Hi everyone, I know that we touched on the Story way back in update #2, but as we are reworking how the logs and story are delivered, This is a nice way of me being able to introduce you another member of the team and hear from them directly. So without further ado, I shall hand over…

Hi everyone, I’m Rosie Walker, narrative designer/writer for Xenosis: Alien Infection and I’ll be talking a little bit about Xenosis’ story for today’s update. Giving too much information about the actual plot would spoil things, so for this update I’ll instead be introducing myself and talking about some of the inspirations, themes and genres that have influenced Xenosis’ story and our plans for how we deliver it to you.

For a bit of background, I work as editor/freelance writer, writing historical and speculative fiction in my spare time. I was originally brought on board for the project back in early 2017 when James first approached me about helping flesh out the story of Xenosis and I jumped at the chance after playing one of the game’s early builds! Although I was initially only meant to create a basic narrative structure for the game, James and I could both see the potential for a much deeper story, and we have been planning and creating content for the project with these ambitions in mind ever since. My main responsibilities on the project are threefold; designing the narrative, producing the in-game written content and world-building for the game’s universe and codex.

Influences

James has already outlined some of his key influences that originally inspired Xenosis, including the Alien franchise and System Shock series. I am a fan of both, and of the sci-fi/horror/survival game genre in general.

I also have a huge interest and background in Classics; my favourite types of sci-fi stories are ones that combine Classical/mythological influence with speculative fiction, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the works of modern sci-fi greats like Dan Simmons and Roger Zelazny. Some of the narrative in Xenosis will take direct and indirect influence from Classical Greek mythology with the hope of capturing some of the flavour from those types of stories. Bearing this in mind, the Xenosis universe is not so far removed in time and place from our own current one, and the game’s world-building is grounded in semi-plausible reality. A particular inspiration here is the universe building created in The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey/Daniel Abraham/Ty Franck, with its factions, colonies and political maneuverings.

Rather than just creating a simplified story for the game as a side note, we want to immerse you in the story of the Carpathian and its crew, one that serves to give real context and depth to the gameplay experience.

Approach

From the start James and I wanted a lot of flexibility with how the written parts of the story are presented. There will be players who will want to explore every nook and cranny to immerse themselves with the written history of the Carpathian, it’s crew and the wider in-game universe, and there will be others who will be more interested in gameplay progress without getting bogged down with walls of text. For this reason a lot of the written story and background information will be entirely optional in in-game logs and emails – there for the player to discover if they wish but not necessary to progress the game. We have ensured that content needed for the core game (key codes, passwords, keywords etc) are automatically logged and stored for the player, as James touched on in an earlier update.

To this end, we are working hard to ensure that all aspects of the game – level design, music, enemy design etc tie together to help convey the game’s basic story and themes without relying too much on written text. The goal is to have the player’s story arc drive the gameplay experience, with the player being given all of the basic story information needed as they progress and interact with the ship’s denizens and through the game’s design. The greatest game experiences are ones that fully immerse the player through the use of various delivery mechanics, and story for us is one of those.

For example, as part of this immersion process we are currently reworking how the terminals function in game so they operate much like a computer interface. This means that the player can access text-based logs, email communications, broadcasts etc at each terminal, which will have an owner or number of logged in users. This will allows the story hunters to really become engrossed in the events of the game, become intimately connected to the crew of the ship and will hopefully encourage exploration to uncover more secrets and lore entries.

Finally, because we have such a large amount of backstory, universe lore, characters and dialog, we are creating an in-game (and web based) codex which will allow the player to unlock entries when they discover new information . This will allow players to easily access information about the in-game universe and give us a nice clean method of being able to manage a large amount of information in a simple way.

I hope that this update has given you some idea of the directions we are taking the Xenosis story. I am incredibly excited to be part of this project and have been working closely with the team to ensure that all of the content I create remains faithful to James’ original vision for the game and integrates with all other aspects of it. Thank you so much for your continued support, if you have any comments or questions feel free to leave one below, or hop into our Discord

Kind Regards,

Rosie Walker
Narrative Director & Writer

Xenosis: Alien Infection is being crowdfunded on Fig, visit the campaign here: http://www.fig.co/Xenosis