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The Endless Mission is the building game designed to teach kids Unity
E-Line Media talk The Endless Mission, the brilliant new level-builder that teaches kids Unity by playing the game.
It’s curious to consider how under the radar The Endless Mission has been over the past few months. While people prepare to revel in the creative freedom at the heart of Dreams, The Endless Mission has been in quiet development in the background. It's patiently waiting to slam its trump card down on the table in uproarious delight: that it’s designed to teach kids – and adults – how to develop games using Unity. We spoke with E-Line Learning Executive Vice President Brian Alspach to find out more.
Created by E-Line media, The Endless Mission has traditionally been described as a “sandbox-style creation game” and is founded upon a similar principle to level-building games like Little Big Planet, Super Mario Maker and, of course, the aforementioned and upcoming Dreams. However, there’s much more depth to The Endless Mission than meets the eye.
According to Alspach, it incorporates Unity, one of the most illustrious game engines in the world, into its building kit. As a result, simply playing the game allows you to familiarise yourself with the nuts and bolts of coding in Unity, without any of the tedious challenges posed by a more traditional approach to the programming language. It’s all embedded within fun, creative play, which means you can educate yourself about something incredibly complex while frolicking around worlds you conceived and designed all by yourself.
“If you look up what the fastest-growing emerging careers are, you’ll see that Unity developer is seventh,” Alspach explains. Sure enough, after a little research of our own post-interview, we came across this report on analysing LinkedIn data to determine the most prominent emerging jobs in the world today.
The Endless Mission’s Unity-teaching quests
© E-Line Media
“We wanted to exploit [our findings],” Alspach continues. Not in the selfish, capitalist sense of exploitation, but because The Endless Mission is the passion project conceived by a group of developers with a history in edutainment: a genre and philosophy devoted to educating people via the entertainment they love to consume.
That’s the core reason The Endless Mission is being developed in the first place. It was born from a desire to teach the youth of today that designing games in Unity isn’t as intangible and impossible as people might think. As you progress through the game, the suite of tools available to you grows, until eventually the UI starts to implement actual Unity building interfaces. “We’ve built these assets in Unity and put them here so you can put them into whatever you’re making,” Alspach says. Some of it seems as if you’re just dragging and dropping different files, but this is remarkably similar to what you do post-asset creation in Unity proper.
This ambitious effort to educate aspiring developers goes further. When The Endless Mission leaves early access, it’s set to launch on Steam for US$9.99. This price will increase in increments as the team at E-Line continue to build on the game, as this project was designed with longevity in mind, according to Alspach. However, all future DLC is going to be free, including support for new genre mashups within the games you’re making. A one-off payment provides you with access to an ever-growing world of wonder, enabling you to create games based on your wildest musings from the most untapped recesses of your boundless imagination.
Create levels in The Endless Mission
© E-Line Media
The only thing you’ll ever have to pay for after your initial purchase is the game’s optional subscription service, which catapults designing games with a suite of Unity-based tools into a whole new dimension. From here, you’ll be able to access classes in Unity programming, teaching you how to make the transition from The Endless Mission’s Unity-esque kit into Unity proper. It’s essentially a Unity course beautifully embedded into a wonderful game about creation and sharing, making it a perfect introduction to game design available to people of all ages.
The Endless Mission is about more than just learning to code, though. It’s a fully-fledged story mode that teaches you how to manipulate different genres. For example, the mission we saw took place in a world not unlike Minecraft, except you defeated enemies by hacking their health until it was depleted. Certain objects were destructible – not because you bulldozed through them with brute force, though, but because you could actually interfere with their code, causing them to crumble.
The voice cast for the game’s story mode was recently announced, too, and includes the talents of Laura Bailey, Jennifer Hale, Alix Wilton Regan, Sara Amini and Courtenay Taylor – people you’ll recognise for their stellar performances in franchises as far and wide as Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Fallout. You can check out some footage from their work behind the scenes. A cast as star-studded as this lends to the idea that the game’s story mode isn’t just a tutorial for the multiplayer sections – it’s a genuine, narratively-driven adventure, complete with excellent acting talent.
As you gradually make your way to more advanced missions, you’ll be able to hack the code of levels themselves. In fact, according to Alspach, this will become an essential mechanic and will even transfer over to the game’s multiplayer aspect. As you’re messing about with another player’s level, you can hack it, changing its properties and causing it to compile in a different way, paving the way for a plethora of strange and unique scenarios. This will form a key part in how the game’s community interact with one another, as E-Line hope to highlight the fruits of their players’ labours. However, being put in the spotlight could attract swarms of proficient hackers, hellbent on redesigning your creations. This leads to an utterly unique, warmly competitive community scene, where players can decide to help or hinder you, both of which will force you to improve and come one step closer to becoming a Unity virtuoso.
At the moment, The Endless Mission contains support for genres such as “platformers, kart racers and real-time strategy,” but E-Line will continuously add more in the future, all of which will be afforded to players at no extra cost. It’s due to launch on Steam in Fall 2019 and, at the moment, that’s the only platform it will be available on. If you’ve ever wanted to learn Unity, or you simply want to design worlds that mash up all kinds of your favourite genres with your friends, diving into The Endless Mission’s bottomless rabbit hole of opportunity and imagination is something you won’t want to sleep on.
