Betterblog

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.