At The Story 2012, Tom and I presented The End, and the challenges of designing a game about death. In preparing for that presentation we uncovered some really interesting stats from the game's players, so we thought we'd publish them all here. 

We've blogged lots about this game, so to avoid repeating ourselves, anyone who is unfamiliar with the game is advised to read the introductory blog post or even the game's casestudy. 

For those that know, at the heart of the game is the 'death dial' - the philosophy mechanic which reads our players and gets them closer to the game's content. As the player progresses through the game world, they are asked questions which require a binary response, and it is these answers that shift our players around the death dial's polar axis. Moving between four thought-quadrants (Truth Teller, Mystic, Awakener and Crusader ...

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In the early stages of The End we decided that the game would consist of one main platformer which housed a secondary card-battle game. At the time we’d all been playing a lot of Puzzle Quest, and wanted to create something similar for our card game. A ‘game within a game’, simple-yet-addictive, with gradually increasing complexity.

We researched a variety of card games, including LOGOS Collectibles in Second Life, Carcossonne, and Triple Triad in Final Fantasy VIII. What we really loved about Triple Triad was the simple flipping mechanic, which seemed to fit well with our light-and-shadow theme. We experimented with our own rendition of the game, played on a hexagonal board and 14 two-sided counters.

The starting rule-set was as follows:

• Each player must place one piece per turn.
• One player plays as ‘light’ colour pieces, the other ‘dark’.
• A placed piece flips any adjacent opponent pieces that ...

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The End is taking shape - Alpha was delivered last week and for the first time we're beginning to see all the game elements (Platformer, Death Cards and Thinker profile) as one complete experience - it's looking real nice.

We've also been busy telling people about it - I showed some screenshots at Winter World of Love, Paul talked about it in a recent Observer article and Edge kindly covered it in their recent feature on new game studios. It's seems to be going down really well and as a result lots of people have been asking to play it. To buy some time until the private Beta release I thought I'd post some of the game art we've lovingly crafting over the past few months.

The chosen one

The mighty Luke Pearson won the paid pitch to do the game art in mid 2010. We don ...

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The old adage that good content will always attract people no longer stands up, particularly when publishing in the scarily competitive online game space, or targeting the overly serviced teen audience. Rather dauntingly ‘The End’ is doing both.

How players will find the game and what keeps them coming back have always been the project's big questions. This post begins to answer these questions, describing the different versions of the game which will co-exist online from launch. 

Progressive enhancement

It’s widely known that browser-based games will end up in multiple destinations online, often as a result of self-initiated seeding but mostly from unofficial rip ’n’ embeds on third-party games portals. This natural distribution system creates a range of requirements which are dictated by the host site and it's community.

I've talked previously about how our games adapt to their environment - In the case of ‘The End ...

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Following C4 Education's announcement of 2011 projects (as reported in Wired, RPS, Develop, The Guardian) we thought we'd provide a bit more information about one of the two games we're producing for them - 'The End'.

Almost a year ago we started talking about a game which would explore the relationship teens have with death and religion. According to research, the majority of UK teens are now non-religious. Given that a person's understanding of death is guided by their religion, the absence of one suggests that the majority of teens are largely unsupported when trying make sense of it.

(An early concept scamp - 'The Daily Death')

'The End' is a game of self-discovery which aims to surprise and delight teens with a variety of commonly (or less commonly) held views about mortality and death. The ambition is to help them answer the same questions humans have always ...

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