Have you ever wondered what you’d do if you ever ran into another version of yourself? What you’d say? How they’d act? What kind of haircut they’d have? Whether or not you’d be proud of them, and vice versa? How their life would be different from yours? Where they live, what they do for work, who they are?
Well, imagine being stranded on a hostile planet and having to create, manage, and work with several versions of yourself to survive. That’s the predicament Jan Dolski finds himself in in The Alters, the latest from This War of Mine creator 11 bit Studios. In a previous interview with game director Tomasz Kisilewicz and lead designer Rafał Włosek, we talked about how The Alters handles branching narratives, but what about the alters themselves? Who are they?
To truly understand The Alters, you need to, well… understand the alters. To do that, we played the Steam demo so we could meet a couple of them in person, and then sat down with game director Tomasz Kisilewicz one more time to get a better idea of who the other Jans were, how many of them there are, and perhaps most importantly, how they interact with you and each other. The interview that follows has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
IGN: We’re going to encounter a ton of other Jans on our journey. Can you talk about building a character whose branching paths could lead to such dramatically different people?
Tomasz Kisilewicz: When designing the character of Jan, we really wanted to create the everyman type of character. We felt this way it would be easier for people to relate to him, understand his backstory and the choices that he has made in the past and the choices that shaped him. And it was crucial for Jan’s background to have those points of regret, because from these points we can branch into drastically different scenarios of how his life could turn out if he had made some different choices along the way.
IGN: So far we’ve seen the Technician, the Botanist, the Refiner, and the Miner. How many Jans can we expect to run into in The Alters? How did you go about deciding what these different types of Jans would be, and how they’d impact The Alters?
We needed to build a variety of Jans, not only for gameplay reasons, but also to create a compelling story of Jan and truly dive into the topic of the “what if?” question. Different alters, have very different skill set that strongly affects your strategy in the game. You can’t create all possible alters in a single playthrough. So the decision on who you bring on board will affect the way you handle the base and how you handle your objectives.
Having various sets of characters with very different personalities will strongly affect our story and also create very different dynamics between Jans. When it comes to how many alters we can create, when you look at the cover of the game, there are 11 characters and I think it gives a good sense of magnitude. But we have some surprises up our sleeves about that. So I don’t want to spoil the fun, and I think I will leave it at that.
IGN: Based on the demo, the first Jan you’ll create is the Technician, who is basically just a more competent version of our Jan, despite taking a very different, less traditional path at an early age. Why did you choose to start off with the Technician?
Kisilewicz: We decided to start with the Technician because, in many ways, he is the polar opposite of the main Jan and he is more competent in some ways, while at the same time, he can be quite flawed in others. But what’s interesting about him is he always keeps challenging our Jan. That’s why he’s so useful at the very early stage of the game when we are onboarding the player with the whole idea of engaging in the relationship with your alters.
Jan and the Technician, they branched out quite early in their life paths. The Technician is someone who stayed with his family. He stood up to their abusive father, something that the main Jan was never able to do. And that’s why he’s a very important axis of the story of our main Jan because that’s one of his biggest regrets that he has.
IGN: One of the immediate differences between Technician Jan and our Jan is that Technician Jan is a little more standoffish, and much more assertive, which seems like it came from the decision to stand up to Jan’s father, and has influenced a lot of his decisions since. Can you talk about how the decisions each Jan makes influence not only their skills and profession but as a person, and how we might see that play out?
Kisilewicz: From the point of branching between Jans, their lives can go in very different directions. It’s like this butterfly effect where changing one little decision can affect your entire life and in the end make you a different person. So understanding those differences helps us understand alters as people, and in the end, helps us effectively manage our crew.
Different Jans can react to our decisions in different ways. For example, one of them can expect us to be a very efficient and mission-oriented leader. While the other might want us to be more empathetic towards the rest of the crew. And pleasing everyone won’t be easy, if not impossible.
IGN: As you interact with the Jans, you can see their responses in real-time, and that seems to determine their reactions to what you see and how they view you. Can you talk about how your choices affect your relationships with the Jans or influence their behavior?
Kisilewicz: The alters have their emotional state that affects how they work, how they behave. And if it’s not managed well, it can lead to some drastic results, including rebelling against us. We can influence their emotions both through economic strategic decisions that we make, and also through interactions.
A big part of the game is dialogue, and actually, every dialogue choice in the game affects the emotional state of our alters. So it is crucial to understand who they are, and where they’re coming from, because different approaches can work better with different alters.
IGN: The more Jans you get, the more complicated it seems those relationships will become. Can you talk about how the Jans react to other Jans? Do you have to mediate disputes? Do they get jealous if you don’t hang out with one of them enough or become friends with another Jan they don’t like?
Kisilewicz: The more Jans we create, the more different dynamics between them are generated, and that can of course lead to fights and arguments. We have a chance to intervene or pick one of the sides. For example, alters can argue about the quality of food in the base. One can think we should invest in a better quality to food while the other thinks that this is a waste of precious resources. So every time we make a promise, we need to make sure we can fulfill it, otherwise there will be consequences.
IGN: Speaking of getting along, a large part of whether Jan and the other Jans get along seems to be shared experience, which you can track via the quantum computer in the base. Jan bonds with the Technician by trying to recreate the pierogi their mom made when they were kids. Is it harder to relate to the other Jans if your common experiences diverge more drastically, and if so, how do you deal with that?
The relationship between Jans is always about what we have in common, but also what makes us different. And that can lead to both emerging conflicts, but also it can help us in resolving them. So no matter how far different Jans are from each other on the branches of the tree of life, there is always something we share. There is always something we have in common. It’s just that, sometimes, it will require us to do a little bit more digging to find this common ground.
IGN: Can you tell us about the other Jans, and give us some insight into what we might expect of them? Do you have a favorite Jan that you’re excited for players to meet?
Kisilewicz: With Jans you can expect the unexpected. We put a lot of effort into creating these multi-layered characters that you’ll uncover piece by piece. At first, when you learn the life path of one of the Jans, you feel like you understand that character just by knowing what he went through. But then you go deeper and deeper and you are uncovering different surprises in not just his outlook on things, but also how he behaves, how he interacts with us, and how he interacts with other alters.
I do have a favorite alter, although it’s a bit like picking your favorite child. [Whispers] It’s the scientist.
IGN: Obviously, it might be a little weird if several Jan Dolskis came back from this mission. Is that something we see the Jans discuss? Does that cause friction in the group? How do they deal with that?
Kisilewicz: Between alters, there is this question of “what’s going to happen to us? What is our future? Do we even have a future?” And the closer we get to actually going back home ,this question will raise more and more tension inside the base. Different alters are different people, so they also differ in their outlook on this topic. That will put even more pressure on us as a captain regarding what are we going to do about it.
IGN: This question may be a bit silly, but can I create multiple versions of the same Jan? Can I have five Technician Jans running around if I want to?
Kisilewicz: Something we knew very early on in development was that we don’t want to allow to create multiple versions of the same alter. First of all, the game was never really about cloning. So multiplication of the same character, it’s an extremely interesting topic, but it’s just not the topic of our game. But most importantly, we always wanted alters to feel like real people with real emotions and real stories. We were afraid that making too many of them would make them more of an NPC or a unit in the game rather than a character with his own thoughts and emotions. So we felt that increasing the number of them might, in the end, reduce their significance as individuals.
IGN: Is there anything we haven’t covered about the Jans that you’d like folks to know about?
Kisilewicz: I think the biggest surprises about the alters lie in their backstories, in their storylines, in the situations they can generate. So we really can’t wait for the players to start unraveling it all and start making their own decisions about the shape of their crew, about what alters they bring on board, in what order, and most importantly, what decisions they make about the alters and about the fate of our main Jan.
Our month of exclusive IGN First content is almost over. If your curiosity has been piqued by this game, you can wishlist The Alters on Steam if you’re interested.