Creating Alien Remnant
One of the most challenging worlds in The Future Project to make.
Infinite Level game discussed: The Future Project
If you have played through my latest game, The Future Project, you might recall Alien Remnant and its robotic enemies, platforming challenges, and massive Citadel. You might have also picked up on the fact that, in terms of scale, Alien Remnant is the largest world in the game primarily thanks to the aforementioned Citadel. In fact, Alien Remnant is big enough to justify a loading screen between the outdoor area and the Citadel, something no other world has to do. I've not been shy about calling The Future Project my biggest game in the past, and nowhere is that epitomized better than with Alien Remnant. For this month's dev blog, since I'm more or less between things and still working on making my next project presentable, I'll be taking some time today to discuss the design ideas of this purple hued world and how it came together in the end.
For the uninitiated, Alien Remnant is one of the last major worlds in The Future Project you unlock, containing the metroidvania staple, the double jump, alongside a Fall Suppression item to negate all fall damage in the game and a certain late game power that you'll need to open the very last world. Of all worlds in the game, this is arguably the one that grants the player the most new utilities when it comes to movement and navigation. Gather up everything in Alien Remnant and you can explore almost all of The Future Project unhindered. It is split into two sections, an outdoor area taking place in some kind of alien city, and the Citadel which houses the powers to be found. You'll start in the city area, making your way through robotic enemies and a maze of makeshift roads and fencing before reaching the Citadel, where you'll then contend with lasers, moving platforms, and other obstacles. Robotic forces make up the enemies found here, with many of them hitting very hard and having a high amount of health on top of it all. On a standard run, you'll likely be coming here with the fire, ice, and earth element powers along with a possible electric power if you visit Tempest first. These plus your missiles, air dash, and strafe give you all the basic tools you need to get through alongside any minor upgrades to health, ammo, and damage you find along the way.
From the beginning, I knew I wanted this to be "the big world", as in the one that has a lot of walkable area, winding paths, and some important powers. A fine goal, but given the size of the rest of the game relative to how many people were working on it, that number being literally one (myself), it was gonna be a big task on its own and inevitably result in a long time to create. So I did it in chunks. Which, to be fair, all the work done for The Future Project's various worlds was done in pieces at a time, but Alien Remnant had the most chunks to get through. Of course, the first thing to happen was the map design and figuring out the rough map of the world. Creating the outdoor area was particularly interesting from a map design perspective as I didn't want there to be obvious walls the way there was with other maps. In-game, the town area is depicted as one large room, with chunks of said room being discovered at a time as opposed to the whole room like everywhere else. The Future Project's in-game maps are several png files stitched together to make a full map, so in order to achieve the effect of discovering chunks of the town at a time I had to stitch together several blank squares in the in-game map. This, as you can imagine, was a bit difficult to manage later if I ever wanted to make changes, but fortunately I made it a point to change the town area as little as possible during the rest of the game's development. And I largely stuck to it, adding only resource and save stations after the original design.
As far as actually building out the world in-game, much like solving a jigsaw puzzle I started with the edges of the town area and gradually worked inward to make the level in-game. Once I had the basic layout I then placed some placeholder objects in the area to get the general feel for where walls, platforms, and ramps would be. These would be eventually be replaced with the objects you now see in game. With the town area playable, I quickly realized a potential issue with my vision. Break the area down, and it's really just a maze. And while I wanted the area to feel a bit sprawling and maze-like, I didn't want it to become frustrating to navigate. To counter this, I set up some street light objects for the area, and deliberately made them shine a green light onto the area around them. Green means go, after all, and lights are a generally useful tool for attracting a player's attention and directing them to where they should go. You will notice as you navigate Alien Remnant that these street lights are largely placed on the critical path to the Citadel, with optional areas having fewer, if any, street lights with them. That's all intentional, meant to help players go where they need to while keeping frustration to a minimum and still giving them the feeling of charting their own path.
A curious bug during development was causing objects from the depths of the Alien Remnant Citadel to appear in the sky. This, as you can imagine, is not ideal.
So, once the town area was in place and surrounding areas blocked out, it was time to move on to the Citadel. Remember when I mentioned that this is the only world in The Future Project that has a loading screen splitting it up? That wasn't originally going to be the case. I was initially trying to put everything in one map, which thinking about it now was perhaps a bit naive of me. Game performance would have suffered for this, and Alien Remnant is already a bit more prone to performance hiccups than other worlds. The thought was to keep everything in one map for organization as well as immersion purposes. I wanted to keep loading screens exclusively to entering and exiting worlds. But obviously that didn't happen with Alien Remnant, which is for the best in the end. One extra loading screen in the name of keeping the game running smoothly isn't going to hurt anything, I think. And besides, at a certain point I hardly had a choice in the matter. See, the Citadel in Alien Remnant is very, very large, with its bottom going far underneath the rest of the world and the top reaching high above everything else. A curious consequence of this design is the fact that objects on lower parts of the Citadel started appearing in the sky as well. Unreal Engine, the primary tool I used to make The Future Project, had this odd behavior that only manifested itself in Alien Remnant where an object so far below the world would duplicate itself in the sky. If this only happened to a few objects, then it would hardly be noticeable...but it happened to several, resulting in a sky dotted with subterranean walls and platforms. By the time I realized what was happening, I was neck deep into the Citadel's creation and really didn't want to undo so much work. This is when I decided to split the world into two separate maps, and thus ends the tale of how Alien Remnant got a loading screen that no other world in the game needs.
The Citadel is where Alien Remnant really sets itself apart from the rest of the worlds in The Future Project. As different as each world can be, it can be argued that a lot of them are some real-life element taken to an extreme. Hand of the Water is basically an earth-like island where a lot of the floor is indeed lava, while Jeweled Tundra is simply a land of snow and ice. There will be some gimmicks setting it apart, usually in the form of special enemies or unique room layouts, but a lot of them are grounded in some kind of reality. Alien Remnant is different. I mean, it's in the name! It's alien! So it should really feel like it, right? This gave me license to be a little extra with the things you encounter in this world. Moving platforms, lasers, and teleportation devices you can activate with an electrical shot are abundant here, specifically in its lower floors. When it comes to platforming, the only other comparable world is Heaven, and even then that only became true after the All's Eye update. There's a kind of movement here that you don't feel anywhere else, and I think it gives Alien Remnant a lot of flavor. It also does a lot to sell the scale of Alien Remnant. You might think that you're getting pretty close to the end of Alien Remnant when you do the upper floors and defeat an army of robots, evade some giant lasers, and get the Fall Suppression, but then next thing you know you're in this underground platforming gauntlet and it's like you're getting two worlds in one. This realization that there's a lot more to see in this world than it appears was one of the primary goals Alien Remnant, and I'm glad these ideas ultimately made it into the game. I don't think Alien Remnant would have as much to say about it if these elements weren't here.
Finally, to tie it all together, we have the two in one boss fight at the end, King's Guard and King's Assassin. A back to back boss battle was something I had already planned for the finale, but I thought it would be nice to have something like that pop up in the main worlds. And there was really no better place for it than Alien Remnant. Once again taking advantage of my self granted license to go a little crazy with this world, I made players take on one boss after the other in order to acquire the double jump and be done with what will likely be an initial pass of the world for most players. The design of these two bosses practically wrote itself too, with one boss on the ground and forcing you to keep your distance, while another takes to the skies and makes you use that newly acquired double jump. The King's Assassin portion of this battle was particularly interesting, as there isn't exactly a template for flying enemies in video games. I put this part of the battle together by first setting up various points in the arena that the King's Assassin will fly to and had it cycle between those destinations. After that, it was just a matter of coming up with attacks that ask you to jump around the arena. While Forest's Greed encourages you to use the missiles you would have just acquired and the Saboteur gives you an epic space to try out new elemental powers in, no boss in the game straight up forces you to use a new power the way King's Assassin does. For this reason it winds up being possibly the hardest boss in the game, hard enough that I was compelled to adjust its properties like health and attack speed after release. But at the same time that gives it a very unique quality that no one else has, hopefully making it memorable in players' minds.
One other design element I want to talk about with Alien Remnant before we wrap up is revisiting the world. Being a metroidvania, it's not enough to just come up with a linear set of rooms to go through and then call it a day. At some point players should come back to a world and explore more of it to find a new power. Barring any sequence breaks, all the worlds work this way. Your first trip through a world will grant you a power, and then later you'll need to come back through with new gear to get an additional power. Alien Remnant is no different, though because of how large it is I opted to provide players with a few shortcuts they can use to get by areas quicker during their return visit. The electric power is the key to this, allowing you to insta-kill the enemies there (they are robots, after all) and activate special platforms. You'll need it anyway to get the final power in Alien Remnant, so helping you get to that part quickly so you're not just retreading old ground is a good idea in this instance. For completionists, this also makes it easier to find those items hidden in the lower floors. You can activate portals and platforms to cross gaps quickly that would normally require more time and platforming ability, and some of the electricity activated equipment is required to get certain items anyway. The point is that, while revisiting old areas is inevitable in games like these and is often part of the fun, there's a fine line between necessary (and engaging) second visits and simple padding. To avoid this second visit from feeling like padding I added in tools that let players get to where they want to go a little more quickly.
And that's Alien Remnant! Every world had its ups and downs and probably had a similar amount of work done for each by the end of development, but I always associate Alien Remnant as one of the harder worlds to put together thanks to its size and the amount of unique elements I wanted to include. With the most varied platforming elements of any world, the toughest standard enemies, a two in one boss battle including one that forces a certain playstyle, an unorthodox "town area", and powers that do a lot to shape the game's final moments, Alien Remnant is doing a lot. And I wouldn't have it any other way. All the unique, dare I say alien elements is what gives this world its identity, and I truly cannot imagine any other kind of world taking its place. It was a challenge to create, but it's nice to step back and say that The Future Project's Alien Remnant does, in fact, exist.
Until next time!
-Lance T.