Betterblog

Today sees another content release, with a big pile of changes and enhancements to the economy. This is the next step in a long-term plan, and I wanted to talk a bit about what we're up to. Nearly three years ago I sat down at the PC in my spare room and started writing and coding Echo Bazaar. I can't emphasise enough what an experimental process that was. I'd taken a few months unpaid holiday from my day job to try to get it up and running (a month of which was already blocked out for paternity leave). I made it up as I went along,  but I had long-term plans. I even had a spreadsheet calculating likely player progress at five different levels of engagement (from 'flirting' to 'probably a bot'). A lot of assumptions turned out wrong (more on that in another post) but the most naive thing was, I did projections for a year... on the basis that we'd never do content that ran more than a year. That would just be crazy. I thought. But the tale, as it always does, grew in the telling, and almost three years on we're still probably only two-thirds of the way to the end. So we've had to adapt the fundamentals as we go. From the beginning, it wasn't about the economy, it was about the story. But the big lesson we learnt: you can't just dip your toe, economy-wise. Either it's a feature or it's not. If some stories require items, either those items are trivial to get or they take time and effort. If they take time and effort, people care about the details, and it's no longer just about the story.I wanted asymmetry and texture, not just a few resources: I wanted people to be able to go, 'ooh, this storylet needs 50 Cryptic Clues, I have those, cool!' 'This storylet gave me a Radical Okapi, oh I haven't seen one of those!' So we scattered a variety of resources around a variety of places. Of course as any long-term player of Echo Bazaar knows, this threw up all kinds of other problems.You don't know where to find that Radical Okapi when you really need one. A secondary issue is that when you've got one, you don't know whether to sell it because you need the cash, or hang on to it because you'll never see one again. The Bazaar is an exchange of last resort, of course. But if you could buy anything at the Bazaar, then every resource is the same as any other resource (although you'd always pay a sort of tax if we kept the difference between buy and sell prices). Getting good value is fiddly. A storylet that gave you twenty Whispered Secrets a few months back feels like poor value when your highway qualities (Shadowy, Dangerous, Persuasive, Watchful) are all north of a hundred. So there's generally a pressure to find better-value ways of getting it. Different players have different levels of engagement. Some players haunt and update wikis and take a keen interest in where to get a Radical Okapi most quickly... but a lot of players are much more casual. So if things are easy to find, it's not interesting for the economic enthusiasts, if they're hard to find, it turns off the people who are only here for the story.Our old friend the 'grind'. We need to pace story to stop everyone eating it all at once, and the traditional way to pace this stuff has been by requiring players to repeat the same action loads of times. In the medium term we have some quite radical solutions for this, but in the meantime we're gently tweaking the game to introduce more variety into the regular routine.These issues have built up over time, and changing the dynamics in a game the size of EBZ without breaking things is like trying to turn an oil tanker around in a multi-storey car-park... but we decided it was worth the effort. The current economy revamp is a move to address this. We're at about step three in an eight-part plan, and we'll change it and develop as we go. Here's what's happening today.Nearly all the items in the new Inventory categories - Wild Words, Luminosity and so on - are now usable. That's about fifty items in all. You can now buy materials from the Bazaar and create most of the items in these lines. If you haven't experimented with these yet, it works like this: with the right connections, you can trade large quantities of cheaper items to get small quantities of rarer items, until you reach the rarest wines or the deadliest secrets. The lines cross in some places, too, so eventually you can trade your huge cache of Whispered Secrets across to become Cellars of Wine. You'll often be able to find better ways to get them - maybe you'll happen across an opportunity that gives you access to a sudden bounty of Romantic Notions - but you won't be dependent on these ways.    And, because we're Failbetter, every one of these possible trades is its own storylet, with rare successes and other oddities, and every one of the categories teases or reveals secrets from the Neath's gigantic backstory. I think we're probably the first game ever to offer a crafting system which runs on characters and dialogue. We'll be adding more branches and variety and longer-term stories to item use; in the longest term, I would like most of the items in the game to be usable in some way.   We're adding availability information to quality tooltips, so when you see that Radical Okapi lock icon you can mouse over it and see 'You can breed Radical Okapis in the Hidden Coil of the Labyrinth of Tigers.' This means that detailed knowledge of the game world is still useful for finding unusual sources, but everyone has a clear and simple guide. We'll keep adding this to more qualities as we go.   We're tweaking requirements and rewards. Lots of these have changed, to introduce more texture, or make it easier to find better value. We'll continue to adjust as we go.   We're reducing costs in the Bazaar Sidestreets. The requirements are a bit more varied than they used to be, so you might need to cast around to find the materials, but it'll cost you fewer actions overall. We're adding variable action costs. We're tweaking carefully, but it means that some choices will have bigger rewards and bigger costs, so you just need to click the button once. You'll also notice that a few actions, like drinking Darkdrop Coffee, are now free.   This isn't the end! There are many more changes to structure and mechanics coming, and, of course, story content that we're itching to release. As ever, we do want to hear your feedback at http://feedback.echobazaar.failbettergames.com - we're releasing the changes incrementally so we can monitor and adjust as we go.   Thanks for all your enthusiasm, folks. This is a grand experiment, and we're glad you're part of it.  

We've just updated Echo Bazaar with new content and game changes. More information can be found on our new forums.

All across the web there are places that Failbetter players go to exchange stories, plan cat-swapping, meet other EBZ players, plan social actions and speculate about why exactly there are no foxes in the city. We've noticed the same questions and conversations coming up again and again. So we've provided a central hub for people to meet, greet, enthuse, enquire - especially with some of the social upgrades in the pipeline. Come and say hi. http://community.failbettergames.com

Before we start with the questions, who'd like some new content?  Ever since the conclusion of our initial University story players have asked to return to the misty courtyards of academia. From today players with a ship can re-establish their academic credentials by mounting a scientific expedition to lost isles of the Unterzee. Make new discoveries. Battle the forces of ignorance! Advance your Watchful to 130! The Scientific Expedition sees the return of a familiar rival in matters of the Correspondence and opens two new Unterzee islands replete with subterranean phenomena! To launch an expedition you'll need Watchful 120, to have finished your business at the University and to be acquainted with the Dilmun club. Look for a storylet around the city featuring a Sneering Gentleman. In addition, players will now find a handy new feature at their lodgings. A number of helpful local citizens will point the way to different locations and storylines, making it easier to decide what to do next and how to access it. Now, onto the second batch of questions from the Echo Bazaar community. Those who missed the previous instalment can find it here. Matt Cramp asked: If it's not too painful to talk about, what was the biggest mistake you made with Echo Bazaar?  A lot becomes clear in hindsight - it took experimentation and iteration to get where we are, and stuff that seems blindingly obvious now was a fog-bank back in 2009. Our key mistake was was assuming that word-of-mouth was going to be enough to spread the game. We’re a cult hit, but we’d have much more resource to spend on the game if we had baked in recruitment mechanisms properly from the start. Something else we struggled with was narrative debt. It is fantastically easy, especially in a narrative with different outcomes, to leave a placeholder to be filled in later and then find other concerns get prioritised over it. We are very careful about incurring content debt these days - we have a lot of loose ends to tie up (and plenty of ideas about how to do that). Mortimer Blunt asked: How does travel between the surface and the Neath work? Dirigible? Is there a hole in the top of the Neath? Two thoroughfares connect the Neath to the surface: the Travertine Spiral and the Cumaean Canal. If you're looking for the direct route, take the Spiral. Those of modest means must trudge the stair that winds through a conjoined stalagtite and stalagmite, while the more well-to-do rattle briskly by on a comfortable funicular. If you'd prefer a more stately journey (and you've got someone to handle the locks for you) the Cumaean Canal is the route for you. It is a miracle of contemporary engineering, and a journey of dark, Plutonian beauty from the little Italian cave where it begins to the shores of the Unterzee. These will both be featuring in upcoming content. Alexis Royce asked: I'm really interested in the unfallen world's reactions to the thefts of the cities. Do other places attempt to take precautions against metro-napping, or do they have no idea what's been going on?  Oh, who knows what’s going on up there. Everything interesting happens down here.  Read the surface news in the back pages of the Gazette sometime: a declaration from Ruskin that he intends to paint the Unterzee despite his recent collapse; a human interest piece on a lady from Prague unable to pay for the ticket she needs to join her fiancé in the Neath; a fire-and-trumpets Roman priest preaching that his city has already fallen. There’s a theme. If the people of the surface would all rather be here than there, there’s clearly nothing up there to concern us. Melanie Keeler asked: Can you recommend any traditional novels for Fallen Londoners? Any other games? One or two.  Novels Practically anything by G. K. Chesterton, but in particular The Club of Queer Trades, The Napolean of Notting Hill and, most of all, The Man Who Was Thursday. Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October. Sarah Waters' Affinity Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Phillip Pullman's Sally Lockhart series: The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the North, and The Tiger in the Well, The Tin Princess K. J. Parker's Devices and Desires Alan Campbell's Scar Night Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London Charles Dickens' Bleak House Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind Chris Wooding's Retribution Falls Games Skyrim has swept through Failbetter Towers like a plague. Few are immune. Planescape: Torment King of Dragon Pass  Two games currently available on XBox Live Arcade: Bastion and Beyond Good and Evil HD, for effective and unique methods of storytelling. Deus Ex and Deus Ex: Human Revolution System Shock 1 and 2 Thief Left4Dead, which creates endless narratives through slick mechanics, near-subliminal storytelling and the simple mathematics of applying four friends to a world of zombies. Nicholas Di Penna asked: My question pertains to the revolutionaries. Will we see more of them? What is their motivation? Did they harbor this same revolutionary fervor before the Fall of London?  We have grand plans for the Revolutionaries, who have grand plans of their own. Future story arcs will reveal the machinations of the Calendar Council, the divisions in their ranks, and the awful ramifications of the Christmas Card List. Patrick Reding asked: How many iterations does a story or standalone storylet generally go through internally before you release it into the wild? For that matter, what does your internal narrative testing process look like?  Yasmeen wrote a trilogy of posts on how we plan and write content here, here, and here. Since then we've beefed up the initial design phase considerably, but those posts still give a comprehensive picture of how we work. Someone tragically unnameable asked: What's with the toothy hat? Did it start off as a studio mascot or something? The toothy hat is what happens when your initial art order to our Chief Illuminating Officer asks for "menacing headwear" with no elaboration. You ask for menacing headwear, you get a hat with teeth. And you like it. Theodor Gylden asked: Is there more to come of Parabola? Will Schlomo's theories bear fruit in the Mirror Country?  There's lots more Parabola content planned, including opportunities to visit parts of the Mirror Country that you might have glimpsed in dreams. Schlomo takes a keen interest in them, but he's the pioneer of a new science and many accuse him of being ruled by his own fantasies. A mysterious and extensive organisation known as #TeamOwl asked: Why aren't there more owls in this game?  We contend that a Bifurcated Owl is more than enough owl for anyone.

We gave our players on Twitter and Facebook a chance to ask questions directly of the Failbetter Team. They sent so many excellent questions we've split the answers across a couple of blog posts. Here's the first.     Daniel Peter Turner-Chapman asked: Do the mysteries surrounding Neathy history and life have solutions already mapped out? Can many of them be solved with the information presently available?   They do. Some - like why the Empress is called the Traitor Empress and why the Masters value echoes - can be solved with clues that are already in the game. Other mysteries hinge on secrets we haven’t revealed yet, but our players constantly surprise us with their ingenuity and scholarship.    No one's looking, right? It's just us? Then here's a hint of things to come. Some forthcoming content will reveal the truth behind one of our longest-running stories. We couldn’t possible tell you which one. But it involves the word ‘Jack’. And the word ‘Smiles’.     @Striketheviol asked: Why is there still no content featuring the clearly universally beloved @Mr_Apples? Is this tragedy to be resolved.   Are you angling for a free jug of Hesperidean Cider, by any chance? If so, we admire your brazen attempt. Mr Apples is already in the game. Although it might not be obvious at first glance that it's him...     Branden Linton asked: Is there genuine magic in Fallen London? If not how do they make Clay Men?    Without ’magic’, how do men and women make babies?* Clay Man are created by an analogous process. Perhaps you'll be able to see for yourself when the zee-routes to Polythreme open.   * This is a rhetorical question. Please don't send us diagrams.     George Parry asked: When do you plan on adding to the ambition storylines, and do you already know how they will end?   We do - their endings are planned out. When will you see more ambition content? I'm afraid the answer is the same as for any other bit of content: 'as soon as we can - we're juggling priorities'.     Branden Linten also asked: Are you guys ever going to finish Seeking Mr. Eaten’s Name?   We're going to finish all the content in the game, unless we die or go bust first. There are no abandoned threads: we want to tell all the stories, we’re really passionate about this stuff.      @pinstripeowl asks: Were there any characters/plots/places you created having been directly inspired by a film/book/etc?   Direct influences on the Bazaar’s look and feel include Mervyn Peake, Lemony Snicket, Moorcock, Wilde, and Coppola’s Dracula. There's no end of in-jokes and references, too. Part of the fun is in spotting them, but you should keep an eye open for easter eggs about Freud, Eliot, Conan Doyle, Golman Hunt, Kipling, Swinburne, Machen, Ovid, Catullus, Roman poetry in general and the Sweeney.   We try not do do too many references to 20th and 21st century media, because we feel they're too distracting. Except for the Sweeney. Because it's the Sweeney.   I wanted to slip a Dirty Dancing reference into the Talk of the Town party ("Nobody puts Rubbery in a corner!") but thought better of it. Our editors are sharp-eyed, and imaginatively vengeful.     @Merusdraconis asked: Were there any story concepts you couldn't pursue or scaled back because you couldn't represent it in Echo Bazaar's design?   Certain sorts of stories don't sit comfortably in our format. Specific moment-to-moment fiction doesn't work beyond a few careful frameworks. Big special effects aren't a good fit. Sure, they’re cheap when you render them as text, but they lack bombast.   Long-time players may remember our PvP subsystem: Knife-and-Candle. Our intention with Knife-and-Candle was always to have a competitive element that tied strongly into the narrative. We found as we went on that balancing a competitive multi-player game in an environment that allowed thousands of players, and tying it to story, is really hard. We still plan to bring it back - we’re trialling relevant ideas in the upcoming social upgrade.     C. J. Cornils asks: Why is it called the echo bazaar?   It originally dates to a radically different game concept, but there is a strong and specific in-fiction reason for the ‘echo’ bit.     Scarlet Fenwick asks: Will there be a continuation of the storyline that ended at the University?   Oh, all right. Because you asked so nicely. Content dealing with your return to the University is currently in development.      @Mr_Fingle asks: Delicious darlings, what are your favourite cheeses?   I tracked down some delicious darlings, which took some doing, and their answers (in no particular order) were:   'Stilton' 'Vegan' 'Vacherin Mont D'Or' (oo!) 'Fourme D'Ambert' (oo-oo!) And 'The runnier and smellier the better. I also like chedder.' Oh, and one unprintable but sincere response which can best be summarised as 'Cheese is renegade milk'.     We'll be back with another batch of questions and answers soon. Next time we'll start with 'If it's not too painful to talk about, what was the biggest mistake you made with Echo Bazaar?' 

Another new feature for all you delightfully appetising Bazaar people. The inventory on the Me tab looks different: tidier. More flavoursome. We've separated a number of items into categories. Some, like Wines or Rubbery or Mysteries, will be familiar... others tease changes yet to come. It's all part of a long process of tweaking and reworking happening to the economy, to make it more understandable, coherent and fun. To take the faff out of 'what the hell do I do with these fifty-three Extraordinary Implications?' and make it more 'ooh, now I can finally get that Touching Love Story I wanted!' And in many cases, to blur the distinction between narrative and economy... There's another example of this coming soon. We've just taken in the Lodgings cards for cleaning. They'll be out again tomorrow, and later this week you'll see what we've been doing with them. The Relickers are coming, and their Rats, who can offer all kinds of desirable things for an unusual price.[1] We're also close to releasing the first version of in-game Cliques: a long-requested feature that'll let you associate more closely with your friends and rivals, but also, ultimately, a way it easier to find and use the delights the Bazaar offers. And of course we haven't taken our foot off the content pedal. More is coming: be ready. [1] (Relick-ers, not Re-lickers. Let's get that one straight.)  

If you've logged onto Echo Bazaar lately you may have noticed a big green button. This is a feature people have been requesting for ages: a chance to try out the game *before* you sign up via Twitter or Facebook.  Clicking "Play Trial" takes a new player through the first area of Fallen London with a temporary identity. Once they've escaped from New Newgate, they'll be asked if they want to create a character as normal.  We understand how frustrating it can be to get your friends to play Echo Bazaar; people often regard social media signups with suspicion, no matter how transparent and polite we are about it. As an Echo Bazaar player, you already know that we never echo without your express permission and we never abuse your personal information. But try telling your friends that, right?  So that's what the big green button is for - to make Fallen London a more sociable place for you. And because we like new people too, we're making it much easier and more rewarding to invite new players to the game. Here's how it works: if a player signs up to Echo Bazaar from your Profile page, you get a little gift. This might be a free action refresh, in the form of Darkdrop Coffee, or something more valuable. You can do this seven times, and the seventh gift is a particularly nice one. They do have to sign up directly from your Profile page for this to work, and they'll need to create an account when they're done with the trial. Don't know how to find your Profile page? Look at the top of your Me page in the game - there's a link.  The same technology allows us to drop random gifts when you echo content sometimes. You may have come across that already.  We're constantly working on ways to make Echo Bazaar more fun to play for you and your friends. We've got a number of improvements coming soon, including inventory tweaks and economy improvements, and of course lots of new content. Forthcoming delights include the concluding episode of "Stormy Eyed", a thrilling Scientific Expedition and a whole new use for your Lodgings.  As ever, delicious friends, we are your servants.  

    Is it quiet in here? It's a bit quiet, isn't it? We haven't added any content to Echo Bazaar for a few weeks, because we've been working like dextrous little rats on a couple of really big new sections. The first of these, the Foreign Office, will be released later this week, and we'll be raising the Persuasive cap to 130 to celebrate. It's a spooky tale of intrigue and espionage in the subterranean corridors of power beneath Wilmot's End, and it's positively stuffed with secrets. Investigate the Face and the Teeth, the two warring factions of Fallen London diplomacy, recruit spies, drink some very suspect tea, and... hang on, what the hell is that THING on the roof? Next, we have something a bit special for our well-heeled Shadowy players: the chance to edit your very own newspaper! Journey to  Doubt Street, home of the Unexpurgated London Gazette and other less savoury publications! Go head to head with Mr Huffam in a battle for scandalous scoops and Neath-shaking exclusives! Will you be a fearless hound of the truth or a shameless gossip monger? This huge chunk of story comes with a brand new social action - you'll be able to interview your friends about their Ambitions - and a Shadowy cap bump to 130. And of course, you'll be able to name your own newspaper. Mine is The Elderwick Enquirer. What will yours be? But wait, there's more! Do you follow the most accurate predictions of Madame Shoshana?  Do you burn to know your own Chiropteromantical sign? The uncanny Madame has agreed, after considerable persuasion, to offer private readings to the denizens of Fallen London. Are you glacial, igneous, even speleothemic? Are you perhaps a cat, or a bear, or a crow? Or do you have the terrible misfortune to be born under the sign of the Hunter? The consulting tent will be open very soon.  As if that wan't enough, we're adding a scatter of new opportunity cards at high levels, and we're making some adjustments to content sharing. You may find that Echoing your activities brings the occasional delicious surprise. We'll leave you to discover the details...   

We've always said that Echo Bazaar will provide a satisfying conclusion to your personal stories, as well as the grand saga of the Neath itself. We don't want just to drag on, or peter out.  Last week at the writers' meeting we refined the road-map for that commitment. Currently, the plan is to raise the cap for the Highway qualities - Dangerous, Persuasive, Shadowy and Watchful - to around 200 over the next year and a bit, until we reach a conclusion at the end of October, 2012. Ambitions will complete around the same time... or perhaps a little sooner. So does that mean you'll run out of EBZ road? No more Fallen London? Definitely not. Inevitably, we propose to do something a little bit experimental here. We can't tell you what, exactly, but it's something that would only be possible with the kind of game EBZ is. Since there's never been any other game quite like EBZ, it's also something we believe has never been done before. So, no GAME OVER screen. Ways to continue the experience. But at the same time some closure for the grand arcs; answers to many of the deepest mysteries; and an endgame. In fact several. We're going to let you keep your mushroom muffin and eat it. (We don't just mean a sequel, or a way to replay the game, or a crossover, or another way into the world... though we might do those as well.)  This will be almost exactly three years since our debut. So I like that I'm posting this just after this, because in one sense we'll be able to say: Echo Bazaar? Yes, it's three years long.

Yasmeen has talked in recent posts about the process and style of our writing. I'd like to complement that by talking about some principles of narrative engineering. This is about game design and how we structure the various moving parts of a narrative, so do feel free to walk on by if you're just here for the tight writing and the threesomes. The principles that I'm about to describe have come through the experience of building Echo Bazaar. I'm not going to claim that they're universal across storytelling or gaming. However, they're useful for us and games like us. So pay attention if you're planning on building something stateful and built on layered micronarratives. Yes, both of you. Keep it Simple, Stupid This is a fine rule for any engineering endeavour. It was brought home to me when I did my first ever bit of complex-structured Echo Bazaar content. That happened to be the Watchful 60-85 content where the player is on the trail of a certain eye-watering alphabet. Now, a lot of people have enjoyed that content, and the alphabet in question continues to be one of the best-loved motifs of Fallen London. But let me tell you something. That content is fragile. Oh it works. Actions are spent, snippets of text are delivered and people get where they're going. But behind the scenes, the scaffolding creaks. Plaster falls on the stagehands and we approach the thing with care in case it comes crashing down. And why? It's too complex. Again, from the player's point of view, it's not really apparent. A bunch of things happen in a fairly sensible order. But there are too many qualities controlling things, too many assumptions about what will happen when. Quality based narrative isn't good at having a series of things that need to happen in order, unless they're controlled by a single quality. When multiple qualities are controlling a story where things need to happen in order, it quickly becomes difficult to read the structure, and unexpected behaviour creeps in. Happily, though, I've learned my lesson. I won't do that again. Promise. Parsimony of Qualities This one is interesting, because it is at once the oldest and the newest of our narrative engineering principles. Very early on in the life of EBZ, Alexis did a lot of jumping and shouting about keeping the number of qualities in any piece of content to a bare minimum. There were some technical and UI reasons to want to do this, but it just makes sense: it keeps things simple for authors, and minimises the number of things players have to remember to make sense of stories. But it has caused a bad habit, which is something we're just realising. We've been using a single quality to do different things in different places. This isn't really parsimony - and it has been causing us problems of consistency and exploitation. Not only do we need to keep the number of qualities down, we need to ensure that they are being used in a way that is consistent whenever a quality appears. There are a few occasions where that still isn't the case, and we might have to do some surgery on those bits of content to bring them in line. Still, it's good to know that we're still learning and still improving. I'll just do one more for now. But it's a juicy one: Show them the Implements Sometimes, we are rather unkind to our poor player characters. We shoot them or drive them mad or cover them in slug-slime. But that's all fairly expected in the two-fisted-romp parts of the game, and we're sure you wouldn't have it any other way. But sometimes, we're really quite unpleasant. Sometimes, we really want to hurt you. In our defence, you asked for it. You came back for more, despite the warnings. Yes, I'm talking about the seeking of a certain name. Anyway, for this sort of content, you expect abuse. And abuse you we will. But here's an interesting thing. If we're making you suffer, you want to know how long you're going to be up on that cross. It's no fun to just be up there and not know when we're going to let you down. So we're making a point in our more robustly unsympathetic content to let you know just how much more of this shit you're going to have to take. We're kind like that, sort of*. We've a few more buckets of this stuff, so I'm sure that a part 2 of this series will be along in a bit. *Not that kind. My initial plan for the end of the Seeking the Name story was to have it cost 1000 Fate and delete the character in question. The others were too concerned with being murdered in their beds to recognise the genius of this.