Impressions Postmortem
Originally published February 1st, 2021
A look back on the ideas, development, and reception of Impressions.
You can play Impressions at either of these links. It’s free! Seriously!
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1220330/Impressions/
Itch: https://prof-smash.itch.io/impressions
Can you believe it's only been a year since Impressions released? I think many of us would agree it feels much, much longer. But here we are, in the year 2021, and already things are very different from how they were when my second game was made available to play. To recap, we're still going through a pandemic that started roughly around this time last year. We've also seen a lot of social unrest, as the people make their voices heard on a variety of issues, from police brutality to claims of election fraud. As of this writing, there's a new U.S. President, but right before that we had a wild moment where the U.S. Capitol was stormed. And as I write this, the stock market is having an...interesting...episode. I don't say any of this in an attempt to “stir the pot.” I'm just trying to communicate how wild of a year it's been.
Not to brag, but I think I've managed to somehow capture the character of humanity with Impressions (or at least Americans). Just before I started writing this, I replayed Impressions to refresh myself on its content. I was surprised by how many things felt one to one with the real world. There's sub plots about a group of people in Impressions believing that the alien contact was a hoax, which reminded me too much of how certain people were (and perhaps still are) treating COVID-19, or the one where the cult Application 12 more or less attacked people for simply speaking the truth. Am I a prophet? No, of course not. But I do wonder if life imitates art, or if art imitates life. I'm just saying, I may have been on to something.
To be completely frank, Impressions is a game I'll probably never make again. It's not that I don't like it, or hated making it. On the contrary, it was really fun making a game that I would normally never do. But Impressions will very much be a product of its time. Without a few key ingredients given to me as a result of living in the time that I am, I would have never made Impressions. And I suppose that's a good place to start the postmortem proper – where did this idea come from?
Design document showing basic look of gameplay scene
There were two primary inspirations. The first, and perhaps most well known, was the idea of “fake news.” It was not that long ago that our former president was taking to virtually every platform he could to decry media, labeling a lot of it as “fake news.” There was a lot to unpack from that, but I personally took that idea and wondered how it might work in a story. It was, admittedly, an interesting concept. The idea that a large group of people would intentionally warp a story to fit whatever agenda they have did intrigue me. Everyone has their biases, and there's only so much you can do to help that, but we're talking about very intentional warping of stories. Being a game maker, I wondered how you could turn that into a game.
The second inspiration came from a podcast I often listen to called StarTalk. Fans of Neil deGrasse Tyson might be familiar with it, as he is the primary host of said podcast. In one episode, while talking about alien contact, he posed a question which went something along the lines of “where's the movies where the humans try to make peace with the aliens?” This tied pretty nicely into the fake news theme I already had. Players could spin the story so that it's painted as negatively as possible, or they could spin it the opposite way and make you wonder how you'd ever think it was anything but good. And why not? Let's make it about extraterrestrials.
So development began, and things went about as expected. First, I did a lot of watching of news shows and got an idea of the kind of language they use when talking. What were some common things in the shows that enhanced or detracted from the point? Sometimes the talking heads started shouting, sometimes they'd cut each other off, and at times they'd actively mock each other. It became pretty apparent that a lot of shows out there (at least the ones I saw) were more for entertainment than for informing the public. Naturally, I tried to incorporate that idea into the game. From the start, I had two characters who were always Patricia and Clark, and each of them would have their say on the four day story of aliens. And of course, they bickered and made exaggerated claims and would probably annoy the player at some point. I always knew the game would be on the short side and had planned it to be free from the start. What I didn't expect is that it would take over a year to make the game. Part of this was because I was also working on a project that followers of this blog now know as “Future.”
Placeholder sprite for player character
But what else contributed? A game this small shouldn't have taken over a year, should it? I'd agree with that, but there were a handful of setbacks. For starters, my computer died early on in development, and I lost a decent amount of progress for it. There was also the usual issue of working on mechanics at one stage, only to gut it later. Impressions stayed pretty close to its original design, but one major mechanic that never saw the light of day was the Interrupt mechanic. When prompted, players could chime in with their immediate thoughts in the middle of conversation. The dialogue from these interruptions would work similarly to the usual dialogue, but there would be additional “stats” made to account for how frequently a player interrupted which would change how future conversations would go. In the end, this mechanic was gutted because, quite honestly, I didn't find it fun to do. As I said, it was a prompt that the player could activate, and I couldn't help but feel players would almost always do that. For me, it lost a lot of its identity, and just became normal dialogue that the player could trigger instead of waiting for the usual dialogue boxes. It started feeling like a “speed up the game” button in a game that was already planned to be less than an hour long.
Another scrapped mechanic was the ratings system, though this wasn't prototyped like the interruption mechanic was, so it was pretty easy to get rid of. However, in a way, it did sort of come back towards the end of the game's development. Impressions now has a social media section where you can see the responses from regular people on the internet. Though not quite the same, it was a helpful indicator of what the world thought of the player's choices. The News page presented before each day contributed to this as well, but it was ultimately more about informing the player before a day starts. Still, it would absolutely change depending on the player's choices, so it could also be a source of affirmation or critique.
The next major contributor to the delay was art. As I've often said on this blog, I'm not an artist. I consider myself a programmer first, and one of the laws of the universe does state that if you're a programmer than you must be bad at art. But I wanted to avoid bad looking art this time, and tried to get a little help in making the art of Impressions. I had some big ideas about the look of the game. There was a strong idea in my head to blend the characteristics of political cartoons with a touch of realism. For instance, characters would often have big heads, but their mouths would still look closer to reality than you often see in those political cartoons. So, what was the problem here? Simple. The help never came. To be fair, I kept the requests to an individual as opposed to spreading it out to multiple artists. I'm a fairly reserved person and a bit of a control freak when it comes to my games, so heading out onto the internet to ask some random person to make art for my game did not sound appealing to me. Making it worse was that most other artists probably would have had financial requirements that I wouldn't have been able to meet, as opposed to the one I asked where I had a strong idea that I could compensate him the amount he would have liked. A part of me now wishes I was a bit more bold in asking others for assistance. If I can't pay them, then I can't. Move on and find somebody else. But instead, I ultimately opted to just make the art myself. My art is...well, it's a programmer making art. I definitely think it's an improvement over War Ender's art, but there's still a lot of assets you can tell were made by a programmer. The News section holds some of my “finest” works yet.
Impressions as seen in-engine
Much of the game stayed the same from day one all the way to February 4th, 2020. It was, without a doubt, the most focused project I had ever made. That's the benefit of making small games. Less time to get cold feet and change your mind on entire sections of game. War Ender went through a ton of radical changes, and “Future” has gone through some as well. Heck, even the RPG I'm making now has already had a few big changes from when it started. Barring a couple scrapped mechanics, Impressions stayed largely the same from the start. I guess it was just a solid idea from the start. That or, as I implied earlier, I just had less time to change my mind on things.
Development continued like this for the rest of Impressions' time in the oven. Finally, on February 4th, 2020, the game released! And for the most part, people enjoyed it. Reviews were overall positive, praising the uniqueness of the game and the interesting narrative. A lot of people liked the news show angle and the pressure put on them as they make choices that would affect humanity's relationship with the aliens. As of this writing, Impressions has been downloaded about 3,600 times. Given that it was free, I'm not sure how successful that's considered to be by most people, but as far as me and my expectations for the game go, I'd say it was overall a success. However, call me a pessimist (I'm not, I'm a realist), but I tend to get laser focused on the parts of the game that received criticism. Don't worry, I don't become angry and get frustrated about them the way some might. I just take what they say pretty seriously. Fortunately for me and my ego, there was very little in the ways of outright negative reviews. Obviously there were some criticisms of the art, but that was to be expected. One notable criticism that stuck out to me was one saying that choices overall did not matter. When reading the review, I can understand where the player was coming from. They stated that because all of the endings are very similar to each other, making it feel like the choices didn't matter. I can even recall testers saying that the endings were too similar, or that it was strange how the player seems to be the only controlling the alien meeting outcome. I even recall one saying there wasn't really a “good ending”, but to be fair on that last point, that was more or less my goal. I know. I'm a ray of sunshine. And to be fair to that tester, I think they even said they picked up on that goal.
But all these critiques are valuable knowledge that I can carry into a future game. I would like to do another “choices matter” style game, and knowing what all went right and wrong from a player's perspective will be helpful information to have in the future. Heck, even in games where the story is linear, knowing what parts of video game storytelling people like can help a lot in future stories. I've often said that Impressions was something of a test of my story writing. In making Impressions, I've learned a lot on how to craft not just an interesting story, but an interesting video game story. Notice the difference in those two things. There's a lot of people who would say that video games are bad at telling stories, and they might be partially right. But a strength of the medium that was made very clear to me during the development and reception of Impressions was the power of the player influencing and discovering the story for themselves. I've found that video game stories are a bit more interesting when they're not just spoon fed to you, but instead are tied more directly into the gameplay. We all know that saying, actions speak louder than words. I believe that's incredibly true with video games.
Design document showing general flow of story and choices
Other than somehow predicting human nature, one of my favorite parts of Impressions is the music. When replaying the game, I loved what I did with sound. To this day I still think I'm real clever for incorporating this world's version of a “breaking news jingle” into the music. You know the one, the kind of sound you might nowadays hear on a fictional news show in a cartoon that goes “doo do do doh doooo do do doo” ...this is really hard to communicate through text. And unfortunately, I don't know how to describe it to Google to get an example. Hopefully, what I'm trying to say will come across. The soft spoken, sometimes eerie sounds of the “pre-Day” music is something I enjoy too. Fun fact about those: a couple of them have instruments that suddenly cut out and reappear a few seconds later. This wasn't intentional. I think it was cause I was using certain sounds that were trial versions, but I didn't realize it at the time and didn't want to redo the whole song. Plus, I thought it strange that I bought a whole music making software with a huge library of instruments that I guess the creators didn't want me using? And yet, it's available to use? It's confusing. Point is, it was a case of a happy accident that some of the music turned out as it did. To me, it sounds like some kind of weird signal that we're getting that suddenly vanishes, only to reappear later.
But my favorite piece of music is the credits theme. I about made myself cry the last time I heard it before releasing the game. I love the way the sounds just come together at the right moment, especially the very MIDI cellos early on in the song. But I play cello, so there might be some slight bias there. Here's another interesting bit of trivia for you – about a week after the game released, I received news my grandfather had passed. As a result, it's very hard for me to hear the credits music without thinking of him, and vice versa. It was the last song I made for the game, the last song I heard before releasing the game, and as it would turn out, one of the last songs I heard before getting such news. … … I feel like I'm making things real sad talking about this, and I'm not meaning to. It's just something that I think is very interesting about this piece of music. Not sure when I'll so strongly tie a musical work to a life event again.
As I said at the top, making a game exactly like Impressions will be difficult to do again. There were so many real world factors contributing to the idea of the game. Not only that, but those real world factors are very unique to the time Impressions was being developed which, according to my dev log, would have been around October 2018. A big reason for its conception was because of a certain major political figure and some of the things he was saying. I'm trying to imagine making this game in any other presidency, and I just can't picture it. It would at the very least be pretty different. I don't even know that I would have thought of the whole news show angle. But it's not just people involved in politics that contributed to the ideas of Impressions. Quite frankly, it was society as a whole. And society is already different from how it was when Impressions began development. Heck, it's already changed a lot in the time since the game's release, or at the very least certain attributes that have always been there have been made more apparent. Impressions is, if I'm being honest, a little weird for me to think about when comparing it to what has actually happened in the world. But those curious similarities is also what makes it a very interesting game to me, and one that I will likely continue to think about for a long time.
Well, it's been fun reminiscing, but we should probably put ourselves back in the present. In my personal opinion, the present is a bit more enjoyable than the past anyway. In summary, Impressions was a interesting game for me to make. It was almost completely outside my wheelhouse, since I usually make games with a focus on gameplay over story. This was the other way around, focusing much more on story over gameplay. I think in developing this game, I now have a better grasp on how to incorporate both the story and the gameplay together in future projects. Hopefully the lessons learned here will make themselves obvious by the time I release my next game, whenever that is.
Until next time!
-Lance T.
You can play Impressions at either of these links. It’s free! Seriously!
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1220330/Impressions/