A Brief Recap of Impressions Development
Originally published February 1st, 2020
How did this all come to be?
Impressions can be seen on…
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1220330/Impressions/
itch.io: https://prof-smash.itch.io/impressions
As of this writing, Impressions is releasing in just three days – February 4th, 2020 to be exact. I thought in the final moments of this game’s development it would be interesting to look back and recap the process of bringing Impressions to life. Thinking about it now, there’s simultaneously a lot and a little history with the game. There’s a lot of history because the game took me a little over a year to make. But it also feels like there’s little to say about development because the game is, after all, a short story. Well, regardless of whether the history is long or short, it should be an interesting tale to tell.
Like all games, it all begins with an idea. I got inspired by two major items – the concept of “fake news” and why every alien story is always about us versus the aliens. The aliens portion speaks for itself – I simply thought a game where someone just talks about the aliens would be interesting. Obvious political affiliations aside, the “fake news” concept intrigued me because the idea of someone altering a story or spinning it a certain way for some kind of agenda was very interesting to me. From there the two ideas just sort of merged and thus Impressions was born. I suppose if you could describe the game in sentence, given all the info on its origins, you could describe Impressions as “the War of the Worlds radio drama…but real.”
So the idea is in place, now it just needs to be made. This game was very different for me in that I worked on the story first, followed by the game. It’s not my typical method of game development, for sure. Usually I think of some gameplay idea and then create characters, the world, and stories around that gameplay. Using War Ender (my previous game) as an example, I decided on it being an action platformer akin to something like Mega Man early on, then discovered the shoot-float mechanic, and proceeded to create the story and characters around all that. Now, with all this said, there was still a hint of my “gameplay first” approach in Impressions. I at least knew the game would be about a news show, the player would make decisions during this news show that would affect the world to some degree, and the game was ultimately about you stating whether you liked or disliked the aliens. But even so, I still largely focused on getting my story ideas in place before working too much on the “game” part of the video game.
Getting the prototype for Impressions was a super quick process since I knew well in advance that the game would be short and simple. Within a short span of time the basic skeleton of the game was in place – there were characters, dialogue, and choices. Shortly after that I filled in the rest of the Day 1 script so that the game could be 100% playable from the beginning of Day 1 to the end. Then I worked on programming the different “what if” scenarios in Day 1. And what’s a “what if” scenario? When I say that, I mean any potential scenario where, as an example, a player may say positive things about the aliens but then suddenly do a one-eighty and talk about them negatively.
“What if” scenarios like that are scattered throughout Impressions. Characters will react to your sudden changes and begin to question why you’d change your mind so quickly. But even if they didn’t, there’s almost always something the game will do to remind you of what you said. So I hope you like the choice you make because it is absolutely permanent. I just mentioned how Day 1 can encounter these situations, but that extends into all four days in the game to some degree. I would say Day 2 and Day 3 are the places where you not only see the most of these kinds of situations (assuming you play this way of course), but also best feel the most impact of these decisions. I think a lot of that can be credited to the writing and where the story is by that point.
Going back to the development process, the remaining days within Impressions followed a specific pattern. I split a day into a few different branches, with each branch corresponding to an overall stance the player can take. Once I get the different branches together I then go back and try to find those “what ifs” I was talking about earlier and add to each branch to accommodate as many of those “what ifs” as possible. From there testing would take place, making sure everything flows as needed. In a nutshell, making a given day has three steps which might not sound like much but if there’s a lot of opportunities for those “what ifs” to occur, the work piles up quick.
By the true end of the above process, all four days are in place. So what comes next? Why, cleaning up and rewriting the entire game of course! This is one part of Impressions development that I kind of wish I had handled differently. The rewrite was absolutely needed to make a more interesting story and more likeable characters, not to mention just a better reading experience, but it really should have happened long before this point. I think the rewrite occurring here contributes a lot to why this short, simple game took so long to make. But, as they say, better late than never. At the very least, all the basic content was in place – the game was fully playable from beginning to end. Now it just had to all read well. So I started improving the dialect of the characters and adding elements of the story to give both sides more compelling arguments for why they feel one way or another about the aliens in the game. This required looking at lots…and lots…and lots of news shows. I’ll admit, that was a painful process especially when watching certain shows. But it was worth it because it helped me create a more convincing “news show” atmosphere.
Around this time I wanted to implement more urgency into the gameplay. Players could just sit back and read for as long as they wanted, and take their sweet time to make decisions. Impressions is practically a visual novel so I wanted to add more “game” elements to keep things interesting. This is when the cutoff timers were introduced. A player is allowed ten seconds to read dialogue before it moves on to the next line. Why ten? I wanted to be sure that players of all reading speeds could have enough time to see what the character is saying and process it. Of course, clicking the mouse would progress the dialogue as well once they were ready. I also added a timer to decision making, initially fifteen seconds but later increased to twenty. I’m hoping it will add some tension to the game, forcing players to decide quickly what they want to send out to the world. It’s certainly done that for me at least. There are also situations where characters may interrupt each other, much like you might see in an actual news show. This is tied into the cutoff mechanic – in code I simply alter the number from ten to however long I want to allow before the next character cuts off the one currently talking. On top of that, if the player wants to get deep into the lore of the world there’s a news ticker and a social media bar at the bottom of the screen that gives you a better idea of what’s going on outside the news room. But, if they want that juicy lore they’ll have to split their attention between it and the character dialogues.
Art, music, and sound were the last few items to come together for the game. During winter break I took time to create the realized characters, background elements, and various UI images. I won’t claim to be the best artist in the world but if I do say so myself, I think I did a pretty okay job. It’s certainly my best work to date from the art side of things. One of the nice things about an entire game taking place in a single room is that it allows me the chance to detail it to my liking. For instance, there’s this neat animation in the game where the large screens in the background have these colored bars appear and dance across the screens. Not only does it look cool but it aids the “not too distant future” look I was going for in Impressions. I wanted to extend this to the game’s UI as well, so I tried to make everything look as sleek as possible. The buttons you click to make decisions are simply look like they belong in this sci fi environment and the tablet that the player reads the day’s news on before a show looks like it would actually exist in the world.
And now, here we are at the finish line. There's a lot of things I glossed over – I didn't even mention character creation – but this dev blog is already one of my longer ones and bugs don't fix themselves (unfortunately). So it's back to work I go. Perhaps in the future I can dive deep into specific aspects of Impressions design and development. But for now, this is where I get off. I hope you're looking forward to the game's release (remember...February 4th). I'll be interested to hear what routes people took in their playthroughs and their reasoning for it.
Se you in three days!
-Lance T.
Impressions can be seen on…
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1220330/Impressions/