Connecting the Stories of Impressions and The Future Project
It's all connected.
Infinite Level games discussed: Impressions, The Future Project
At first glance, it might be strange to think of The Future Project as a sort-of sequel to Impressions. The two gameplay styles are completely different, for starters. One is a choose-your-own-adventure style, narrative focused game, and the other is a 3D metroidvania where story is more in the background. They don't seem like they'd have much in common. But there is one very important trait that they both share that makes the connection...they both exist in the same universe. Now, I'm not about to pull a Marvel Cinematic Universe or anything with these games, but I do think that connections between two otherwise completely different properties can be its own kind of fun, provided two things occur. First, a player should still be able to enjoy either game without needing knowledge of the other. Second, the connections have to at least make sense. So, just how does one connect the two narratives? Let's find out!
As Impressions was released first, it would make sense to start with that game. As a refresher, Impressions has you controlling a pundit for the futuristic news stream, Stream 47A. You and two other pundits comment on the arrival of an alien species, and the discussion influences the world's perception of the aliens. It's a very narrative focused game, which is a bit unusual for me as most of what I make is more gameplay focused. The game is also very short, lasting somewhere between twenty to thirty minutes depending on your decisions and how fast you're able to read and make your own decisions. That short length is also the reason I made the game free to play, as it didn't make sense to charge for something that's not even an hour long. This ends up being a benefit in the end though, because it means anyone who wants to get up to speed on the Impressions/Future Project narrative can do so without hassle, and in a timely manner at that.
Impressions, naturally, lays a lot of the groundwork for The Future Project's story, right down to outright saying "The Future Project" in dialogue. Without getting into spoilers, the Great Meeting talked about in Impressions is the whole reason for The Future Project existing at all. Humanity has had a moment of self reflection and feels that they need to make a greater effort to explore the cosmos. But they also recognize the great risk to the crew that goes out on this expedition, so they create an artificial intelligence that can handle much of the exploration and combat instead of the humans. In essence, the robots do the hard work, while the humans study the robot's findings and use that knowledge to make decisions. Now, there's an interesting problem to connecting the Impressions and The Future Project stories. Players can directly alter the story of Impressions, resulting in different endings to the game's narrative. I knew this could be a potential issue when developing Impressions. The Future Project's development had already started and I had made the decision to connect the two games early on, which meant that any of the endings in Impressions had to all be canon to The Future Project. The last thing you want is to take a player's experience and tell them "actually, it went like this". To work around that, I constructed the endings in Impressions so that, in terms of the big picture, the end result was largely the same across endings, but it's the final discussions and the alien's message in the game that sets the endings apart.
Now that The Future Project has the Impressions endings to bounce off of, it can now forge ahead with its own narrative. Being in the same world, The Future Project will of course reference many of the events and terminology of Impressions and build upon that. But now you have a new problem! The Future Project takes place within a simulation, so there's no physical way to interact with the in-universe world. Can we really say the two games are connected then? I believe you can. Just because the world of The Future Project is digital doesn't mean it can't be aware of the events of Impressions. This naturally lends itself to the Comments players will find throughout the game. In the game's universe, the developers behind The Future Project use their own codebase to communicate with each other, since the government is not allowing communication through email, video chats, and other common communication tools due to fears of it being intercepted and leaked by the public. These communications personify themselves as these green speech-bubble like Comment items spread throughout the game. The discussions found in each run the gamut, from developers discussing features of the AI, to aspects of their personal lives, and of course to past events seen in Impressions.
This might sound like the connections are largely done through lore, and very little in the main narrative. While it's true that The Future Project does a lot of story telling through lore, there is a main narrative at play. I've kept quiet about it in order to keep spoilers to a minimum, but given this is a dev blog post all about stories, I suppose I should break the silence a little bit and talk about the game's main narrative. It's revealed in lore that, despite the effects the Great Meeting has had on humanity as a whole, there are still plenty who still do not want to have anything to do with aliens, and believe The Future Project is a colossal waste of time, and indeed puts humans at great risk. Protests are frequent, and from a PR perspective, there are concerns about what would happen if any part of the codebase managed to get into the hands of those who disagree with The Future Project. For that matter, there's a several potential issues that could arise from an irate member of society getting their hands on any Future Project code. These concerns are the driving force behind keeping The Future Project so tightly under lock and key, but even those actions fuel the protests further. Perhaps you can already start to see where this narrative is going...
Yes, it turns out, there is an antagonistic force that's managed to make their way into the codebase, and has entered simulations in order to halt tests and learn more about how the AI works. Their arrival is subtle, to the point where the first time they talk to you, you almost wonder if that actually happened. But then it keeps happening, and you may start to realize the position you're in. What do they want? Same as many of the other detractors. After what was, in their mind, a far too risky meeting with aliens, they want to stop The Future Project before it can be completed, thus stopping the efforts to explore space, a desire made known all the way back in Impressions. It's worth mentioning too that a lot of time has passed between Impressions and The Future Project, so damaging The Future Project could mean years of progress dgets completely undone. Indeed, even the main antagonist of the game is motivated by events that transpired back in Impressions. After all, without that story, the antagonist wouldn't even really be here. But again, I try to convey this information so that you're not required to play Impressions. The antagonist is meant to be a little mysterious and even confusing, but you shouldn't necessarily need to do homework to fully process their motivations. Reading the Comments in the game and paying attention to their dialogue should be more than sufficient for filling the player in on events of the past.
The bulk of The Future Project's story is happening because of Impressions, and for the most part it's The Future Project that gets the bulk of development (no pun intended) as a result. However, that doesn't mean I couldn't have some narrative developments for Impressions. That's right, those who played Impressions will get to see a little continued story development for that part of the world. These aren't as frequent, partially because the need to make all the multiple endings canon limits what I can and cannot do, but I think people will enjoy what nuggets are there. In particular, there is some conversation on what happened to the news source Stream 47A and some of the special names mentioned throughout Impressions, such as named government officials and factions mentioned in Impressions discussion. There's even a brief mention of the player character and where they ended up! This was actually interesting to figure out, since I couldn't use a specific name, gender, or backstory. Like the endings, I had to make all possibilities for the player avatar canon in the world of The Future Project. Story continuations like these is actually where I will be referencing the lore bible I wrote for Impressions. Oh yes, that does exist. It was written early on to help me keep track of Territory Leaders, the in-universe government system in Impressions, and any backstory on factions like the aliens or the Application 12 cult (on that note, I'm gonna have to revisit these guys one day because rereading what I wrote in my lore bible about them is genuinely interesting, if I do say so myself). It'll be a handy guide as I write what I hope will be satisfying continuations of the world we all discovered in Impressions.
Well, that's all I can really get into without spoiling either game. I'd be more willing to get into spoilers for Impressions if it wasn't so linked with the story of The Future Project. And obviously, I'm not gonna spoil the story for The Future Project! I need to at least release that game first before I go divulging all the juicy story details. We'll save some of the more in depth conversations for another time. As for what I'll do after The Future Project? Can't say yet, but I'm really enjoying this little universe that I've created. I'll almost certainly dip back into this world from time to time and explore more of it. Though I recognize how exhausting it can be, I think connected universes can be a lot of fun so long as it doesn't get too big for its own good. Unless I slap a "2" on the end of a title, these will still need to be standalone titles at the end of the day. But we can still have fun with the connections and references to past events. But, that's far into the future. A, heh heh...future project, you might say. I'll see myself out.
Until next time!
-Lance T.