Hypersect – Development Blog

June 3, 2025 Silvia Zanotti No comments

We’re so excited to finally announce Never’s End!

Check out the trailer below:

Never’s End is a turn-based tactical RPG where you return from death into the midst of a global cataclysm. Possess townsfolk to use them as living weapons, wield the forces of nature to reshape the battlefield, and lead mankind back from the brink of extinction.

Command the Elements

The world of Never’s End is deeply simulated and completely interactive. Temperature, weather, wind, water level, and even the density of the earth beneath your feet can all be manipulated to gain the advantage in combat.

Possess your Party

Only you can survive the Never. Rather than recruiting allies, you must possess them—burning away their self and soul to turn them into living weapons. For each companion you gain, another life is lost: doomed to fight at your side until either you succeed, or they fall in battle.

Reclaim your World

Fight your way through an open world of rain-soaked jungles, blistering deserts, and freezing tundra as you explore the wreckage of a forgotten golden age. Cleanse corrupted settlements, awaken long-dormant temples, unearth lost technology, and then reap the rewards as civilization rebuilds in your wake.

Destroy the Never

Your path to victory is your own. Will you hunt fearsome beasts to upgrade your temples, or establish new towns to grow your ranks? Will you trade lives in search of greater power, or prove your skill by heading straight for the Never’s heart?

We are finally back after a really long time, but with some amazing news!

During the MIX Summer Game Showcase on June 3 we announced the super secret title we’ve been working on since 2018, Never’s End.

This actually started as a solo effort, but with time the team started growing bit by bit. We are still very small, around 5 people and some collaborators, all with a never-ending love for making videogames.

Never’s End was born from our experience playing the classics, such as Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre, along with newer titles like Wartales and Battle Brothers, and our desire to mix Eastern and Western elements in a dark fantasy world, with captivating, pixel-art like 3D graphics, a compelling story, and addictive gameplay (trust me, I’ve been playing it non-stop!).

We are still hard at work on the game, polishing the code, adding even more amazing art and making it the best we can, so we can’t share a specific release date with you yet, but fear not, we’ll keep you updated every step of the way!

Last but not least, we want to thank you all from the bottom of our hearts for supporting us since INVERSUS, and waiting a long time for this announcement. We couldn’t be happier to have such a fantastic community, and we’ll keep doing our best to bring you our biggest and most complex game yet.

If you want to stay updated every step of the way, join our mailing list!
We’ll be sending monthly sneak-peeks, behind-the-scenes content and announcements.

March 27, 2023 ryanjuckett No comments

INVERSUS: Sixish Years of Sales

Back in fall of 2018 I posted a breakdown of the first two years of INVERSUS sales that you can see here. It’s now spring of 2023, and while at GDC last week I had a few discussions with people about indie game business that touched on INVERSUS. In my mind, it was still doing okay for the type of game it is, but I wasn’t actually sure what the numbers were. A sharper business person would be on top of all of that along with graphing out how sales perform and so on, but my time has been focused on the next game. 😅

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July 12, 2020 ryanjuckett No comments

RJ_IMAGE (version 1)

While working on some new graphics features, I needed to store and load an intermediate image files with floating point pixel data. Up until this point any intermediate texture data generated by my build pipeline was stored as TGA files. This was useful if I needed to inspect the data because I could just load it up into Photoshop and see what was what.

However, it also meant I was limited to a very small set of pixel data formats. I needed a new solution so I started looking at image file formats that could handle floating point data. Immediately I encountered formats built for HDR images like RGBE and OpenEXR, but was not pleased.

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October 18, 2018 ryanjuckett 5 comments

INVERSUS: Two Years Of Sales

I’ve always made time for reading postmortems about sales. They were useful when I first considered going indie and are still useful today with over two years of selling INVERSUS behind me. Whenever peers ask how the game did (or is still doing), I find it hard to frame the answer. INVERSUS is not an obvious runaway success nor is it a failure. It sort of “does well enough” given how my solo studio, Hypersect, is run. Hopefully sharing some specifics of how it has sold will in turn help you evaluate past and future decisions.

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May 23, 2018 ryanjuckett One comment

Additional Thoughts on Skill Ratings

I suspect I’d get significant value from writing about systems earlier in their development because breaking a system down in words often leads to new insights. Over the past week I’ve been thinking about my recent post on how online skill ranking works in INVERSUS Deluxe. If you haven’t read it or aren’t deeply familiar with skill rating systems, you might want to click that link or the rest of this won’t make much sense.

One of the primary hurdles that I had integrating Glicko-2 (and that most games have from my understanding) was applying the rating periods. INVERSUS forces a rating period to pass with each completed match and then also runs a separate step forcing inactive rating periods to be evaluated for players that have been away from the game for a while. This has two downsides:

Depending on the frequency you play matches you will evaluate more or less rating periods than others.
Rating periods never get to evaluate more than one match at a time (which would be preferred by Glicko). That said, I haven’t run through the math to know how much that actually matters.

I now believe that you should be able to get the best of both worlds and let rating periods get a fixed time (e.g. a week) but still give players instant feedback after each match. The idea is to change the interface to process less than one rating period and take input representing the intermediate computations from any prior call. It would then update the intermediate state to be used by a future call and output what the players rating, deviation, and volatility would be as of right now (partially through the rating period). Internal to the system, it would continue to append match results to the intermediate state and reevaluate the current rating period from scratch with the additional supplied information. The resulting logic would be something like:

If the additional time step has advanced to a new rating period, commit the prior rating period’s variance estimate into a new rating, deviation and volatility.
Apply any necessary inactive rating periods if the time step is greater than one rating period.
Apply the new match results to the tracked intermediate values necessary for computing the current rating period’s variance estimate. Note that we shouldn’t actually need to track the full match history for this rating period, but just need to update the accumulated values.
Output the player’s displayable rating and deviation by evaluating the current intermediate values for the partial rating period state. Note that these values are actually logically recomputed across the entire current rating period until step 1 commits them and starts a new rating period on a future call.

I’m pretty sure that would both work and not be too complicated implement. Maybe someday, I’ll go back and try it out, but for now I just want to put the idea out there for others!

May 15, 2018 ryanjuckett 6 comments

The Online Skill Ranking of INVERSUS Deluxe

Online skill ranking was one of the big features added to the Deluxe edition of INVERSUS and building it was uncharted territory on my part. It required a bunch of learning and is one of the systems players ask about the most so I’d like to share some behind the scenes details regarding how it works.

Rank Points and Skill Rating

From the player’s perspective, they earn and lose Rank Points (RP) while playing online. I wanted the Rank Points system to achieve two goals:

By inspecting a player’s RP, you can tell how challenging they are. Players with a higher RP are expected to defeat players with a lower RP.
You are awarded and deducted RP in a manner that matches your expectations. If you win, your RP should increase. If you lose your RP should decrease.

While those goals might not sound like anything special, they can actually conflict because computing a statistically accurate skill rating (the first goal) can produce results which are both confusing and do not match player expectations (the second goal).

There might be wild fluctuations as the system is first learning how you perform.
There might be counterintuitive ups and downs such as an increase in skill after an expected due the system’s confidence level in your skill increasing more than its penalty for the match.
You might not actually gain any skill after a win if you were expected to win.

To mitigate these issues, the actual skill rating of the player is decoupled from the player-facing representation of Rank Points. Before getting into how the Rank Points are calculated, let’s dig into the actual skill rating system they are built upon.

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January 3, 2018 ryanjuckett One comment

Hyperbot: Making a Discord bot for INVERSUS

The official INVERSUS Discord server (found at discord.gg/inversus) has grown to house an active community of both veteran and new players. Creating the community was my first introduction to Discord and I quickly came to see the advantages of having a bot to help automate common questions and needs. I first searched for an existing bot to integrate with the INVERSUS server, but nothing was very focused on being build around the community for a competitive game. I wanted features such as players positing invitations to their private lobby by typing !invite or having the bot automatically let everything know when a new high score was reached on the leaderboards. Thus, once I got the time to learn a bit about node.js and the Discord API, I went ahead and build my own bot, named Hyperbot, that I could add to over time.

Putting Hyperbot on your Discord server

If you are in a similar position and want a reference bot to start from or just want to boot up Hyperbot as is, you can find the latest code and documentation on the full feature set on GitHub at https://github.com/hypersect/hyperbot

December 19, 2017 ryanjuckett No comments

Improving the Font Pipeline

This post will be a bit different than my normal technical posts. Rather than covering a successful finished system, this will be a glimpse into the process of (hopefully) getting to that point in the future.

With INVERSUS finally out on all platforms, I can clean up some of the engine’s rough edges, and one of the bigger pain points has been the font pipeline. When it comes to refactoring workflows and engine architecture, I think it’s important to find tractable small steps you can take on the path towards your desired goal. I have a fuzzy picture of how I’d like things to be, and I make small improvements while at the same time getting a better focus on the destination.

Problems Everywhere

In my experience, the complexity of properly rendering text is an underappreciated problem by engineers that have never worked on it. It seems so simple! There are really only three steps:

Choose the next glyph to draw
Choose where to draw the glyph
Draw the glyph

So which of those steps is the hard one? Unfortunately, if you want to render crisp text in multiple languages across the world, all of them are the hard one.

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October 5, 2017 ryanjuckett No comments

The Complexity of Simplicity: Rendering INVERSUS Deluxe

When discussing the visual style of INVERSUS, there has always been an amusing contrast between the random YouTube comment saying that “this could run on an Atari” and the periodic questions asking how I’m actually managing to draw what is happening on screen. We’re going to take a detailed walk through how INVERSUS Deluxe composes a frame, but for fun let’s start off by looking at an actual demake of INVERSUS for Atari that Ed Fries was toying around with (believe it or not, just finding a way to render the obstructions on the map was non-trivial).

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Rank Points and Skill Rating

Putting Hyperbot on your Discord server

Problems Everywhere

Launch Schedule

Community Tournaments