The Alters: Meet the Jans, aka the Many Alternate-Reality Versions of Yourself – IGN First

ign.com:

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