Dev Diary #5: Water

Hey everyone, welcome to the first Never's End Dev Diary of 2026!

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I'm Ryan, the game director, and in this entry, we’re diving into one of the systems that quietly affects almost every battle: water. What started as a visual detail has grown into a fully simulated mechanic that shapes movement, positioning, and emergent tactics across the game.

In Never’s End, water isn’t a static decoration. It’s a fully simulated system that plays an active role in combat. Designing believable water inside a turn-based tactical grid has been an interesting technical and design challenge, and it’s something we continue to refine as we learn more about it.

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A Tactical Water Simulation

Water flows across the battlefield using a simulation that tracks currents and pressure. It behaves like water should (seeking lower ground, wrapping around obstacles, and responding to terrain changes) while still respecting the structure of a tactical grid.

We’ve had to develop a way that keeps the water states fixed to the battle grid and understandable, while also maintaining the expected fluidity. The player needs to be able to look at the water and immediately understand what effects it will have. Is it deep enough to get them wet? Is the current strong enough to push them? How much extra time and stamina will it cost to move through it?

We also want your perspective on water to change as you learn more types of magic throughout the game. That should be unlocking new tactics as you grow in strength. In the early game, you can use Fire magic to change the temperature, which interacts with water through the humidity system to create fog and precipitation. Later on, Stone magic can raise or lower terrain, directly changing how water flows. And Water magic lets you relocate water itself, shifting entire volumes from one location to another.

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Water States and Depth

The vertical height of solid ground increments in units of one-third of a block width. So a height of 3 on the map looks like a cube. But water needs to flow, and thus we let it have a much higher fidelity in height values, which are then split into a set of meaningful depth states.

Puddles

The smallest amount of water forms a thin puddle. You can walk across puddles without getting wet. Puddles prevent certain status effects, such as fire, from spreading. They stop dust from being kicked up by the wind and can wash away spider webs. They are subtle, but tactically relevant. ㅤ

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Shallow Water

Once water becomes deep enough, a shoreline effect is drawn around its edge. At this depth, stepping into the water will make you Wet, and water currents can begin pushing you. If you end your turn on a tile with an active current, you will be pushed in the direction of the flow (similar to standing in strong wind). ㅤ Steam post image

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Wading

At one vertical unit high (one-third of a block), characters enter a Wading state. Moving through water is now starting to get more difficult; your evasion stat takes a small penalty, and navigating through the water costs additional time and stamina. ㅤ

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Deep Water

Every object defines the depth at which it becomes submerged or starts to float. For human characters, this is two vertical units, but it varies across the different-sized monsters and props.

When an inanimate object reaches this depth, it becomes submerged. This is when the fire of a burning brazier will be doused.

When a character reaches this depth, they switch to the Swimming state. Unless you are a monster with the aquatic trait, swimming will prevent you from attacking or evading. It also costs significantly more time and stamina to navigate across these blocks. Swimming is dangerous, so be careful! ㅤ

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Wet Status Effect

Being Wet provides both advantages and drawbacks. You gain resistance to fire, but suffer an accuracy penalty when attacking. As mentioned above, walking into shallow water or deeper will make you wet, but you can also get wet from rain, having a water bottle poured on you, having a water bottle break when thrown at you, or getting hit by certain water-based monster attacks.

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Rendering the Water

The water rendering is one of the parts where we can really take advantage of Never’s End being fully 3D, while just looking like a 2D sprite game. When characters are partially submerged, we can have them refract under the water surface when viewed from above. If you are able to see into the water from the side, where it intersects with the edge of the battle map, you can see more clearly through it, as if it were the side of a fish tank.

We’ve also been able to implement some nice polish features to keep a clean look, such as having highlight outlines around selected objects refract beneath the surface, but still render as part of the surface reflections.

We also utilize elements of the water rendering to help reinforce gameplay. When currents are strong enough to push objects, we render a stylized churn layer. The animation matches the cardinal direction that you will be pushed in, while also smoothly blending between adjacent water blocks. ㅤ

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Current Development Challenges

The water simulation comes with all sorts of unique edge cases, and we are still developing clean design solutions for them. One that has been on my mind lately involves deeply submerged objects.

For context, we don’t let you stand on top of other objects. You can climb up onto rocky terrain, but you can’t climb up onto a boulder object. But what should happen if that boulder is in very deep water? So deep that it looks like you should clearly be able to swim over it?

Well, right now it feels like you bump into an invisible collision wall. It’s very rare for this case to come up, but in our procedurally generated world full of player-modifiable terrain, it happens.

We’re exploring two possible solutions:

• Removing objects that become too deeply submerged

• Adding better support for swimming above submerged geometry

It might seem like swimming above the submerged object would be a simple solution, but remember that water itself can be moved by magic. If you syphon that water away, a swimming character might suddenly find themselves standing on top of the submerged object! If we were to go that route, it would mean either we support object stacking, or we have you bounce off the object and land on some nearby free space (assuming there is a free space…). Solving this cleanly requires some careful systems design, but I hope to have some tests of this in place early this year.

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Why We’re Doing This

We really want Never’s End to be the most dynamic tactics game you’ve played, full of emergent, interacting systems. When we demo the game at conventions, there is a water barrel on the first battle map, and it consistently surprises people to find that breaking it causes actual simulated water to flow out, which can affect the battle.

Our goal is to make every battlefield feel like a dynamic environment that rewards creativity and observation.

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And that wraps up today's deep dive on water.

As always, make sure to wishlist Never's End, hop onto our Discord, subscribe to our newsletter, drop a comment below, and follow us on our socials for more updates and fun content!

Thanks for reading and following along with the development of Never's End. See you in the next Dev Diary! - Ryan