This month I’ve been working on the ending of Beyond the Chiron Gate. (Which doesn’t mean the game is nearly done, of course, there’s lots more to do to the middle.)
Victory events
You win the game by finding the homeworld of the Gatebuilders, the mysterious super-powerful aliens who built the Gate network that made your exploration possible. So far I’ve written two different events that can trigger when you find them, and I’ll add at least four more before I release the game.
Finding the Gatebuilders gives you the information you need to fully control the Gate network. The inability to visit the same system twice is actually a technical restriction (Twine grinds to a halt when you try to make it store a galaxy’s worth of data), so I decided to work it into the plot by making it the problem you eventually solve.
I’m quite pleased with the new ending events, but I’m not going to post screenshots of them. There’s got to be something I leave for you to discover when the game is launched!
End-game stats screen
I will post a picture of the other thing I added this month, though:
After the game ends, you now get a bunch of hopefully interesting stats about the game, and a final score.
I might change how the final score is calculated, but at the moment it’s the amount of data you collected, minus 50 per system visited and 100 per dead explorer. (You get a penalty per system visited because getting a lot of data or meeting the Gatebuilders is more impressive the fewer trips you needed to do it.)
(The score in the screenshot above isn’t an especially good one, as I made some deliberately bad decisions in order to get to the game over screen so I could take a picture of it.)
If you win the game, the Main Menu button is joined by another that lets you keep exploring in sandbox mode.
I went back and forth over whether to add an overall score. When I wrote Seedship I originally didn’t have a final numeric score, but it was something some of the playtesters really wanted and then appreciated when they got it, so hopefully it’ll satisfy the same desire in this game.
That’s all for this month. If you can think of any other stats you’d like to see on the end game screen, let me know in the comments!