Dez Boyle

The core focus of the game is the interaction system. It borrows ideas from point-and-click games and brings them into a 3D first-person perspective. If you want to pull a lever in the game, you physically click and drag it instead of just pressing a button and having it automatically play an animation.

I wanted as much of the game to be interactable, so I made a base Interactable script and subclassed that into different types of interactions.



The most useful one was the InteractableSlider. When you interact (left click + hold) on an InteractableSlider, you "grab" onto an invisible point and can move your mouse to drag it in between two points.

This brought up many challenges. I had to calculate the world-space 3D vector of a 2D mouse movement and apply that to the interactable. I also realized that most interactions would feel unnaturally smooth, so I added fake tactility curves and audio feedback to help sell the illusion. With this, I could mimic how a lightswitch flips back and forth but doesnt stay in the middle.



In hindsight, I would have liked to make this Interaction system more modular, maybe using the decorator pattern to plug together different types of interactions / tactility curves.

During my time in covid-19 isolation, I spent every day meditating and exploring in nature.  ENDO is my attempt to use sporadic and unconventional ideas to create something interesting.  From the diversity of plants, to the miniature worlds of moss, fungi and lichen, I find that nature is a great inspiration. I wanted to emulate this sense of wonder with ENDO. 

The year is 2020, and I just recently abandoned a large project that I had been working on for the past year.  I was trying so hard to make something marketable, something that resembles a game, like the other games I see performing well.  That mentality was dragging me down.  I wasn’t making something that I was proud of or enjoyed.  My creativity was exhausted.  As the snow melted and plants began to bloom in their place, I started spending more time outside, alone.  In the beginning, I went for occasional walks down a country road connected to my neighborhood.  I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did, but as time went on, it became a part of my daily routine. 

Every day, I would try to go somewhere different.  I’d go off the path, observe random plants, trees, sticks and rocks.  Every day I would notice something different.  There is an infinite amount of randomness and chaos in our universe that there is novelty to be discovered everywhere you look.  This made me realize how much I was trapping my ideas inside a box.  There has always been an infinite amount of novelty and inspiration all around me that I could capture in my games.  A game could be anything.