A new ending, and how it came together (light spoilers)
By Encrypted Cat / 0xKOT · Originally published on itch.io
Last time I promised a new cutscene for one of the endings. It’s here, and it’s my favourite thing in the game now.
A small warning: this post talks about one of the endings in general terms. If you’d rather find it yourself, stop reading and go play.
The ending that didn’t work
The Cradle has several endings. One is quieter than the others. There’s no escape and no scream, just a song. It depends on what you found in Block D, and some players never see it at all.
The first version was simple: the children rose and faded away. It was eerie, but it said nothing about you. It didn’t matter what you’d found or who you’d remembered. Everyone got the same thing.
What it’s like now
Now it’s a real cutscene. The camera leaves you, the letterbox bars close in, and for a few minutes you just watch.
It depends on what you did along the way. The children you remembered and the ones you didn’t end up in very different places. Some find their rest. Some are still standing there when the lights go out.
There’s music the whole way through. A lullaby starts thin and crackly, as if played through old equipment, and slowly fills the room. It grows close and quiet as it nears its end, then stops.
I won’t say more than that. There’s one small detail near the end that I didn’t plan. It came out of a line written on one of the name tags, and it’s now my favourite moment in the game.
Behind the scenes
Getting here took more rounds than I expected:
- Round one: the children walked too slowly, there was no music, and you could still move the camera and turn on your torch in the middle of a “cutscene”. Not great.
- Round two: real cinematic cameras, a proper musical arc and a climax. But the melody restarted every time the camera cut, and some shots were completely black.
- The black shots turned out to be a genuine engine bug. The game only lights the lamps nearest to you, and during a cutscene the camera was somewhere else entirely. That’s fixed now, for every future cutscene too.
- Round three: one continuous lullaby, one close-up instead of two, and every shot properly lit. This is the one in the game.
Along the way the engine gained a full cutscene system (camera moves, cuts, fades and letterbox), plus a timeline tool I can use to scrub through a scene and fix shots by flying the camera around. Future episodes will have many more of these moments.
Go find it
If you’ve already finished The Cradle, the new Chapters menu takes you straight back to the final choice, and the name tags and the reel you found come with you.
If you haven’t found it yet: listen to what the building is trying to tell you, and pay attention to the names.
As always, tell me in the comments how it made you feel. This one I really want to hear about.