25,000 Humans Found Our Robots 🤖❤️

Somewhere during May, Endless Machines passed 25,000 wishlists.

That’s honestly a pretty surreal milestone for us.

So before anything else:

thank you!

Thank you to everyone who found us here on Steam, through YouTube videos, Instagram clips, TikToks, Reddit posts, or simply through word of mouth. Thank you for following along while this strange robot world slowly takes shape.

And thank you for your patience, support, feedback, theories, questions, encouragement, and excitement along the way. It means more to us than you probably realize ❤️

Preparing for Playtest #2

Right now, we’re preparing for our second playtest.

As some of you may remember, our first playtest took place between Christmas and New Year in Katame’s plains biome, and honestly, it taught us a lot.

At a very high level, what we took away was that the world, mood, mystery, exploration, sound design, and overall art direction are landing the way we hoped. The same goes for Katame’s personality and the fact that Endless Machines doesn’t constantly hold your hand. Players are meant to observe, experiment, and figure things out for themselves.

We deliberately leaned very heavily into that philosophy during the first playtest. In fact, there wasn’t even a tutorial. We wanted to see how much players could naturally piece together on their own simply by exploring the world and interacting with it. Watching players try to make sense of the world for the first time was fascinating. Some quickly started connecting the dots.

Others wandered into the wilderness completely confused for a while.

But the playtest also taught us something else:

complete freedom isn’t always automatically better.

A lot of feedback pointed toward the same things:

camera movement could make orientation difficult, controls and UI felt overly complex, inventory management was confusing, and upgrades weren’t always easy to understand.

So we're hoping to have a tutorial ready for the upcoming playtest 🤞 At the very least, definitely by the third one.

At the same time, we’ve also been experimenting a bit with scope and structure in certain areas of the game.

Endless Machines is still very much an exploration-driven game...

... and we never want to remove the feeling of discovery, experimentation, and mystery. But we are currently exploring whether certain areas benefit from slightly more direction or more linear moments here and there.

Since the first playtest, we’ve spent a lot of time iterating on exactly those areas.

We’ve improved controls, adjusted the camera (again — and probably not for the last time), made parts of the UI clearer and easier to understand, and generally tried to make the world easier to navigate without removing the feeling of discovery and mystery.

One of the bigger additions since the first playtest is the Periscope system:

an optional first-person scanning mode that lets players visually scan the environment, identify points of interest, and place waypoint markers on anything they want to investigate, all through the eyes of the robot.

We’ve also continued expanding the role of Trail.m8 terminals throughout the world. The terminals help players locate nearby points of interest, set waypoints, and sync/save their progress, acting as small navigation anchors while exploring.

The upcoming playtest moves away from Katame’s plains biome and into little robot Joule’s desert biome instead.

The desert biome is a very different place from Katame’s plains.

The desert is also where the first real boss encounter in Endless Machines happens:

the fearsome Umbra Gaze.

We’re super excited to put the next version of the game into players’ hands again and continue learning from your feedback. Every playtest changes the game, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in very big ones.

And that’s how we want to build Endless Machines:

together with the people who care enough to explore this strange world alongside us.

So once again:

thank you for being here.

Good things take time ❤️

Talk soon,

Cindy, Jonas & Gaston

We're happy to have you here

... following along as this game takes shape. Also, if you feel like saying hi or asking anything about the game, you’re very welcome to join our Discord. We’re always happy to chat and answer your questions (to the best of our ability), though sometimes it might take us a little while to get back to you. We’re a small team, but we promise we’ll get there. And if you'd like a little more Endless Machines between updates, you can also find us on Reddit.

Disclaimer: Please remember that Endless Machines is still in development. As the game evolves, things that may seem like an integral part of the story right now could change or turn out not to work as we intended. As a result, they might not make it into the final version. This is a natural part of the process. Thank you for your support!