Hi everyone,
Here's something we thought about a little while ago but did not get the occasion to do yet. Every week or so, we will discuss a theme and answer to three questions. These questions can be about anything: the Amplitude team, our jobs, our hobbies, the games of course, a particular aspect of the game and so on.
This week, we want to answer to three questions about the Endless universe. Without revealing too much on Endless Legend and Dungeon of the Endless, we think that it could be interesting to start with this subject! Jeffrey "Slowhands" Spock, our awesome writer, replied to those three questions.
3 QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ENDLESS UNIVERSE
Amplitude has recently announced 2 new games: Endless Legend and Dungeon of the Endless. Is this becoming a franchise? How did you manage to link those games?
Setting up a game franchise wasn't really part of our master plan. In fact, the original master plan was pretty simple: Survive. But even so, from the beginning we started working on a huge timeline for the Endless universe, and Endless Space only covered one chunk of it. We thought we would unveil its evolution a bit at a time, which would make things more integrated when we started working on the free add-ons and so on.
Once we started thinking about Endless Legend, which would be a high fantasy setting, the question came up as to whether we develop it in the same universe, or create a new universe with new rules. And even if it wasn't in the same universe, would we still call it "Endless" in order to maintain unity of the game titles across different genres? We pretty quickly came to the conclusion that using the Endless universe and the word “Endless” in the title would not just enrich the universe, but also emphasize the randomness and infinite replay value that we want in our games.
Of course, after we decided that, we had to work out a way to do a high fantasy-style game inside a science-fictional setting. It turned out pretty well, and when Dungeons came along it dovetailed into a lot of things that we were trying to work out in the lore and worldbuilding. We decided that we could use it to help create the link between the other two games so that the universe would be more coherent, not increasingly disjointed.
In a few months you can all tell us if we succeeded or not!
WTF is Auriga?
Auriga ended up being the crux of where the games intersect. It is a planet that has a tortured history, and anyone who ends up playing through Dungeons and Legend will get the details behind all of that. Pretty much everything else I can say has either a) already been said in the press, or b) is being kept secret for the game, so I don't want to spoil it...!
Where did you get all these ideas for Endless Space, Endless Legend and Dungeon of the Endless?
I guess it's from the first twenty years of my life, which were spent devouring anything and everything in fantasy and science fiction that I could get my hands on. I don't read as much as I used to, but I spent my youth working through pretty much everything that was printed in the genre from the 1940's up through the 90's. Add to that a healthy dose of cartoons, Japanese monster movies, comics, and many nights playing D&D when I was a kid and you end up with an awful lot of source material!
But to be honest I can't take credit for the universe, because a lot of what I do is mix my ideas with everybody else's and try to make something coherent out of them. Calling the precursor race "Endless" came from one of the designers, François, most of the Amoeba and Hissho lore grew out of ideas from the artists Ronan, Aurelien and Christophe, the United Empire style and the evolution of the Pilgrims into mystics came from Romain, etc. etc. The only stuff that is pure Jeff is the weird bits like the Horatio
We've also had amazing ideas from the community, and we have a whole forum devoted to fan fiction. We've gotten tons of good recommendations for history and lore, plus a lot of reasoned arguments to help fix some of the holes we didn't even see! Multiple hero biographies were written by community members, the Automaton faction was created with the help of panzer and Vahouth, a couple of scientists in the community helped improve the tech tree, etc. There was even a huge community effort to create a timeline called the Thousand Year War, and we managed to sneak in some nudges and winks to that in one of our free add-ons.
So the fact is that designers, artists, programmers, and players have all had input into the worlds and have helped bring them to life (and guarantee that they make sense). The final words might be mine, but the ideas and inputs come from everybody at Amplitude and in our community.
NEXT WEEK
We will discuss a new subject next week: game designers. If you have any questions about this subject, if you would like to know how they work, shoot! We will pick one or two questions left in the comments below.
Thanks for reading!
