Infinite Level’s Next Game - The Future Project

The future is now.

Oh, how I have looked forward to showing off this one…

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you’ll know that I’ve been teasing a game called “Future” for a while now. I’ve shown off a lot of “extremely alpha” images of it for quite some time on my previous website, but this is the first time I’ve shown off the game in its intended state. This is The Future Project, a first person metroidvania styled game where you teach an AI how to effectively explore alien planets and combat threats by taking it through different simulations. It follows the traditional metroidvania structure by allowing the player to find new abilities to aid their exploration and combat prowess. Unlike most indie metroidvanias, this one is a 3D game viewed from a first person perspective. As you may have guessed, it’s a large project, and as of now it’s currently being developed by one person, yours truly. Alongside this dev blog post comes this very website you’re viewing now as well as video footage of The Future Project in action. If you’ve not seen this video yet, I highly recommend visiting The Future Project page on this website and checking out the video, along with screenshots of the game and a description of it. The remainder of this blog post will be talking about what was seen in the video, so it’s a good idea to be familiar with it so you can follow along more easily.

With that said, let’s start at the beginning. As the disclaimer mentions, The Future Project is still in active development. As such, a lot of elements seen in the video are prone to change. However, what you see is representative of the intended experience. In the video, we explore the game’s first major simulation, Distant Sibling. This simulation is meant to simulate our own home planet in a time before humans. In the lore of The Future Project, the developers considered this a great first simulation to both create and test the AI in thanks to the abundance of similarities between this hypothetical planet and our own. The AI starts off in a small cave with what appears to be a floating speech bubble planted in the middle of the cave. What is this thing? This is a Comment, a simple collection of notes left by the developers of The Future Project to view later. In programming, developers will leave comments for themselves all the time to remind themselves of things they may have done before. In this case, one of the directors of The Future Project development team decided to leave a motivating speech for all to see. She mentions something about aliens and how, when they left, we started to better realize our potential as humans. If you have played my previous game, Impressions, then you’ll know exactly what this is referring to. This game and Impressions take place in the same universe, with The Future Project being a continuation of the story seen in Impressions. Now, since Impressions is a “choose your own adventure” style game where players make choices that affect the ending, players may wonder what this means for their particular path through the game. Rest assured, your choices in Impressions are still very much canon. So, whatever ending you got in Impressions is, in fact, the reason The Future Project begins at all.

But, let’s return to the here and now. Once the AI leaves the cave, they’ll encounter their first enemy, the Vile Flower. After dispatching it, the game presents the player with a slight dilemma. A huge gap separates the player from progression. Fortunately, there’s some rocks sticking out of the walls on one side, so we platform our way across to meet two more enemies of the Distant Sibling simulation, the Strider and Cyclops. The Strider will relentlessly pursue you until one of you falls, and the Cyclops will attempt to keep its distance from the player while throwing small rocks at it. Once they’re defeated, we go into another area and walk up a hill to find a menacing looking tentacle. You can’t defeat it, so the only way to get past it is to run around it. But it swipes at the player too hard and fast to safely get past it. This is the first “locked door” of The Future Project, where you must get “unlock the door” by exploring the nearby area and perhaps finding an ability. Consulting the game’s map, you’ll see there is an opening to a room near the area where we encountered the Cyclops and Strider. So, we make our way there and encounter another new enemy, the Horned Rambeast. This creature is quite dangerous, as it moves fast, hits hard, has plenty of health, and even has a face shield made of rock to protect itself with. You can break the shield with enough shots, but you have to watch yourself in the meantime. Get past it, though, and you’ll acquire the game’s first upgrade, the Strafe ability. Holding the left or right movement keys and pressing the Shift key, the player can quickly move left or right to evade attacks. This seems particularly useful for that tentacle we saw earlier, so we go back.

The game progresses pretty normally from there, so let’s talk about enemy design. Most of the game’s worlds will follow a basic template for enemy creation. You have enemies that pursue, enemies that keep their distance, those who stand still and control space, and others that are tanks. There’s plenty of other enemy types to be found in the game, some unique to their specific simulations. For instance, the Horned Rambeast is one of the only enemies with a proper shield that must be broken to effectively combat it. Other enemies may have hard exteriors, but that generally means they have more health. Horned Rambeasts can be defeated without necessarily breaking their shields, but they try to keep themselves oriented to your position so that their shield can take the damage, letting them live longer. Many of the upgrades within a simulation can make enemies easier to deal with, such as the aforementioned Strafe ability that allows quick dodging. Though it’s not shown in action, the end of the video has the player acquiring a Missile Gun, a classic of the metroidvania genre. Missiles can completely break a Horned Rambeast’s shield in a single shot, making them that much easier to deal with. Additionally, the Strafe ability can make evading the quick and nimble Striders more manageable, while that same ability can almost make the Cyclops’ projectile a joke. Like many metroidvania games, The Future Project will frequently present you with difficult challenges that will eventually become quite easy with the proper upgrades. And of course, those same upgrades expand the available areas for you to explore, which is arguably more important than simply defeating enemies.

Returning to the gameplay video, the player is now asked to use their new ability to explore more of the planet and reach the next major destination. It’s still early in the game, so progression will remain fairly linear for a while. This part of the map knows that the player will have a single jump, a basic gun, and now the Strafe ability, so the level design can change to accommodate these abilities. While the game is still guiding the player, it makes a point to leave the player with little things to notice and come back for later. Did you notice the mountain nearby? You can climb up to it and find interesting things there, but only after gaining certain abilities. Similarly, there’s a couple rocks that have this large, red crack texture on it. Perhaps some kind of projectile can break it down and open a new path? By planting these little curiosities throughout the game, the hope is that when the player gains a new ability, they can immediately think of two or three places where that ability can be put to use. The Future Project wants players to remember its worlds, and explore them as much as possible. In the meantime, it grants the player little things to find in the here and now. Additional Comments can be found, which grants the player more story. Though not seen in the video, there are plenty of small upgrades to items like health and missiles that the player can acquire for simply being curious. Did you go somewhere you didn’t necessarily need to? Or perhaps you saw a strange object and wondered what would happen if you shot it. To reward your curiosity, the game will grant small rewards which make the player avatar more powerful.

Using the tools you have available to you, the player can effectively navigate the next several areas with confidence. One of the demo’s larger areas shown off has several enemies inside, including two Horned Rambeasts, some Striders, and a few Cyclops. Along with the emphasis on exploration, The Future Project wants to present you with satisfying moments of combat to break up the pacing. In this room, almost every enemy seen so far is present, and sometimes you can get quite the nasty combination of attacks. For instance, in the video, a Horned Rambeast and Strider are both coming at the player from different sides. A dodge attempt actually managed to put the player in the Strider’s swipe range, which meant taking a hit in the process. Awareness of where enemies are becomes important in situations like these, especially when you don’t have all the game’s abilities. The hope is that the player will eventually come to this part a second or third time with many more options at their disposal, and make short work of the enemies there as a result. Imagine, for instance, an ability that roots an enemy in place for a brief period of time. There is an ability like this in The Future Project, and in this scenario it could be used to keep the Strider stuck in place while the player focuses exclusively on the Horned Rambeast.

After a little more platforming and a couple of enemy encounters, the player comes across yet another tentacle. The player already knows what to do here, but they have the pressure of being low on health. Strafe past the tentacle, and you've made it to the next major destination! A save and health station are placed, which prepares the player for what's to come. After receiving another batch of developer comments, the player enters a large area with a giant flower in the middle. In front of them is what appears to be a new gun. After a brief look around, the player picks up the Missile Gun, expanding their weaponry immediately. However, in doing so, the player awakes a slumbering plant the developers have opted to call "Forest's Greed". It shoots up from the ground, bellows at the player, and then...to be continued.

Obviously, the player will be fighting this new beast using the missiles they've acquired, alongside all the other abilities they have so far. The missiles serve a simple purpose – they deal a lot more damage than the regular bullets, but you only have so many of them. This is where finding those missile upgrades will become incredibly useful, and after this the hope is that the player will start taking time to look around and find upgrades if they haven't done so already. Some will be easily granted just because the player reached an important new area, while others must be seeked out and located. Later on, the player will acquire more combat abilities that will have their own separate upgrades, further incentivising exploration. Are you noticing a pattern? At the end of the day, the primary goal of the game is to encourage player exploration. Using their abilities and intellect, my hope is that players will enjoy exploring the different worlds of The Future Project, seeing everything that they have to offer. There will be plenty of game to explore too, with multiple worlds to navigate and each one comparable in size and scope.

I appreciate you taking the time to take a look at The Future Project. This was a long dev blog post, and the accompanying video is eight minutes long itself, so it's a lot to go through. The game is certainly a large one, so it’s appropriate that the content surrounding is equally dense. In fact, it's the biggest game I've ever made, and it's been quite the challenge putting it goether. But now, you should have a pretty solid grasp on what the game is about, the kind of gameplay to expect, and what the goal of the game is. I hope this sampling has gotten you interested in what the rest of the game has to offer, and that you'll be willing to keep an eye on this game's development. The game still has a long road ahead of it, but I'll try to maintain regular updates through this dev blog. I post a new dev blog post on the first day of each month, so June 1st is when I will have another post prepared and ready to read. I also have another blog post here that gets newcomers acquainted with me and my work, if you are curious to see what I'm about.

Until next time!

-Lance T.