2023: The Year in Fallen London, part 1
In the past two years, I've done an end-of-year Twitter thread where I'd go over some of the Fallen London updates that came out on that year and talk about them – noting details and listing my favorite things.
This year, I'm doing something a bit different. This first part is going to be just about the major things we shipped this year, and it's more of a post about goals, successes, and lessons learned. A bit closer to the end of the year I’ll talk some of my pure favorite things of the year and recognize some of the great work that the very talented people who make Fallen London have done in 2023; this one is more focused on the game’s direction.
For this reason, this post is going to gloss over a lot of the regular things we do – monthly Exceptional Stories, festivals, and so on. Those things are just as important as anything that goes into the game, but they’re a lot more solved and well-understood for us, so there’s less of an exploration there.
Onboarding game improvements
This really was a nearly year-long project, and it’s one of those things that’s somewhat invisible but may end up being one of the most important things we did all year. What we call the ‘onboarding game’ is the early early game; from the tutorial through taking your first steps into Making Your Name. George Lockett took point on this, and it led to a lot of individual changes.
We did things like rebuild the initial tutorial to be more narratively engaging and clearer, add tons of signposting to the early game, and generally improve things to make the game less bewildering. Some of this is industry-standard stuff: for example, several tabs in the UI are now invisible until you get far enough into the game that it makes sense to start interacting with them, in order to give players a proper introduction of each feature and system in the game.
Other changes are an expression of where we’re finding ourselves after thirteen years working on the game. Some of the early-game writing was edited or rewritten to more closely match the tone that the rest of the game ended up having, for example.
Most players can’t really perceive this work; you’re either long past this stage of the game, or you’re going through it for the first time so you don’t realize that things were different earlier. And it’s so, so hard to quantitatively measure the impact of something like this; things like retention numbers are incredibly sensitive to transient factors. New players come into the game through a lot of different avenues, and some of those channels tend to attract players who are more likely to stick around because they’re already self-selected in some way. But these changes definitely look successful, even through the noise. And the qualitative feedback we’ve gotten has been hugely encouraging.
Gaider’s Mourn
The Mourn is a really cool and beloved location from Sunless Sea, so getting to realize it in FL (written with a lot of flair by Luke van den Barselaar) was one of the high points of the Evolution arc. There was a lot of desire for more challenging zailing that could appeal to endgame players, and so the piracy addition ended up joining together a lot of wants into one very neat package.
Piracy was very well-received and has become a beloved part of the game. I think this was one of our cleanest hits of the year, which honestly given its complexity is hugely impressive. Zailing was the first major system that I built for the game, and watching Luke run with it and evolve it has been very gratifying.
Hearts’ Game
Hearts’ game started life from a simple brief: Fill the Professional Activities-shaped hole in our hearts. That is, be a new line of regular, small, free updates.
The tricky thing though is that Professional Activities were kind of a one-off opportunity. Every one of the Profession wheels is mechanically identical to the others, but that’s not a problem because they’re expected to be – indeed, players want these kinds of mutually-exclusive factions to be balanced among them, something that wouldn’t really be possible if they all had different structures. But having done the Profession wheels, we can’t really repeat this structure of doing the same wheel over and over with a different fictional framing; there’s no other opportunity for this.
So, Hearts’ Game was born with the idea of being one activity that would grow and expand over the course of time, with each individual update being an addition that would complicate the existing activity. The activity itself also ended up being an experiment – in reward structure, in design.
In practice, I ended up taking a lot of lessons from this – which is a nice way of saying it had quite a few problems.
- It’s really hard to deliver on a broad expectation. Hearts’ Game was pitched to the players as a distant descendant of Knife & Candle, a spiritual successor of sorts. In truth, players can take that to mean such disparate things that there’s no real way to deliver on this kind of vague promise, and I think a lot of players were disappointed that it didn’t hit the specific notes that they most associated with old Knife & Candle.
- Hearts’ Game ended up requiring a lot more ongoing design attention than it was really expected to originally. This is a thing where my desire to experiment was really badly at odds with what the purpose was for the activity; part of the point of this style of ‘small content drop’ (a very generic term for this kind of thing) is that they are easy to produce. IN practice, every HG season is bottlenecked by my own availability and time, which hasn’t been ideal.
- In general, Hearts’ Game is a pile-up of different experiments and novelties, and I think that has muddled a lot of the actual learning from these experiments. It’s hard to pick through feedback and tell what players are responding to when there’s so many new factors in play.
What I want to take from this into 2024 is: respect the production realities of what we’re trying to accomplish, and be more intentional about experimentation.
But don’t take this to mean that I consider Hearts’ Game a failure, or that we’ll never see this style of play in Fallen London again; a lot of players have responded very positively to it. It’s not for everyone, but the players who enjoy it have really enjoyed it, and I think it’s overall been a worthwhile addition to the game.
Irem
Irem might be my favorite thing that I’ve ever done for Fallen London. It was incredibly hard to write, and it had a lot of hype to live up to, but I feel really good about where it ended up, about the response to it, and about what it’s doing narratively in the game.
Irem expands the setting a lot in all kinds of directions. It’s the most visible part of an ongoing shift in how we portray several factions, most notably the Liberation of Night. It has probably the most dramatic reveal the game has ever had. It’s a huge thing, and the challenge with it now is really “how the hell do we top that.”
Which isn’t to say that it’s perfect – Irem is complex, dense, and very inside-baseball. It’s a puzzlebox that a lot of players have found challenging to navigate, or maybe even frustrating. In spite of its huge size, it implies a vast scope that could never deliver every payoff that every player would have loved.
But what I find most encouraging about the response to Irem is this: I was really, really worried that players would feel like Irem – especially things like the secret future or the terrible deal – doesn’t feel like Fallen London. That it goes too far or is too weird or crosses some invisible boundary and sheds (like snakeskin) the identity of the game that players love. But I think my concern here was unfounded, which to me suggests that Fallen London can be even stranger and deeper. That’s a big part of what I want to carry into the future.
Estival
Was that as much fun for you as it was for us? No, serious question, was it?
Estival is always challenging. It’s the big pivot point of our yearly schedule combined with a big week-long performance. It’s stressful and it’s exciting, for both ourselves and the players. And this years’ Estival really was a full-team effort, with everyone on the writing team contributing writing, though design and story for this was led by George Lockett.
Overall, I count this years’ Estival as a success, and one that keeps proving the potential of Estival as a concept. It did involve what was possibly the funniest miscalculation of the year: we thought we could do a fakeout.
I mean, the fakeout worked. But we made the fakeout too exciting and now players want to get ahold of the unrealized, half-baked fakeout. That’s extremely funny and also reflective that even when we tell ourselves “yeah we’re going to make this purposefully boring”, we end up with something interesting. Oops.
The other main thing I’m tracking with Estival is just ‘bombast fatigue’ among the players. I think of the first three Estivals as a sort of trilogy; they’re three interpretations of the same base idea – London coming under threat by various forces, and needing to cling together to head off its destruction. This has been tremendous fun, but its impact is going to be blunted if we keep repeating it. I expect that next year we’ll take this in a different and unexpected direction.
Into 2024 and Beyond
These are just my personal thoughts as I close out another challenging year of professional practice. Don’t try to pick this apart for an Official Statement on the Direction of the Game. Even if I’m thinking about certain things one way, I might change my mind, or we may come to a different decision based on the broad needs of the game.