons, I plan to go with an array of 100 by 100 rooms, which should feel like an unlimited number without actually being unlimited.
This means that there will be 10,000 rooms to explore. If I create an array to map all the rooms, I probably don’t want to load into memory the objects for every room, entity, creature, puzzle, script and so forth. I may need to map where to find those things and include in the active array, completion, changes, narrative progress, and the like.
The question I am currently playing with is how much I need to keep in memory and how much I can defer to files.
This is a key set of choices that I feel I may need to make early, as changing later could be a lot of needless work. I’ve been using ChatGPT as a coding buddy to talk through ideas (I’ll write my own code, thank you chat), which has helped me get some ideas organised in my brain. Not because ChatGPT is particularly helpful but because I have had to codify and explain what I’m trying to figure out.
Any thoughts? I’d love to hear them.
A remix of the track “There’s something wrong”
This tune is called “There’s something wrong”. I’ve remixed it but I’m not sure which version I like best.
For the logo, I gave my little masked dude a white glow so he looks better on a black background.
The Remixed Version
The Original Version
Which do you like best?
Please leave me comments and replies (or even mentions) with your thoughts. I want to know which you like. Or, if you hate/love them both, what you hate/love/etc..
Lord Matt – There is something wrong
This is a track composed by yours truly. It was created to be part of The Endless Rooms. I may not entirely be finished with it. I’m thinking about adding some EQ, compression, and that sort of thing.
Please feel free to critique, offer feedback, praise, criticise, love, or hate. Basically, I’d like to know what you think.
Sanity, darkness, and the reset machanic
A planned machinic is a hidden sanity meter. Sanity is reduced slowly over time but more quickly while in unlit rooms or interacting with the more eldritch elements of the maze. As the meter gets lower, strange things may start happening, other lost souls will be drawn towards you, and some of what you find may or may not be purely in your head. If it hits zero, you will find yourself reset to the starting room. Not everything resets when you are reset.
As your sanity reduces, your vision narrows, meaning that you may miss things on the first pass through a room.
Another effect of rooms in total darkness may be disorientation. This means you might take a side door out rather than the one in front of you.
This is a central part of the gameplay loop. This sanity and reset loop is what you are trying to escape by finding the one door that (for you) leads back to the real world.
Random early art for The Endless Rooms
About The Endless Rooms
The Endless Rooms is the working title for a narrative-driven psychological horror game wherein you, the main character, are lost in a maze of infinite near-identical rooms, seeking the one room that you can leave by while putting together the fragments of your memory to work out why you came here to begin with.
The game is inspired by a short story I wrote in early 2025.
This bloglet is where I will document my progress in making The Endless Rooms. I’ll also boost and share game-related content that I’ve posted elsewhere.
My name is Matt. I am a professional geek, sci-fi fan, writer, author, and first-time game developer. I will be grateful to receive feedback, criticism, critique, advice, and encouragement. Your replies, mentions, and comments are what I hope will keep me going.
The Endless Rooms uses the Ren’Py engine and (obviously) is written in Python.
