Endless Dungeon is the latest release set in the Endless universe, serving as a spiritual successor to Dungeon of the Endless. The title comes from Endless franchise developer Amplitude Studios and is published by SEGA, and is slated to release later this week. The game places players on an abandoned space station where they'll be able to utilize a diverse roster of characters in a unique new take on the tower defense and the roguelite genres.
Endless Dungeon centers around two key elements: exploration and protection. As players and their team explore the labyrinthian levels of an abandoned space station, opening doors and finding exit strategies, they'll also need to move a crystal across the map, the safety of which determines the outcome of a run. The crystal can be protected through both active combat and upgradeable technology like turrets to fend off hordes of monsters that want to destroy it. The game will launch with eight playable characters, and Screen Rant can exclusively reveal an introduction for the fighter Sweeper in a brand-new introduction video.
Screen Rant sat down with Endless Dungeon's narrative director Jeffrey Spock and expert narrative designer Benoît Faguet to discuss creating the Sweeper, building a diverse roster for players, and telling a narrative through character design.
First, I would just love to know a little bit about what the process was like for you guys in general when it came to designing each character, and how the Sweeper specifically came about.
Jeffrey Spock: Typically, when we start a new game in the Endless universe, really the first thing that we're looking at is: when did it happen? Because the universe has a timeline and events and different factions, so if the game happens then, these guys can't be in it, these guys don't exist yet. So the first thing we do is try to figure out when is it happening? And then what sort of previous history does it touch on? Once you figure all that stuff out, then it's like Benoît, who's game designer, myself as the lore and writing guy, and the artists are doing a lot of brainstorming together.
And what happens is the artists will come up with lots of crazy designs, all sorts of visuals; some of them are based on factions and characters we've had before, and some of them are just artists coming up with crazy new ideas. Which is always a huge problem, because if you put a new character in the game, you have to create a new faction around them, so all of a sudden I get this big chunk of work to do on top. But it's a very iterative thing, we spend a lot of time in brainstorming. I saw the interview you did with Romain and Jean-Max, so you know about the whole galactic Western, space Western thing. So working with primarily Benoît and Jean-Max, we're looking at the characters and then thinking, "Okay, what's the archetype for gameplay? What's the archetype in a Western setting? What's the archetype in a sci-fi setting? What did the artist come up with?" And we're just mixing and matching all these things together, trying to come up with something interesting, fun, coherent, and - ideally, for me - that ties into the law of the universe in an understandable way.
Benoît Faguet: Yeah, clearly, it's a mix of different constraints we have, of course. For example, let's take Sweeper: we know we need a character that is going to be the first playable character, we have different classes of characters in terms of gameplay, so we need to fill in these boxes in a way with what we need on the gameplay side, and according to the number of character we will be able to produce as well. We have to make choices, of course. As you may know, we will have eight playable characters in this game for the release, which is already very nice, because each of them, they have their own personality, animations, et cetera.
Jeffrey Spock: Yeah, that's a good point, knowing that was part of the creation of the character and the style of the character. Like Benoît said, it's the first playable character, it's the character that you run into in the tutorial, so from my pure storytelling point of view, he's kind of a stand-in for the player. Because the player arrives in this place, has no idea what's going on just like the Sweeper does. And as the Sweeper's going through the tutorial, the player's going through the tutorial, because Sweeper doesn't know where they are or what's going on or anything like that.
So we actually had a lot of fun. Benoît and I worked on the tutorial; he came up with a whole, "Here's the game design stuff, here's what the player has to know." And then we just sat there brainstorming lines and moments and that sort of thing so that this first experience for the player and for Sweeper sort of makes sense, brings them to the saloon, and then the player's ready to start the game. So that's a very particular character role that Sweeper has.
Benoît Faguet: Yeah, I would add that we've been really far in that approach. If you look at Sweeper, and his pink gloves, it was clearly a 2D art idea; it was brilliant. It perfectly shows how much Sweeper is not at the place he should be. [Laughs] Completely lost in the middle of the universe, and he's got these gloves reminding you that he's not supposed to be here.
Jeffrey Spock: Yeah, like that's a little touch that came from the art team, but it was so good we kept it all the way through. And that's the whole part of his character where he's lost, he's always confused, he's never sure what's going on, he's never sure what to do. The stand-in for the player and also a convenient way to run the tutorial and learn new techniques and that kind of thing.
What do you think are the most important elements when it comes to building a character from the ground up? How do you maximize their potential as a character?
Jeffrey Spock: I have a very narrative-focused view on that. Dungeon of the Endless was built to be - initially it was going to be like a little companion mobile game that you play for five minutes to tie Legend and Endless Space together, and that kind of grew out of control. So the characters in there, it's still 2d sprites, with a paragraph, maybe two or three paragraphs of biography, and that's it; they were very, very light. And we took a lot more time in the development of Endless Dungeon to think about the setting, to think about who the characters were. Why are they there?
So once you have the setting, an abandoned space station built by the Endless, it's been out of action for - I forget what the final number is - 15 or 20,000 years? What are these guys doing here? If you're purely looking at programming and art and maybe gameplay, you don't care so much about that - I care deeply about that. [Laughs] And Benoît does too, Benoît was very much into that aspect of the creation. So every player has to be there for a reason. Now, it could be it could be by accident, like the Sweeper, some of them are there on purpose, there are some that maybe have always been there. So you take that, because we need distribution of gameplay types, we need a distribution of character origins, we need a distribution of Western archetypes.
And so we're saying, "Well, this guy can be this and this, and he will take that from over here." For me, it's all part of the brainstorming process, putting all these things together and saying, "Okay, this character is the healer, and before they were doing this, they were doing that, and here's why they're there.” And the healer is also sort of a mortician in the wild west town, they're like the undertaker, so we wrap that archetype into there as well.
And that's in the backstory, and then Benoît and the design guys are having fun with that, and developing all the healing systems and how they interact with the other members of the team and that sort of thing. Because a lot of the development of the game was very different from anything we've done before, a lot of the pre-production took a little longer, and even early production. So we had an unusual amount of time to talk about these kinds of things and to work on them and do different iterations of them. I'm quite happy with where we ended up, bringing all these things together into the different characters.
I'm not sure if you have anything to add to that, Benoît.
Benoît Faguet: Actually, not specifically. I'm thinking of all of these characters that are living on this lost station, you have the eight playable heroes and you have all of the other NPCs. And all of these people, it's true that they had to be as various as we could, like having aliens, men, women, robots, like in any space opera you will play or you will watch. And that's very important, especially in our galactic Western setting we want to promote.
And the Sweeper's special and ultimate skills are so fun with the cleaning theme. I'm curious about the process behind determining a character's skills in the game, like what are you taking into consideration both narratively and gameplay wise?
Benoît Faguet: For Sweeper we had this very inspiring design with this guy having his cleaning stuff on him from the very beginning, from the 3D mesh and they even started some animations. So we had that very specific look, and we had to respect that on the gameplay side. So it was very precious to us. That's why we really paid attention on the active skill and your ultimate skill to make him use his spray or his sweeper.
Jeffrey Spock: Yeah, and I guess we did for all the heroes, but they also all have, like Benoît said, there was this very comic book kind of style to the art. And so that also spills over into the skills, because when they do the active and the ultimate, there's an onomatopoeia there like, "Sploosh," or whatever, and so he hits the spray out and goes, "woosh." And so you have this sort of visual and the comic book look and that ties in with the soap suds and the pink gloves. The visuals, the skills, and the effects, and the naming and everything, there's a lot of brainstorming that goes on because you want them all to be really coherent, and logical, and obviously fun, and maybe funny when they come together.
And I'm curious what the testing phase for the Sweeper character was like, did the character go through any big changes during that time?
Benoît Faguet: In terms of graphical design, you can notice that he's got a shoulder to protect his body. He's got a couple of additional accessories we put later to make him look a little bit more like a warrior, because he started being a complete newbie, but then you will see that in his quest he becomes advanced, he is learning and that's clearly his story in the game.
Jeffrey Spock: When we do new games, if it makes sense - we do it for both internal and external use - we do sort of a comic, or like a storyboard of the player experience. And we did this storyboard from the point of view of the Cleaner. And so while a lot of the other characters came in later or evolved a lot, the Cleaner was actually one of the first ones that the artist came up with. Maybe almost the first one, it may be Cleaner and Blaze.
Benoît Faguet: Sorry for saying the Cleaner - the Sweeper.
Jeffrey Spock: My bad. [Laughs] But what's interesting though, so he's one of the first visual designs, but I think he was one of the last that was actually coded and put in the game - or do I have the sequence wrong?
Benoît Faguet: No it was not the last, actually I think the last hero we developed was probably Cartie.
Jeffrey Spock: The archivist Cartie, okay.
Benoît Faguet: She was designed already, but she didn't have her skills at the time.
Jeffrey Spock: I guess it's because I didn't play Sweeper until much later in the dev cycle. We've been playing the game for a couple of years, all the dev builds. It just feels to me like Sweeper came in much later. But maybe I'm just not remembering or maybe just didn't choose him from the lobby.
And what were some of the biggest challenges when it comes to making a really diverse roster of characters that each feel distinct and play well together?
Benoît Faguet: As I said, we had to have a minimum of gameplay archetypes - a DPS character, a tank, a support character, et cetera. And every time we designed the skills of a new character, we had to keep that balance. So if we had already a DPS character, obviously, having another one would have been maybe for later. So different classes and different Western archetypes as well. And I would say, of course, different parameters to balance in the data to, to make sure they all move the same speed, for example. So it was a process all along.
Every time we were designing one hero after the other, in a nutshell, we stayed on the look of these characters,and they were all playable, just moving around. And then we were able to change the parameters to make them move faster, or attack stronger, or things like that, and we were balancing all the processes to have the good balance in the end. But it's true that for the skills specifically, we had to be very exotic, each skill set for each character had to feel unique. That was very important to us.
Jeffrey Spock: Yeah, they're all just running around shooting, but it's very interesting when you have one character who's laying mines, and one who's buffing the turrets and one who turns into this ball of fire and things like that. I think the diversity was, in a lot of ways, a very big thing. Racial diversity isn't such a big thing in the science fiction universe, but we wanted to have gender diversity. And so this is actually the first game I've worked on where I actually had a grid of pronouns for the characters, like what's the gender? How do they present? What pronouns do we use for them? So it was actual work on the diversity even from that angle.
The other thing is, what the artists always do is you come up with your list of characters, they put them in silhouettes, and every silhouette has to be distinct, has to be clearly visible one from the other so that the visual diversity is really clear. And that's height, that's the number of arms, that's the bulk, the shape; there's a lot of different things we can play with there. And then the diversity like Benoît said of the Western archetype.
And then ideally, I like to have a diversity of speech styles. It's harder in a game like this, because they want them all to sound kind of Western, so they'll start to sound a bit the same. In other games where you don't have such as strong sort of cultural or particular pop-cultural inflection to them, you can have a little more diversity in the speech style. Here they all - Zed, maybe less, and the Sweeper less as well - but they tend to throw in sort of cowboy, Western slang and that sort of thing. So that's less diverse maybe then I'd like to do ideally, but it fits the nature of the game. So not my choice.
Who do you think the Sweeper pairs best with when it comes to making a run winning team?
Benoît Faguet: That's interesting. Sweeper is definitely very good at repairing the turrets, being a good operator, a good support guy. He's quite balanced, I will say. As we say, as a starter hero he's probably the one that fits the best with any other hero. It makes sense to me, at least, because it is the first player you play. So we want players to love playing with him.
Jeffrey Spock: Yeah, he's sort of the jack of all trades.
Benoît Faguet: So for Sweeper, specifically, that's the answer. But for the others, you know, if you look at the artificer, the big guy with the Western hat and forearms, he's got a big voice, and he's clearly like a desperado, that kind of archetype. And he's putting mines on the ground is clearly more strategic than Sweeper, for example, and he is also slower. And so for this kind of character, maybe you should complete him with someone moving faster.
Jeffrey Spock: The thing I think seems to be for the Sweeper is exactly the fact that he's sort of an operator and a good support person. So I think he's kind of fun with the gunsmith, because it gunsmith is very turret focused, and has a turret skill and extra turrets. So the gunsmith is good. But yeah, I would lean towards a more - because of the nature of the game - a more DPS-heavy. So faster, DPS-heavy.
Benoît Faguet: There is something important to notice, that it's not only making the right combination of heroes between each other, it's also choosing the right characters for the right path through the station. So if you want to face bug monsters or if you want to face the bots, it's not going to be the same choices for you. For example, if you play Sweeper, he's got this capacity to slow down enemies, so maybe slowing down bugs because they go fast, that will be clever. But on the other hand, maybe if you count a lot on your turrets more than usual, you should maybe take Sweeper.
Jeffrey Spock: Yeah, Benoît is a much more subtle player than I am. [Laughs] I don't take things like districts into account. It's too complicated for me.
Source: Endless Universe/Youtube
Endless Dungeon releases on October 19 for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.