Betterblog

We're a bit vague about release dates for new content, because we're such a lean and frantic operation that it's often hard to know when we'll be done. Especially when we come over experimental. But we do have a big fat blurt in the pipeline, so I thought I'd post about it.

We went live with Mrs Plenty's Most Distracting Carnival. This is quite a departure from other areas: a smorgasbord of little fun snippets rather than the usual ladder to climb. As such it's an experiment. Props to @goatdance, who was creative lead on it and did most of the work, and to @emilystaubert, who is entirely to blame for Madame Shoshana. The early-access pass is also an experiment in revenue generation, so feedback on both the carnival and the pass are welcome. (We will possibly be dropping the price of the early access pass as we get closer to March - this depends on takeup, but we're as interested in data as in income on this really).

We have the first part of Book 2 nearly ready to go. This goes up to around 84, but again, we're experimenting with some different patterns for play on a couple of the paths, so the upper limit isn't as straightforward or obvious as it has been in some other cases... We'll probably run an early-access scheme on this too, but it should be open to the public well before the end of February.

If you've been following @huffam_esq, @mr_wines and so forth, you'll know that the Feast of the Exceptional Rose is just around the corner. This is Fallen London's take on Valentine's Day. I want to use it to road-test some enhancements to social actions that I've had bubbling away for a while. That should run, er, from Valentine's Day.

And the Ambitions are getting love. We need to go careful on these, because they tie so significantly into major background secrets and we try to make the prose a bump more sophisticated than the standard storylets, but you should soon be closer to satisfying your Heart's Desire and your need for revenge.

A more general point about upcoming content. We have arcs sketched out up until around 240 along each of the main tracks; we expect Ambitions to run up to about 150. All this is tentative and depends on player growth and enthusiasm. If we only manage a small hard-core of long-term players we'll end the arcs sooner; if we get a big long-term audience then we'll probably keep adding content until everyone's bored or dead. We do have some extreme ideas at the very top end that I think it's fair to say no-one has really ever done in a game, and I'm very, very keen for those to see the light of day.

One last point on that. You've probably noticed that the cost of increasing a Quality is the next level: 38 to go from 37 to 38, 39 to go up one more level, and so forth. The thought of a grind that required 100 or 200 change points to increase a stat has long made me a little ill. A couple of weeks ago we decided to take a stand on this, and capped the cost of increasing qualities at 50: that is, it will cost you 50 to go from 49 to 50, 50 to go from 50 to 51, 50 to go from 159 to 160, and so forth. I *hope* we will gain in player enthusiasm more than we lose in Fate sales at high levels - but more than that, the goal with Echo Bazaar was always to build a casual but compelling storytelling experience, not a straightforward grind game. We'll be looking at more ways to approach that ideal in the months to come.

-- Alexis

I've seen some comment on Twitter about the messages we encourage players to send. The s-word comes up from time to time. I want to clarify our position on this.

Echo Bazaar does not, by any commonly accepted meaning of the word, spam. We don't send unsolicited messages to anyone, ever. We don't ever use anyone's account to send a message without their direct and immediate consent. We do offer an incentive for sending viral messages, but it's quite a modest incentive and we only offer that incentive once every 24 hours. And finally, we allow people to edit the viral messages without any restrictions beyond keeping the fallenlondon link in. If you want to say, 'I diskard this silly game [link]', well, it's your Twitter account, not ours.

We do also allow people to send postcards and echo content if they like the content. This is their call, it's entirely voluntary, and it's really no different from any of the [Twitter this] links on any of a thousand sites.

Ultimately, some people are bound to find EB-related tweets annoying, but we want to limit that annoyance to, oh, the kind of annoyance I'll feel when the World Cup rolls round and half my friends start tweeting about bloody football. So if you think there's something reasonable we can do to reduce possible annoyance, let us know. If you find any hint that anything I've said about our tweeting guidelines is untrue, let us know straight away. We take this very seriously.

If you're a player, you might be wondering what's kosher to do by way of tweet edits. To reiterate what I said above, it's your Twitter account, not ours. But a few points below. Consider this a draft T&C section.

Things we really don't mind you doing

- tweeting for an action refresh and putting completely unrelated text in the other 100 characters. Think of the fallenlondon link as sponsorship. :-)

Things we'd strongly prefer you not to do, but we won't hassle you for

- tweeting for an action refresh, and then deleting it straight off. We considered penalising people who do that, but (i) it seems a bit aggressive (ii) if someone's protected their updates we'd probably be penalising them too. Ultimately we rely on the goodwill and enthusiasm of our players.

- tweeting for an action refresh and saying 'this game sucks.' :-)

Things that are potentially bannable offences

- linking to content that pretends to be EB content, in a way that's griefy or fraudulent rather than funny.

- misrepresenting what our tweet policy is in a malicious way: 'If you see this tweet then EB is spamming my account without my consent [link]'. Unless we've embraced the dark side, in which case, nail us to the wall, folks.

- and of course, anything that contravenes the Twitter TOS.

Ta for reading. Comments welcome as ever.

One of our players mailed me last night to ask why everyone in the EB art is white. I'm glad this came up, because it is something Paul and I have been mulling over.

A glib answer would be, there weren't that many Asians in Dickens. A glib answer to the glib answer would be, there weren't that many sorrow-spiders either. Then we get into the whole  business of whether ahistoricity in fantasy is important because it's about suspension of disbelief, or trivial because it's fantasy. And three sentences later we inevitably find ourselves embroiled in one of those Wikipedia-based internet arguments, which isn't something I want. As a position statement, the approach in EB has always been not to be openly anachronistic but not to be too fussed: so there's a music hall culture that's more of the 1890s/00s than the 1880s, we slip in and out of Victorian turns of phrase, we probably have hundreds of other mistakes, but we don't have electric street-lights or Marxist-Leninists. 

And yet, despite the powerful and pervasive chauvinism and homophobia of the nineteenth century, we allow players to pick a gender role and sexuality which suits them, and we treat characters of any gender identically in the storylets.[1]  We've stretched gender roles by depicting female or vaguely gendered non-player characters with a distinctly ahistorical degree of independence and sexual freedom. So that's pretty anachronistic, isn't it? The thing is, we can go on to use the casual sexism of the nineteenth century to help establish period (three ladies faint at your scandalous joke, and all that), but the presence of strong non-male characters and protagonists takes the sting out of it. Unfortunately it's hard to pull the same trick with casual racism. And it's tricky to present Chinese, African, Indian, Jewish or Gypsy characters without addressing, erasing or ignoring the racism of the time. Paul has suggested the 'RSC option', that is, we simply go colour-blind and randomly assign characters to ethnicities regardless of context, but we're not the RSC, we're a little game on the Internets, and players see our stuff in isolated dibbets. We have to steer between extremes: if we have a nineteenth-century black policeman it looks like tokenism, if we have only black servants it looks like prejudice. We don't have crowd scenes, so it's hard to manage a traditional US corporate diversity rainbow effect.

We feel it deserves attention, though. And there are certainly roles that don't fit neatly into society but that players find sympathetic and exciting - monster-hunters, bravoes, explorers, poets - which could be filled by non-white characters without it looking like we're labouring a point. So you'll probably see a less monotone cast of characters as time goes on. But we'd be very interested in what our players have to say on the subject. By all means comment below.

[1] Which has, let me tell you, made writing content pretty fiddly in some cases :-) 

[2] I think, incidentally, we're rather pushing the envelope by allowing player-characters whose gender can be 'not telling you.' I know this has been done in MUDs and other non-commercial contexts - how many genders did LambdaMOO have? - but as far as I know it's a first in casual social gaming.

It will, you know, barring the unforeseen. Have a little faith. Yes, I know what the date is. 

I thought I'd mention some of the things we've been doing while we were away.

There's a map. It'll change and grow and, yes, it'll be the navigation interface eventually.

There's much more content. Especially by way of Opportunities. The hidden areas referenced in the Ambitions now exist, too.

You can choose avatars. More to come. You'll be able to pick alternate avatars for a small number of Fate Points.

You can engage in social actions with your friends. Or with anyone, really. There's a limited number of these, and a consciously light feature-set, while we trial the framework changes we needed to support them. There'll be more. Feedback welcome.

There's been an economic rebalancing. We were very generous with rewards in the beta to make sure people saw a lot of content in a limited time...and on top of that there were some bugs and loopholes that allowed people to get *very* rich. It's all a bit calmer now.

There's a newsfeed so you can keep up to date with messages without relying on Twitter direct messaging. A bit primitive, we'll iterate.

There are now rare successes in some events - you won't necessarily see everything a storylet has for you first time round...

Content now goes in via a CMS rather than my crazy DSL. The way I put content together when I was testing didn't scale at all well to the task of updating content for the live site. Yes, all sounds fascinating, I know. What it means though is that you should see a greater variety, of, ah, narrative topologies, God I love saying that, in game events.

We've decided to stop taking Jack-of-Smiles seriously. I never liked serial killers.

And some bug fixes, scaling enhancements, styling changes that no one but us cares about.

Finally, there is a payment wall ready to go so you can buy Fate...but it's all feeling a little bit more beta to me with all these changes. So we're going to leave that off for the first week or so after we come back, until I'm happier we're bedded in.

Thanks for your patience. See you in there.

Some of the icons in Echo Bazaar took a mere twenty minutes to create from sketch to site, while others - usually the simple ones - took many days.  The most extreme example of this is the little button that gives a tweetable postcard of your location, which took two weeks, fifteen iterations, one very unprofessional huff and a semi-serious threat to replace the existing art with a pair of luminescent green breasts.  And after all that, maybe five people clicked the goddamned thing. Anyway, I thought it might be fun (and pleasantly narcissistic) to run through the evolution of a single icon. Typically, the process starts with a brief from Alexis. In this case:

“A wild-haired lunatic with eyes and mouth agape and a blood-dripping meat-cleaver. Sticky stuff dripping from his mouth. Expensive-looking clothes in disarray, evening dress maybe. Narcotic honey is the drug of choice downstairs. This gent has overdone it.”

Which led to the following, somewhat crappy sketch (done in ArtRage on a WACOM pad):

(Alternative title: Alexis will do anything to skive off rejigging cashflow projections.)

M and Bioshock, the last great flowerings of German expressionism. A predator stalks a twilight city, driven by unrelenting internal demons to hunt down children.

PERFORMANCE: M was produced in 1931 and will run on anything. Bioshock is a last-year's-game that will run well on an aging gaming rig. M WINS. M AHEAD.

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Bioshock is stunning: New York in sepulchral aquarium light. M is stunning, but only in black and white. BIOSHOCK WINS. NECK AND NECK.

AUDIO: M has a striking score and a memorable leitmotif. Bioshock likewise. M's soundtrack has the underwater quality of a last-but-three-generations production. Bioshock has like that Dolby thing. BIOSHOCK WINS. BIOSHOCK AHEAD.

INNOVATION: M was only the tail-end of a epoch. It rides on that epoch's coat-tails. So does Bioshock, not least in its enthusiastic reinvention of specific shots from Murnau's Nosferatu. Bioshock is, moreover, a skinned XBox port of System Shock II. M WINS. NECK AND NECK.

GAMEPLAY: The combat mechanics in M leave much to be desired. The resource management model is nonexistent. Bioshock is a giant box of toys, with upgradable plasmids and a myriad of combat tactics, but it gets repetitive. In M, when you die, you stay dead. In Bioshock, when you die, you resurrect painlessly. It lacks weight, my friend. M has more variety in gameplay than Bioshock's combat and hacking. Not compelling, though. BIOSHOCK WINS BY A HAIR. BIOSHOCK AHEAD.

GERMANS: Bioshock contains exactly one German, quasi-war-criminal Dr Tenenbaum. M has hundreds. Literally, hundreds! M WINS. NECK AND NECK.

SKIN: M is entirely unerotic throughout. Bioshock, leaving firmly aside the queasy presexuality of the Little Sisters, has Dr Tenenbaum, who smokes languidly and looks sort of pretty in the radio mugshot. She's quite lumpy in person but nevertheless represents a CLEAR WIN FOR BIOSHOCK. BIOSHOCK AHEAD.

SHARKS: M is set in Berlin, and features no sharks. Bioshock also has no sharks, but its underwater setting makes their lack evident. A minor demerit: M WINS. NECK AND NECK.

VALUE FOR MONEY: M has a running time of around 2 hours. Bioshock has over 20! BIOSHOCK IS THE CLEAR WINNER. BIOSHOCK AHEAD.

THEMATIC DEPTH: M is about a child murderer. Bioshock is about a child murderer and also Objectivism. BIOSHOCK WINS. BIOSHOCK AHEAD TWO.

FINAL SCORE: M 4, Bioshock 6. BIOSHOCK WINS: DECISIVELY. SCIENTIFICALLY.

1. Early alphas are great. We had a half-dozen playtesters swarming over the game from the moment it was barely playable, when it was a monochrome text-only experience with two dozen storylets, and we kept them at it. It wasn't what you'd call a formal testing process. But it did provide early evidence that we had something people would want to play, and it did shine a searching light into the crevices where bugs hide. It meant that going into beta was merely terrifying and not cripplingly terrifying. Which in turn kept my gin intake to genuinely respectable levels.

The down-side has been that you can't really test social features with five players in a game intended to scale massively. This is my excuse for why the Friends page and the buffing options are all a bit pants.

2. The low-spam policy looks like a qualified success. Failbetter's founding philosophy (i.e. what I would shout at Paul after too much coffee) was that we be as unspammy as we could be without being dying on our feet. We want to co-opt you into recruiting for us by sharing content, but we want you to enjoy sharing content. And we want you to be confident that once you've let us into your account, we won't, say, randomly direct-message director-level contacts at your current employers. Don't laugh. It happened to me.

So the 'success' bit' is that we grew organically from 50 to 180 players over a week, just by giving out a few business cards. A drop in the ocean, but quite a keen and supportive drop. The 'qualified' bit is that we are still tarred with the spamminess brush of some other Twitter games, so we find ourselves caught in a bind where people won't sign up because they're worried we're spammy, but we've ruled that weapon out of our armoury anyway...and other people with fair-sized Twitter followings are playing the game silently. But several of those people have said that if they couldn't have played without advertising it, they wouldn't have touched it. So we've lost nothing but a few server cycles, and we've gained support and handy feedback.

3. Sometimes, people are just nice. We put the ability to Twitter content without getting an action refresh advantage into the game, rather experimentally. Some people really ran with this. No idea how it helped with recruitment, but it really made us feel good. Thanks guys.

4. If beta-testers are into a game, they won't always rush to report exploits. A very early piece of admin stupidity on my part now referred to in hushed tones as the NIGHT OF A HUNDRED MILLION ECHOES made everyone fabulously rich for about two hours in the middle of the night. A numbers glitch with the exchange opportunities ('x lamplighter beeswax for y appalling secrets') allowed for a dramatic carousel of bling purchasing. Some people mentioned it, some people didn't. Quite an engaging little psychology experiment actually. 

5. People like a sense of place. Fallen London has been the single aspect of EB that people have responded to most: to the extent that we hear it talked about as 'that Fallen London game' at least as often as 'Echo Bazaar'. We hoped it'd be a popular game element, but frankly it's exceeded our expectations. We've also heard, though, that it feels a little lonely when you get out of prison: that it'd be more like a place if you got a sense of what other people were doing around you. This, as part of the drive towards more social features, is one of the things we're keen to address with the refurbishments.

Ta for reading. Feedback, as ever, not only welcome but solicited.

At the far end of the tunnel of human consciousness there is an invisible light. Peggle is the quest for that light. So is Kubrick's 2001, but 2001 has no unicorns.

1. PERFORMANCE. Peggle will run on a cheap netbook. So will 2001, but it really needs a big screen to be effective. PEGGLE WINS. PEGGLE AHEAD.

2. GRAPHICS: Peggle runs in 800x600 resolution with simple, cheerful, minimally animated 2D graphics. 2001 is a major motion picture directed by one of the greats of the 20th Century and photographed in Super Panavision 70 with marvellously undated best-of-breed in-camera special effects. 2001 WINS. NECK AND NECK.

3. INNOVATION: Peggle's primary mechanic is based firmly on the pachinko machines of Japan, and the debt it owes to the power-ups of Arkanoid and its successors is obvious. 2001 was an unprecedented collaboration between a pre-eminent director and a pre-eminent science fiction novelist, using pioneering special effects to create a whole-sensory experience unequalled in any field of human endeavour. 2001 WINS. 2001 AHEAD.

4. GAMEPLAY: Peggle's gameplay is classic PopCap, which is to say, shallow, yet deep, yet shallow. Kubrick's direction is classic Kubrick, which is to say, like, deep, but in places, like, extremely deep. 2001 rewards patience. Peggle's contempt for patience is legendary. Its core audience is a trained monkey in the grip of sugar psychosis. Therein lies its genius. PEGGLE WINS. NECK AND NECK.

5. SCIENTIFIC ACCURACY. 2001 employed a NASA engineer as scientific consultant. The screenplay was co-written by  one of the grandfathers of hard SF. Minor inconsistencies aside, the accuracy is impressive and well-maintained. Peggle is rife with errors. Its physics model is inconsistent and exaggerated. Peggle Master Splork's 'Space Blast' has no basis in science. Claude the Lobster speaks English! With a French accent! 2001 WINS THOROUGHLY. 2001 AHEAD.

6. MONOLITHS. 2001 employs three monoliths: one in the prehistoric African savannah, one unearthed on the moon, one in orbit around Jupiter.  For a film which trades so famously on the potent image of the black monolith, this is not generous. Peggle is crowded with monoliths: not only the standing stones and Egyptian monuments of the Academy but, by some readings, the rectangular variety of the pegs themselves. PEGGLE WINS. NECK AND NECK.

7. MUSIC:  2001 famously uses music by Ligeti, Khatchataurian and two distinct Strausses to powerful effect. Peggle deploys the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth at each level's end, as well as a bouncy, serviceable original score. There's nothing wrong with that. But 2001 has the numbers. 2001 WINS. 2001 AHEAD!

8. INTENSITY:  Kubrick said:

"2001 is a nonverbal experience... I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content."

There is no doubt he succeeded. 2001's space is a cathedral-exile for the soul. Ligeti's Requiem rises to unbearable crescendo while planets align and prehumans cower before the terror of the monolith. But all this is nothing before the Dionysiac frenzy of PEGGLE  EXTREME FEVER. PEGGLE WINS! NECK AND NECK!

9. MORAL RIGOUR: 2001 lacks any real moral centre. The only drive is towards knowledge, self-awareness, sophistication. At the heart of the first act lies a crime of primeval murder in pursuit of that goal; at the heart of the second, the double murder of Poole and Bowman, ultimately to the same end. Unpromising. But Peggle, beneath its carefree motifs of unicorns and woodland creatures, is  a ruthless hymn to chaos, to greed, to the pursuit of the trivial at the expense of the eternal. Its spirit arises like cigarette smoke from pachinko parlours, those dens of infernal machinery which thrive on the misery of the degenerate gambler. 2001 is merely inhuman. Peggle is actively demonic! 2001 WINS. 2001 AHEAD!


FINAL SCORE: 2001 5, PEGGLE 4. 2001 WINS: SCIENTIFICALLY.