'We have more levels than players'_ This indie dev's game was a complete flop, but he's powering thr

Endlight - Official Trailer - Solid - June 2023 - YouTube

I was initially attracted to , a weird indie game about getting hoops, by its intense, almost overwhelming trailer, but what hooked me were the less obvious but very clever bits lying beneath its sensory onslaught: Levels are punctuated by odd, sometimes very funny chunks of text that made me feel as though developer Jim McGinley was watching and talking in the background as I played. I also loved the game's central conceit: Every level can only be completed once. After it's done, it's gone forever.

The twist is that once a year, Endlight offers a , the reward being an in-game "coupon" allowing the holder to play Endlight again—but just once, from the very beginning—at any time over the following 12 months. It's twisted, completely counter-intuitive, and to McGinley, extremely funny: He acknowledged that a lot of players would hate the idea, but added, "I think people will come around to appreciating the humour."

Some no doubt did. Endlight has a "positive" user rating on Steam, which is good: The bad is, that rating comes from just 28 reviews. Endlight launched on Steam in July 2023, and put up an all-time peak concurrent player count of—it almost physically hurts to say this—. Endlight, McGinley said earlier this year, has more levels than players.

"Still the case!" he told me in a more recent chat. "After returns, we're at ~325 sales. Endlight has 16 seasons, 400 levels."

Endlight launched with 100 levels, but they're very short: Some of them can be completed in a matter of seconds if you're lucky. McGinley's plan to keep people playing was to release monthly "seasons" of 25 levels each, all of them free, bringing the total number of Endlight levels up to 500 when all were finally out. I wondered if he might be having second thoughts, since nobody's playing them anyway—two people have made it to the end of season eight, just one has completed everything so far—but that's not happening: McGinley committed to 20 seasons, and he's doing 20 seasons.

It's not just a sense of duty or bloody-mindedness keeping him on the job—there's a practical justification, too. "Since you can't replay Endlight, we committed to providing free seasons," McGinley explained. "After a year, we're still supporting a failure—a feat even No Man's Sky can't claim.

"At launch we planned for this failure scenario by creating 80% of the free seasons ahead of time (400 unpolished but playable levels, ~3 years of work). The idea being any demoralization caused by lack of sales would be offset by the need to ensure all that upfront DLC work didn't go to waste. That plan is working! Without this DLC albatross, we would have run far, far away—at least as far as $2,430CDN can carry us."

It's not just new levels that are being worked on: McGinley is also following through on the Right to Replay challenge—in fact, work on that has delayed the release of Endlight's final four seasons. Roughly 50 people tried the 2023 challenge but nobody was able to finish it, so he's toning things down so someone might actually get it done this year. His rationale for tuning a challenge in a game with no players is very similar to his reason for persisting with Endlight seasons: "Implementing that challenge took roughly two months of work (coding, Q&A, tweaking, making it unhackable) and I can't let all that good work go to waste simply because no one will play it."

McGinley's sense of humor shines throughout our conversation, and can also be seen in an [[link]] ongoing detailing Endlight's failure, where he shares sales figures, player numbers, and other thoughts. ("The comments are much more civil than when I first started," he said. "No sales, but I'm winning hearts and minds!") But he's under no illusions about the current state [[link]] of the indie game business, which he said has changed dramatically in recent years, in part because platforms like Fortnite and Roblox enable game development without the learning curve involved with conventional game engines like Godot and Unreal.

"There are already indie devs creating hit games with huge audiences [on those platforms] that dwarf the traditional indie game space," McGinley said. "Could you create a successful Endlight within one of those ecosystems? I'm betting yes. I'm not sure where that leaves indie game developers working on Steam and console. I'm guessing more and cooler projects experiencing less and less success."

Endlight - Season 16 (of 20) - August 2024 - FREE! - YouTube

Despite Endlight's failure and a shift back to his "real skillset" as a commercial full stack engineer, McGinley said he's "not finished with this videogame nonsense." Along with wrapping up the remaining four seasons of Endlight, he's also looking for a publisher for an all-levels-included console edition, and dabbling with a VR version. And at the end of the day, he has no regrets, except that nobody bought the thing.

"While Endlight definitely (by ANY measure) did NOT work out, I'm insanely proud of how the game turned out," he said. "No regrets—likely because there's nothing we would have done differently. Most things that failed (reputable publishers weren't interested, no money to pay influencers, no coverage, the indiepocalypse) were out of our hands. Would I do it all over again? YES. Alas, finances are stopping me.

"Working on Endlight was a dream job. Not everyone gets that chance."

Endlight's 2024 will be open throughout December 9. Beat it and you'll win the right to replay the game—biff it, and you'll have the right to try again in December 2025.