The Future Project - 1 Year Later
How the future becomes the present.
Infinite Level game discussed: The Future Project
Break out your party hats because this month, The Future Project turns one year old! Incidentally, my kid also turned one year old, albeit a little sooner than The Future Project. To this day, it's still kinda funny how close together the two events are. I had an eventful summer in 2023, to say the least. In the time since, there's been updates for The Future Project including an entirely new boss battle, and I scrapped one project and started a new one (which that I am currently still working on and getting very close to showing off). For its one year anniversary, I thought it would be appropriate to look back on The Future Project, talk about things that went well and things that I would perhaps change, and the lessons learned from its development.
To start, it's helpful to know what the goals were from the start. It would be easy to just say the goal was to make a metroidvania, but that doesn't quite give the full story. It says more that this was to be my "big game". I had been doing smaller, simpler games for long enough that I felt it was time to try something more ambitious. And I always wanted to make a metroidvania, so this felt like the perfect oppurtunity to do both of those things. Of course, I still knew that this would take a lot of effort for a solo dev, so while the goal is to make the game the biggest I had done, there would still need to be some concessions made here and there. But other than that, it was just a matter of deciding a theme, the story, and what kinds of powers the player could have to wrap up what the plan for the game was.
Theming and story came pretty naturally since this was a continuation of the story from Impressions, so a sci-fi story about the creation of the titular Future Project referenced at the end of Impressions simply made sense to me. The details would be figured out over time, but it was at least decided early on that a Saboteur would involved in the plot in some way. As for powers, that took a little thinking. I had a few different versions of the player character in my mind, but they ultimately were designed for exploring multiple types of worlds and gradually being able to open up more paths over time thanks to their upgrades. In the end, I opted for the version we have now, a robot with a standard energy gun, missile launcher, and a selection of elemental powers. The idea was that the elemental powers would play a big part in influencing the kinds of worlds that the game would have and how the player could interact with them.
In particular, there was going to be some mechanics similar to what you might find in the immersive sim (Bioshock, Dishonored, and other games like that), where various objects could interact with each other and potentially cause a chain reaction of events. In The Future Project's case, that included things like lighting objects on fire such as oil patches or tall clumps of grass, freezing water, and more. The option was available for enemies to activate these things as well, though this was far less developed. This actually leads pretty nicely into the first major cut of the game, and that being this very immersive sim-like quality of the game. The decision was made for two reasons. First, it was proving difficult for me to meaningfully make these objects a part of the level design, and second it was challenging for me to justify why the player would interact with these items as opposed to simply aiming at an enemy and inflicting their status of choice from there. Because that's all these objects were really doing in the end. Light an oil patch on fire, and if an enemy crosses over it they'd get the burn status. It's neat, but a bit of an unnecessary complication when you can do the same thing in fewer steps. All that said, I didn't remove all of these interactions. Ice can still be shot into water to make platforms for you to use, and Alien Remnant has a handful of moments where you apply electricity to an object to activate a platform or teleporter. There's also elemental weaknesses and resistances among the various enemies, such as enemies from Jeweled Tundra taking extra damage from the burn status. So while the interactions between elemental powers and the environment didn't get to be fully explored in The Future Project, it at least wasn't completely removed from the game and does see some use in the finished product.
For the game's development, I started by focusing exclusively on the mechanics and player abilities, and then adjusting their properties until it felt right. So, while it wasn't at all pretty, the player was technically playable in every state that they could be early on in development. For the most part it was only small properties like speed, jump height, and damage output were adjusted over time, with the core moveset of the player largely in place. In fact, I think the only major changes was adding the secondary abilities to each elemental power, those being the flamethrower for fire, ice shield for ice, earth summons for earth, and the electrical field for electricity. I had a few sample rooms made to play with abilities, fine tuning their properties as I went. This was great for me because it helped me learn early on what kinds of challenges would be appropriate for the player, making it easier to intuit some parts of the level design on a first pass. This also meant that my level design documents could focus more on how the player explores the world and the way rooms loop back on themselves rather than getting into the nitty gritty of the nature of platforming and enemy placement.
Speaking of level design, there's another lesson in there. Of course, it's pretty much expected that metroidvania maps loop back on themselves in some way or another, not to mention incoporate all the player's abilities by the end. It's part of what makes them fun! And for me, that part of map design wasn't too difficult. I'd have a starting area, a first set of rooms, an idea of what powers the player would have by this point and what they would acquire, and then figure out how to bring that initial set of rooms back around to some central area. What did prove problematic was how to make those individual rooms interesting. During the first pass of Distant Sibling in particular, at some point I noticed that the whole world was very flat. There was no stronge sense of verticality, and platforming was barely a thing. I got so focused on making a big area that's fun to explore and loop back around on that I kind of neglected to make those smaller areas interesting as well. It took an awkwardly long time for me to notice this too, which goes to show one of the major weaknesses of solo development. There's no one around to tell you that something's not working. This is also, incidentally, why playtesting with others is especially important in solo dev, but I had barely even done that yet at this early stage. Fortunately, the levels didn't stay this way. If you play the game now, many individual rooms call for some use of a player's abilities, with those requirements expanding as the player progresses. It's important to remember that, in your quest to build up to a satisfying overall experience, you need to first create engaging smaller experiences that lead into that bigger experience. Basically, you can't skip the moment to moment gameplay and expect that people will "get" what you're doing. As best as you can, you have to make each minute count.
But as for the actual levels, most of them are pretty close to what I originally envisioned. And if they didn't stick to the original visions, then there was probably a reason for that. If I had to share any regrets regarding the level design, I think it might be with the Tempest world. Of all the worlds in The Future Project, this is the one that feels the most like more could have been done with it. I like the enemies I created, but only three enemies for an entire world seems a bit small. Adding in special obstacles helps, but in hindsight I'm not sure that was enough. Plus, the visual variety is a bit lacking in comparison to other environments. All worlds stick to a theme and thus all the visuals for each world are going to be similar in the name of consistency (with Hand of the Water perhaps being the one exception), but Tempest feels like it needed something extra. Still, it's also one of the smaller worlds in the game, so perhaps that balances it out. At the very least, it was a world where I got to have a lot of freedom with how obstacles were designed since the player needs to have several abilities to get there at all.
As far as the game's design goes, that covers most of the main points. But we can quickly do a "lightning round" of things that stand out to me when looking back on the game's development. To start, I can't help but notice that some aspects of the game's ending and the Saboteur themself feel almost like practice rounds for my current project. Without saying too much, that feeling of practicing for a later project has to do with their mood and tone. In particular, the way the Saboteur could sometimes just appear without warning feels like the sort of thing that could feasibly happen in the game I'm working on now. The final moments of the game have an eerie feel to them as well. We'll see of course how much I truly learned from those moments at a later time. On the topic of the finale, I still continue to go back and forth on the three final bosses back to back seen at the end of the game. On the one hand, it makes a lot of sense to have it be that way from a story perspective, but on the other hand I did get some feedback after the game released stating that three in a row like that is quite taxing. It may simply be a matter of opinion. Lastly, for a very minor point, I wish I could have figured out how to get the Cyclop's enemy's fur working. Yes, the stone throwing one eyed enemy of Distant Sibling was supposed to be a hairy boy but I simply could not figure out how to get hair to appear on it. It makes me seem very amateur to admit that, but sometimes you just don't know how to get something working at the time and decide to compromise.
So, what is the ultimate takeaway from The Future Project after one year? Well, it's not going to be very surprising, but the takeaway is that being a solo dev making a game that might typically require at least a team of ten is, well, difficult. Sometimes I'm still a little surprised that I managed to put it together at all. But I really wanted to take everything I learned and try to make something ambitious, and even if there's plenty of areas that could be improved, I can at least say I did it. And I learned a ton making it. Common game dev wisdom states that indie devs should avoid making big games because they probably won't have the times, resources, and knowledge to make it. That's still true, but now that I've made The Future Project I can pretty confidently say that there's a lot of knowledge I've gained as a result of making a game that, realistically, shouldn't have been feasible given my circumstances. I'm now taking all that knowledge, be it technical, design, and even marketing into my next game. And so far, I'm feeling pretty confident my next game will be far better than anything I've done before. I don't know that I'd have that same confidence if I didn't make The Future Project.
But it is worth stressing that big games are challenging for someone like me, and until my personal situation can change in some way that makes them feasible again, I doubt I'll do it again. It takes a lot of time and effort to get something like The Future Project where it is by yourself. I find that the end result is worth it, but it could always have been something more. So going into my next game, the aim is to focus on a smaller overall experience (but not too tiny because I admittedly have a hard time thinking real small), but in exchange for size the experience will be tighter. The mechanics will be simpler, but in the place of complexity there will hopefully be a stronger emotional pull. And given the kind of game I'm making, stronger emotional pulls is gonna be the sort of thing I'll need.
A final fun fact about The Future Project before we wrap up. You might know that Impressions and The Future Project are connected, with Impressions' story leading pretty directly into The Future Project's. Are there any plans for The Future Project to lead into a kind of third chapter for this universe? The answer is yes...but that's another big game, and I did just say that I'm not really in a position to do something the size of The Future Project right now. If I can figure how to bring the scope down to something more reasonable, then I can reconsider, but for right now it'll simply remain an idea. My next game will be something completely different with its own story to explore, and hopefully I'll be able to show it off soon. And with it, you should be able to see the progression I've made as a game developer between The Future Project and it. So, I do hope you'll join me on that adventure when the time is right.
Until next time!
-Lance T.