World Without End will bring an in-depth strategy RPG experience to mobile phones.
Images courtesy Steve Uy

The upcoming mobile game World Without End looks absolutely stunning, as if it were ripped straight out of a comic book.

This is no coincidence: The mind behind the game is Steve Uy, a writer and illustrator of Marvel and DC books including Uncanny X-Men and Avengers: The Initiative. And now he’s trying to break into videogames with World Without End, which he will release for $3 on iOS and Android when it is completed.

Though he has enlisted a programmer and musician, Uy is writing, illustrating and designing the game on his own.

“This may be a single-man indie game, but it won’t feel like one,” Uy said in an e-mail to Wired.com. World Without End, Uy says, will take upwards of 15 hours to finish and let players explore several branching storylines.

Uy is asking for donations on Kickstarter to help him finish the project. He’s hoping to reach $15,000 by late August.

World Without End is a strategy role-playing game heavily inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics. Each character can take two actions per turn, moving around the board and attacking enemies. Players will have make smart decisions with every individual move: More powerful moves expend up more Action Points, which are a limited resource.

“Using powerful skills might suck you dry,” Uy said. “Should you use a special skill to kill an enemy right now and leave yourself helpless in the next turn, or should you just move out of range and try to tackle them again next time, when you have more AP?”

Unlike many other strategy RPGs, World Without End doesn’t have a movement grid laid across the terrain. Characters can move freely, with the player guiding them across the gorgeously drawn backgrounds by tracing his finger along the phone screen.

The game will also feature an overworld not unlike that of the Zelda series. “By sheer content alone it’s bigger than a Pokémon game,” he said.

Wary of spoilers, Uy wouldn’t tell us much about the story. He would only say that players will control an amnesiac hero who runs into a prescient old man. When the man cajoles the hero into helping clear their land of monsters, they run into unexpected consequences.

“The game is about freedom, and choice,” Uy said. “That theme will permeate everything you do in the game, and the multiple playthroughs you can go through afterwards.”