Dev Diary #2 - Pushing

Hello everyone and welcome (or welcome back) to our Dev Diary #2 for Never's End!

I'm Ryan, the game director, and one of my main goals with the design of Never's End has been to support player creativity and expressivity in combat.

Wherever possible, we try to make all objects operate within a shared set of systemic rules, based on a common set of properties. This extends to our magic system, but it’s also important in more grounded interactions like pushing, which is what I want to talk about today.

Positioning

A lot of the game’s rules and calculations depend on how objects are positioned, and pushing is your primary tool for rearranging the battlefield. If you are standing on higher ground than your enemy, you are more likely to land a headshot. If you are surrounded by multiple enemies, you are less likely to evade. If you are behind an obstacle, it might obstruct an incoming projectile and keep you safe.

The list goes on, but one of the most important positional systems to be aware of is engagement. Adjacent enemies become engaged and can't walk away from each other, but they can be pushed apart, which frees them up to move again!

What Can Be Pushed?

You can push items, crates, candelabras, chairs, tables, and just about anything that isn’t rooted to the floor, like a tree or building. You can push enemies, and you can also push your allies.

All pushable objects have a weight class, which we use to balance the system. Heavier objects cost more stamina to push. As a result, you can even push that giant boss you are fighting, but you might not be able to do much else afterwards.

Systemic Interactions

Pushing isn’t just about movement. It’s also about the interactions between what you push, and where you push it.

Impact Damage

Push an object into a wall or another object of equal or greater weight, and it takes guaranteed damage (there is no random roll to hit). And if you push it into an especially dangerous object such as a cactus or the spiked side of a barricade, you get additional bonus damage.

Chain Collisions

If there are a series of objects lined up, the collision will cascade down the line. Each one takes damage, but only the final object in the line is the one that actually moves, similar to a line of pool balls impacting.

Staggers

If you push a character into a heavier object or just into a high terrain wall, they will be staggered. Staggered characters are unable to evade until the next turn, which makes it a great way to increase your hit chance on a follow-up attack.

Knockdowns

When you push characters off of high ledges, they fall and become knocked down. This takes them out of the fight for one turn!

Bouncing

When you try to push a character off a ledge, but there is another object in the spot where they would land, it causes a bounce. The bounced-on character takes damage according to the weight of the pushed character that fell on them, and the pushed character will bounce forward to the next location and possibly even bounce again. Bounces can create surprising strategies where you might want to push an ally off a ledge so that it damages enemies below while also safely reaching a new location.

Status Transfer

Things get more interesting when status effects are involved, because anytime two characters collide from an impact or bounce, certain status effects get transferred between them: burning, oiled, and wet. Because these status effects then have their own sets of rules and interactions, this is a common place where high-skilled players can take advantage of very specific scenarios, but also where hilarious unintentional outcomes might appear.

Slipping

The terrain status you are pushing characters onto is also important to consider. Ice and oil are slippery surfaces and let you push characters farther than usual.

Breaking Stances

Pushing can also be used to knock characters out of different stances. If your foe has raised their shield, you can push them to lower it. The same goes for characters in a resist stance, waiting for someone to approach, or characters in a riposte stance, waiting to counterattack.

Pushing, Pulling, Wind and Water

So far, I’ve mostly been talking about pushing characters away from you. That is how the standard push interaction works. But Never’s End provides numerous ways to push. Some weapons allow you to push from a distance, such as the pitchfork and pike. Other weapons allow you to pull characters towards you, such as the hoe and halberd. Environmental forces like wind and water currents can be used to push in any direction. While wind and water currents can be naturally occurring, they are most often due to magic, which can be very powerful when mastered. Fire magic is your path to creating temperature changes that result in wind, which can be used to push characters left, right, forward or back, and it can do it at range!

Player Freedom and Creativity

Because Never’s End allows for so much player freedom, we are often discovering new tricks and tactics in playtests that were not explicitly designed for. One of my favorite examples is pushing to help your allies move into position. This can be a strong tactic in cases where movement is very costly, such as on snow or sand. You might have your archer on the back line push your warrior forward, getting them one step closer to the enemy before it’s their turn. This can result in landing additional attacks and give you an early advantage in the fight.

Continued Development

The game isn’t finished yet, and we are always looking for new ways to have our systems interact, creating even more strategies and possibilities. One of our upcoming tasks is to experiment with characters standing on webbed ground being resistant to pushes from wind (some spiders create webbing as they move through the map). Time will tell how this feels and if it will be implemented permanently in the game, but I suspect it will be another interesting interaction that ties more systems together.

That's it for this deep dive into pushing and how it fits into the various systems of Never's End. Like many other mechanics in the game, it's easy to learn and use on its own, but it leaves a lot of room for experimentation once you start thinking more creatively.

As development continues, we still have a lot of interactions and edge cases to explore, and I'm really excited to keep building upon systems that make combat feel dynamic and expressive.

As always, thank you so much for following along with the development and for all your support so far, it really means a lot to us.

If you have thoughts, questions, or if you just want to speculate on possible strategies by using different mechanics, feel free to join our Discord or leave a comment below!

And if you want to see regular content about the game, such as videos showcasing mechanics, lore, design, and much more, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on our socials!

Until next time,

• Ryan