“The staff will be reluctant to let me go again, but I’m not an easy man to confine.”

I have been listening to lots of Irving Berlin to get me in the melancholy mood for post-war Travelling At Night. (I’m a big fan of all this kind of stuff. Did you know Nina’s dress is inspired by one worn by Ginger Rogers in Carefree?) We should get some news about potential music for Travelling this week, which may be extremely exciting. We will reveal those particular details as and when they exist.

For now, I wanted to share our updated character creation screen for the game. It tells you a lot about a lot. Here’s where we are right now:

Click for a larger version.

You choose your Career, then Passion, then put points into selected Skills (based on your Career). This generates a character portrait of Spencer, a little backstory, your ‘Sign’, and builds your starting Aspect Pool.

The trickiest part was fitting so much information on a page. I’m sure many of you reading this – like me! – know the RPG fan’s joy of being presented with a character creation screen and being allowed to choose your attributes and personality and all those tasty things. We can’t offer full visual character customisation: Travelling is being drawn in 2D, so we’d have to facilitate every possible alteration to the base character in all hand-drawn art, animations and UI portraits, as well as somehow making it work with the Outfit mechanic. But we can offer a lot of Aspects / Skills / Passions customisation, which will pretty meatily affect your roleplaying and probable choices in-game. Forgive me if I’m doing Art Maths, but I think that works out at about 108 different potential starting Spencers, which seems quite enough to be getting on with!

Your Sign is allocated right at the end of the whole event, once you’ve chosen your Passion and allocated all points to your Skills. The art for this is not final, and your Sign is probably the most mysterious thing about your whole character. I’ll let AK explain it in a later blog post, but for now it has something to do with your origin story, commedia dell’arte and a key Rosa Mundi activity which will recur at significant moments throughout the game.

You’ll notice that your choice of career affects which starter Passions you’re offered, and that out of the three that appear, you only get to pick one to start with. You can have up to three Passions as you progress through the game, which become available based on dialogue choices and play style. But here’s the full suite of them, in case you want to aim for one Passion in particular! AK is definitely a Melancholy/Whimsy build; I’m probably an Ambition/Compassion. What about you?

Click for a larger version.

Lots more coming soon, but we will take a smol break from Travelling to launch the French and Spanish beta for Cultist Simulator tomorrow, along with an early Japanese beta for BOOK OF HOURS. It sounds very odd coming out of my mouth in particular, but I am particularly excited to be able to share the world map…

First things first: Cultist Simulator is 50-70% off as part of the Lovecraftian Days sale, so if you have no idea what the Secret Histories are and have stumbled across Travelling At Night because you've seen ads on all the CRPG subreddits I could find, now's a great time to try the game that started it all! For those who are already counted among the Know, we are also running a 20%-off-almost-everything in the merch shop[weatherfactory.etsy.com], so fill yer boots.

Now, some LORE. Be warned: minor spoilers for Travelling at Night, and inconsequentially minor spoilers for BOOK OF HOURS. Don't read on if that concerns you! We are also now switching from Lottie writing (hello!) to Alexis, so good luck.

***

Three years ago, I sat down to write an in-game letter for each Wisdom. The one below was for Hushery. We were going to release it as part of the Book of Hours marketing run-up, but it was a particularly opaque effort. Less opaque if you’re steeped in Secret Histories lore and know that Winter-long are immortal only until their specific date of expiry. Or that Winter-long who ascend under the Sun-in-Rags are sometimes dismissive of those who win their immortality from the Elegiast. Or that the actress and painter Nina Lagasse was sometimes identified with Nyn, the Witch of Lagash. Or why Julian Coseley didn’t get on with Solomon Husher. A number of these things became clear in Book of Hours, which I recommend you play, if you hain’t already.

But obviously the letter proposes a couple of new opacities, in particular how Nina Lagasse is still kicking around fifty years after her holy, irrevocable, Hour-enforced time of dissolution:

I spose maybe we should just keep reposting this image with every blog:

I hoped we were going to get to go to Ortucchio in Travelling at Night, but we probably don’t have budget for DLC. We’re not going to Paris, because Nina has excellent reasons to refuse ever to return there. But our itinerary does include some time in the mountains.

Anyway here’s the letter.

Kerisham
July 1894

Julian, dear:

February the 9th, 1895. There, I have said it. I had long been certain it would be February – long, in fact, before anyone had thought of naming that angle of the year as ‘February’. But the detail of the year came late. I had hoped for another hundred. The news came from our Patron when I saw you in Paris last. You did remark that I seemed out of sorts at dinner after the recital. Yes, that was because of the news of the year. I think you had guessed as much.

But I think you had not guessed that the news came during the recital. I am sorry, Julian, I have always found Satie pointlessly languid, but I had no wish to upset you; and by my age one has learnt how to nap with one’s eyes open. So I dozed through the tinkle tinkle plonkle and I found myself in the Mansus, much quicker than I might have expected. I felt our Patron’s chill, and I began at once to fear the worst.

It didn’t come in person, of course – I didn’t even see its light – but its emissary was a full Name, a gratifying condescension indeed, and she left no doubt in my mind. The choice of February is an honour, if not a surprise. The choice of the year, well, I would have liked to know sooner. I hope you will excuse my irreverence if I wonder whether our Patron had forgotten the matter, or had at least not made up his mind. He is, as they say, not as he was.

‘I hope you will excuse my irreverence.’ Of course you will. Most raggies would have cast my letter into the fire when they saw me share my date – they would have found it in very poor taste – or even suspected some intrigue. But you have always been irreverent, dear Julian, and as my end grows nearer, I find that my own reverence wanes. Do not surrender yourself to excitement. I have no interest in your great project of cosmic abolition or celestial overthrow or whatever it is you are calling it now. But it is a relief to cast off the pieties.

I am going back East for the end. I don’t want to spend my final days alone. Dagmar wanted to accompany me, but I know she will get emotional and I’m afraid she will do something foolish. There is a young woman of good family – I will call her Gertrude because that is her name, but I shan’t tell you her surname because I don’t want her getting mixed up in your nasty schemes. Gertrude has recent knowledge of the region, as well as an unslakable enthusiasm for alpinism. I will find both very useful. She is quite well-connected and determined enough to want to travel alone, and I think a little suspicious of me, but I have won her with secrets.

Before I go, I will entrust a will to my lawyer here. You will find it aggravating when I tell you that I am going to name you in my will. You will find it more aggravating when I tell you why. I am doing it to win our argument. We have talked before about Solomon Husher, and his aesthetic ideals. You expressed a poor opinion of those ideals – very forcefully. The palest painting – you said – was an ambition for ghouls and not for raggies. You suggested Solomon was no true raggie. Very forcefully, Julian. I found it difficult to get a word in. And in any case I have always found it hard to explain in words what I find in Solomon’s work.

So instead I am going to paint it. And I am going to leave you the paintings. And although you have little time for his approach, you are going to examine them carefully, and you are going to see my point. You are going to do that firstly because I am your friend and I will be dead and you will feel so obliged. And secondly because I am going to put in them all that I have left of my secrets. Now I will tell you what I mean.

The first painting will be called ‘Abydos Uncrowned’. The second, ‘Nix Abolix’. The third, ‘Sunset Celia and the Unleashed Flame’. Do I perhaps now have your attention?

I will paint the first at Ortucchio. I have long wanted to stop in, and now I learn – did you already know? – I learn that Duffoure has a little girl. ‘The Line of Antaios’ – you wrote in your silly Letters – ‘the Line of Antaios ends not with the Wheel’. There are two things you might have meant there, I suppose, but indeed the Line still runs, and she its newest course. Perhaps I will bless her, like a wicked fairy. Back to Abydos. I’ll climb one mountain or another with Gertrude, and conceive the ruins of Abydos at its summit.

Husher wrote of the continuity of endings. You scoffed. So I will paint what happened at Abydos after the eight years of Chione’s silence – after the Shouts. Perhaps I will even paint what was woven from Chione’s hair.

The second I will paint in the hills outside Heraklion where the hawthorn blooms. Gertrude will not want to go to Crete, but I will promise her a hidden mountain in the Zagros and I think she will humour me. If I bring the proper offerings, the Horned-Axe might grant me audience in the Mansus. I doubt it. But if the subject matter opens any doors that I cannot close, the Axe will be on hand to close them. She will not be pleased with me, but at this late stage there is little she can do. And if I am going to paint the Cross’ fate, it is fitting for me to do so beneath her gaze. If they were not her children, they were certainly her servants. I’ll paint all the detail I can, Julian: how the Cross passed into Nowhere, and how they did not, and how they met with Worms, and how you may discern them now. Husher argued for the journey of colours. You disagreed. Perhaps I can still change your mind.

The third I will paint in the Shadowless Labyrinth. I don’t like the place, but it will be difficult to get the light right anywhere else. Gertrude will be the model for my Celia, if I can convince her. I will find a likely lad to stand in for the Sovereign of the Flame. I will paint the Sun as Celia’s shadow, and the Forge as the likely lad’s. I will paint myself as Winter, pining in the shadows or officiating at their union: Husher’s own paradox.

You fancy yourself an authority on the Sun’s Division, and I happen to agree with you. But I was there in every History when it occurred, and you were not. If you think you have nothing more to learn of the Division, then you need not look at my last painting.

In fact I will ensure all three are delivered to you veiled safely in black. If you’re afraid you might lose an argument with me, even after I am gone Nowhere, then you can leave them that way. Or you can be rid of them. The last three paintings of the Witch of Lagash – I can’t guess the price those might fetch at an Oriflamme’s auction. Although of course, no buyer is likely to understand the work as you might. Sell them, and my last secrets – which might have uplifted your anarchies – will go with me Nowhere.

Or not; there is one last vulgar alternative to Nowhere that I will investigate on my way East. But I suspect that bird has flown.

May the Patron’s ragged rays rest kindly on you, Julian. In all sincerity, when you have decided at last what it is that you want, I hope that you find it.

Nin

I am delighted to begin this post with the news that ---


This is nuts because the store page still has some completely outdated UI on display and only two screenshots of the environments. But it bodes well for the basic Weather Factory premise of 'what if it wasn't insane for two people to make a CRPG?'. I can't wait to upload new images showing all the bonkers locations and incidents ('Mahaggony'? 'Medea's Garden'?) AK has been telling me about since he returned from his recent writing week in France. I suspect he will want to carefully reveal the parts of the narrative he's happy to share in a later post, so I will leave this to your imaginations. But it's the most loreful stuff I've heard in years, and I think you're going to like it.

The work we've been doing recently has led us to a new and much crunchier system of Outfits (crafting and cummerbunds, together at last!), but that's complex enough to deserve its own blog post too. This week I want to share our newly minted Character screen, where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives which is one of the lodestones of a CRPG. Here's how it's looking so far:

[weatherfactory.biz]Click for larger version.

Firstly, please note that this is WORK IN PROGRESS. Hence the placeholder Passion images. But it should give you an idea of the areas you'll focus on throughout the game. That crown symbol over some of the skills' level numbers, for instance, indicate skills that align with your chosen Profession: these increase faster than non-aligned Skills, and have at least one other advantage.

You can also see the current Aspect Pool. The Aspect Pool system is the re-roll mechanic which offers interesting in-game decisions even when you fail a skill check. For example: Oh no! Epic fail when trying to charm Dagmar: you made a bad joke about what turns out to be her favourite uncle, and your trousers fell down. But perhaps it's really important to you that you succeed, because you happen to really like her, and/or you fear her puissant wrath. But if you use up your Aspect Pool now, you might have a more serious check later on you won't be able to force ('Failed skill check on OBSERVATION! You fell into the hole in France').

You'll also notice all those juicy skills in the centre of the screen. Here's a closer look:

[weatherfactory.biz]Click for larger version.

You know a bunch of these skills already from BOOK OF HOURS. Their updated artwork is based on the original aspect art - I think my favourites of these revamps is either Birdsong or Skolokosophy. There are also a number of totally new skills specific to Travelling:

• Charm — "I have the knack of being liked; and people who like me will often do things for me."
  
• Dignity — "I can project an air of authority and respectability."
  
• Eloquence — "I can express myself with compelling clarity. This is most useful when I want to explain to someone why they might want to help - or at least ensure they'll enjoy listening."
  
• Legerdemain — "Law's touch is lighter than we sometimes think. And so is mine."
  
• Observation — "I notice details others don't."
  
• Sophistication — "Knowledge of art, culture, history. Are these things actually useful?"
  
• Spivvery — "I've hung around with disreputable people doing disreputable things. I might be able to find goods on the black market, and if I had to do something criminal, I'd have a good start."

Your chosen profession (exorcist, writer, conjurer or physician) will select a number of relevant skills to start with, but you can choose to upgrade whichever ones you like most. For the avoidance of doubt, Travelling At Night's skills will not talk to you like Disco Elysium's skills - but they remain one of the key touchpoints of the game.

The eagle-eyed among you have probably noticed a number of other things in this new screen that I can't/won't get into at this stage. But stay tuned for explication, story reveals, outfits and more in future updates, and let us know what you think in the comments!

"Our blood was red... but theirs was golden."

Welcome to an art-centric update on Travelling At Night. I really want to get the UI right for Travelling. Here's the new version we're currently working with in Unity, featuring the all-important dialogue system:

The design takes inspiration from 1940s maps and identity documents while also bearing modern UX in mind. Please note it's not final, and may change significantly! For example, the space on the left beneath Aubière's portrait will probably be filled with AK's 'Aspect Pool' system, which lets you strategically decide which failures to rescue by 'forcing' to success based on your character's Signs and Passions. But I'll let him talk about that design later down the line - and share how that will actually look in UI terms once we've implemented in-game.

There is a hitch to this UI, though. In Cultist, with the exception of the Mansus, even though huge numbers of different things happen in-game, all screenshots look roughly the same. This made marketing difficult, because you're supposed to be able to offer people a menu of different screenshots showing the breadth and variety of your game to excite them. Showing people multiple Cultist screenshots was a bit like being Ms Bread at the Bread Shop on Let Me Tell You About Bread Day. Beautiful though I still think the game is, it all having the same environment was a bit of a drag!

Travelling is going to have lots of different, visually distinctive areas: a sun-drenched French sanitarium; a dusk-lit circus encampment; cabins on 1940s diesel-electric trains; a snow-girt Alpine fortress... This is great news for me as a marketer, a little daunting for me as an artist, and downright devious for me as a UI designer. We have to make a UI that gels with all these places and colour schemes, whether it's overlaid on a touching scene between lovers in a garden at night or a climactic crowd-scene by the sea.* This, I think, is why games like Disco choose a dark grey strip for their dialogue window: black goes with everything. Except... I don't actually think that it does. Certainly not in Travelling. For example, see the two screenshots below when overlaid on our night environment.

Some CRPGs - Gamedec springs to mind - designed different UI for different environments to manage this problem, but I'd rather avoid doing that if we can. I think there is one consistent solution we can come up with - we just need to find it.

Moving on, I think it's high time you met monsieur le docteur. This is Dr Aubière, the insouciant psychiatrist in charge of the Sanitarium Aujourd'hui where Spencer starts the game. There's a lot of cool inspiration going into the sanitarium - visual cues like art deco houses to open-air tuberculosis hospitals in the Alps - but the key thing to remember is it's totally normal and everything is entirely above board. Which is why you don't need to worry if Aubière is working for the Incorporates, influenced by external forces, or has your real best interests at heart. Phew.

"Bonjour. C'est moi. Le plus beau médecin de France. Faites-moi confiance."

While drawing him I was thinking of a line from The Big Sleep: "The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out." Is he a Chandler fan? Is the art trying to tell you something? Does his coat just need a wash? Well, you'll just have to gosh darn play Travelling to find out.

Finally, I thought you might appreciate some experimentation I've been doing with Spencer's facial expressions. We don't know at this stage how much reactivity there'll be in-game, but all the characters I'm sharing will be animated to some degree. We might want to show moment-to-moment facial expressions in dialogue, or perhaps different visual representations of Spencer that are affected by the choices you make in-game. TBD. One significant visual effect will be outfits, which, in their current pre-alpha condition, look like the unholy lovechild of BOOK OF HOURS' crafting system with Alicia Silverstone's virtual closet from Clueless. This will probably change. Probably. Regardless, Spencer is likely to have Big Feels about a number of things in-game and I'd like him to be able to express them somehow, so here's me playing with Emotion. I find Whimsy!Spencer's happy lil' face an effective tonic if you're having a bad day.

Click for a larger version.

More news soon on outfits, environments, Skills and more. Next time we'll either introduce you to an upsettingly handsome Sanitarium orderly or Fraser Strathcoyne's simply upsetting new 'pal' Annabelle. Stay tuned!

*Please note - so AK doesn't think I am mismanaging your expectations - that neither of these situations are canonical or likely to actually exist in Travelling. Though there is one particular romantic subplot in-game that many of you will like... [AK: as long as you like things that MIGHT END MISERABLY. ]

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.”
— Gustav Mahler, unless it was Benjamin Franklin, or Jean Jaurés; possibly after a line of John Denham

“It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”
— Jean-Luc Godard

Fallen London and Sunless Sea and Cultist Simulator and BOOK OF HOURS: none of them fit in an existing genre (although Cultist spawned a microgenre of its own). All those other games had references and influences, but they all went in all the directions.

Consider my list of influences for Sea: ‘FTL; Don’t Starve; Strange Adventures in Infinite Space; Sid Meier’s Pirates; Taipan; Elite; roguelikes; the Crimson Permanent Assurance; the Irish immrama myths’.

Now look at our list of influences for Travelling at Night: ‘Disco Elysium, Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1+2’.

Two of the influences on Travelling’s list were developed by one studio; the same people worked on three of them; and Disco’s most avowed influence was Planescape. It’s not an exhaustive list, of course, but the other games that we might cite as influences (HBS’ Shadowrun games, or the OG BGs, or Obsidian’s work as the successor to Black Isle, or Owlcat’s neo-iso tradition) are all ultimately in that Interplay/Black Isle tradition. So Travelling has clear conventions, innovations, precedents that we can – in fact, we have to – acknowledge or follow or ignore.

Stop throat-clearing, Kennedy, we want to hear about Travelling! I’m going to talk about Travelling, but first I’m going to talk a bit about opera. Don’t worry, I know very little about opera, it won’t take long.

In fact the only time I ever regularly went to the opera was when I was living in Łódź in the mid-90s. I had almost no money, and the opera was well-subsidised in Poland back then, so the tickets were actually cheaper than the cinema. Polish surtitles for Italian language-opera weren’t really accessible to an English expat, but I could sit in the warm and feel cultured. A memory surfaces of an embarrassing conversation with a nice Scottish expat friend in the lobby of the Teatr Wielki in the winter of ’95. To appreciate the full effect of the experience, you need to imagine me as I was then, with beard and ponytail, in an embroidered waistcoat and bow tie, like an extra-hairy budget boho Frasier:

Jeff: So what have we come to see then?
1990s AK: [condescendingly] To hear, Jeff.
Jeff: Sorry?
1990s AK: [very condescendingly] You mean, what have we come to hear.
Jeff: Och sorry! What have we come to see here?

So opera. Unlike CRPGs, it emerged in Florence in the early seventeenth century. But like CRPGs, it’s a hybrid form that aspired to be a new kind of artistic expression with its own distinctive style. And like CRPGs, it developed its own distinct and distinctive traditions and conventions (we’ve talked about this before[weatherfactory.biz]).

What kind of traditions and conventions? For instance, an opera is a fundamentally narrative form; operas have overtures; opera makes use of the distinctive bel canto vocal style which feels like listening to a nice Sauternes (yes still channeling Frasier. Deal with it)

Wait a minute, you say, I like a bit of Wagner, and he made a point of rejecting bel canto. He did! for a more dramatic, more heroic style which unsympathetic listeners might call ‘shoutier’ and I would call ‘more like listening to bourbon than Sauternes’. Fair enough, bel canto is really an Italian opera thing, clue is in the name.

Wait a minute, you say, Einstein on the Beach has no narrative to speak of, and it’s clearly an opera. Well Glass has his detractors, and though I like his work a great deal I don’t know if I’m brave enough to sit through five hours of it without an intermission, but yes of course it’s an opera unless you’re going to be needlessly mean. (And you’d have to be meaner even than Niles Crane: ‘His productions are brilliant. He staged a Philip Glass opera last year, and no one left.’)

Wait a minute, you say, Nixon in China has a prelude but it’s not an overture, it doesn’t preview the musical themes whatsoever, it’s just an atmospheric intro. True, I reply, although you seem suspiciously well-informed about opera, what are you doing reading a blog post about CRPGs – oh you know Nixon in China the same way I do, because you heard ‘The People Are The Heroes Now’ in the Civ 4 soundtrack…

But okay that’s enough opera. You take my point: there’s a consistent family resemblance even when people break with the conventions and traditions. More than that, you can get juice out of intentionally breaking the rules – as long as you know why you’re doing it. Conventions in art are Chesterton’s Fences[www.chesterton.org]. Sometimes you do need to knock ’em down, but you always need to think about ’em first

Back in ’95 – at the same time I was parading round a Polish opera house in my waistcoat – the Interplay designer Chris Taylor put together a vision statement for Fallout. (Huh, he designed Nemo’s War[boardgamegeek.com]! I liked Nemo’s War.) Here are the bullet points from the vision statement:

1. Mega levels of violence.
   
2. There is often no right solution. Like it or not, the player will not be able to make everyone live happily ever after.
   
3. There will always be multiple solutions. No one style of play will be perfect.
   
4. The players actions affect the world.
   
5. There is a sense of urgency.
   
6. It’s open ended.
   
7. The player will have a goal.
   
8. The player has control of his actions.
   
9. Simple Interface.
   
10. Speech will be lip-synched with the animation.
    
11. A wide variety of weapons and actions.
    
12. Detailed character creation rules.
    
13. Just enough GURPS material to make the GURPSers happy. The game comes first.
    
14. The Team is Motivated (‘Tim [Cain] has incriminating documents on all of us’, Taylor affectionately writes: apparently Cain was literally the sole developer on Fallout at the very beginning, but he managed to enthuse enough other Interplay employees to form an actual team)

(source[fallout.fandom.com])

If you look at all the later iso CRPGs (and indeed plenty of non-iso ones, like Bethesda’s Fallout sequels or the Silver Age BioWare games), then you’ll see they also follow through on a remarkable number of these aspirations. Some of the aspirations have fallen away – the ‘GURPS’ bullet point didn’t even make it into Fallout 1; most iso games don’t have facial animations even if they’re voiced; and in particular, as I’ve said elsewhere, Disco’s biggest innovation was to take the combat, point 1, entirely out of the CRPG formula. But it hangs together, doesn’t it?

You’ll notice that this list doesn’t include some of the features we expect in an iso CRPG, like…

• a. dialogue trees
  
• b. companions
  
• c. a skill system
  
• d. skills increase with use/experience
  
• e. top-down/iso perspective with character sprites + character portraits

…because the features are ways to achieve the aspirations in the vision statement. This is a really fuzzy distinction – ‘a wide variety of weapons’ or ‘detailed character creation rules’ are features as much as aspirations – but I don’t want to get hung up on the taxonomy of it, that’s for the game studies PhDs, I just want to make the point that early on dialogue trees, skill systems, etc., became part of the CRPG tradition, even though it could have evolved totally differently[weatherfactory.biz]. You could make an iso CRPG without them, just as you could put on an opera without a stage or a proscenium. But players would miss them. Even their limitations are part of the form.

Dialogue trees are a good example of what I mean. Like a lot of designers, I went through a phase of grumbling ‘we can do better than dialogue trees’. We probably can! At least in the sense that film and TV and video games are ‘better’ than opera and theatre, because you don’t need to dress up and go out and pay for tickets and all that stuff. But just as there’s something ceremonial and fun in dressing up and going out, and experiencing a unique performance, there’s benefits from even the limitations of dialogue trees.

For instance, we get tired of lawnmowing the tree (thinks: why did it never occur to me until now how weird it is to ‘mow’ a ‘tree’). You probably know the term: if you see a row of possible conversation topics, you know you probably either have to read all of them eventually, or miss out on something. If you’re enjoying the writing, this can feel like Christmas; if you’re not particularly enjoying the writing, it can feel like homework.

Tradition, normally, would dictate we also have ‘6. Let’s talk about something else’ and ‘7. That’s all I wanted to ask’. PS THIS IS PRE-ALPHA, ESPECIALLY THE LAYOUT!

Sometimes designers try to work round this, for example by limiting engagement – e.g you only get to ask them two questions before they say ‘enough for now’. I put an experiment in Fallen London years ago where you were sitting in a box at the theatre with your interlocutor – you had limited questions, and every time you asked a question, you missed a bit of the play. This can be fun! But it can also worry or confuse players who are used to the familar rhythm of mowing the lawn, buzz buzz, smell of cut grass, where they feel like they’re being punished for behaving naturally when the conversation ends. Tradition and convention, again. And expectation.

Let’s wrap this up. System and story: a good system is stuff that happens predictably and a good story is stuff that doesn’t happen predictably. I don’t mean that a good story needs to be a twist every scene, but if you know everything that will happen, it’s dull. Similarly a system will throw you surprises every so often, but it’s designed so that once you understand it, you can appreciate it and use it to predict the results of your actions.

Here are the games I mentioned at the beginning of the blog post, on a continuum from story-focused to system-focused:

I’ve spent happy years working near the right-hand end, in the poetic space where the systems support the story. Contentment only lasts sixty seconds in Cultist; Sunless uses its systems to make you think about hunger and the dark. Travelling is the farthest left I’ve ever gone. That made me disconsolate for a few weeks, because I really like working consonately with a structure… but then I realised something.

Right at the top I mentioned HBS’ Shadowrun games (Returns, Dragonfall, Hong Kong). I really enjoyed these – I was surprised how much, because a lot of the component parts are only ‘good’ or ‘very good’, but the whole works together fluently. I was also reminded by a chap on the Disco subreddit that the Shadowrun games pioneered a RHS dialogue interface, back in 2013 – although a very different one –

It’s not scrolling text – it’s designed to look like a PDA folding in from the side, I think – but it still feels elegant and liberating to me, after years of being used to the text in a band along the bottom

Part of the reason, I’ve realised, that I enjoyed Shadowrun so much is that the rhythm. You go on a heist of some sort; there’s generally a plot twist; you return to your hub; you talk to people and resupply; you go on another heist. It’s a formal constraint – a system – a foothold of predictability on the excitingly treacherous crag of narrative uncertainty.

This is a good intuition pump for one of the uses of ‘systems’ in narrative games – basically, they’re not just CYOA. A structure might be a skill system. A structure might be a reasonable expectation that the murderer in a whodunnit will not turn out to be ‘some bloke called Phil, who has never been mentioned at any point before now but you could find in a random monster encounter’. Either way, it allows the designer to set expectations, and the player and designer to benefit from a mutual understanding.

Fig. 4:


Point being, game systems, act structures, conventions, are all different ways (not ‘just’ different ways! detail matters!) of providing these expectations. Which allows me to post Fig. 5, which I find reassuring:

Travelling at Night still exists in that nice structured poetic space. It’s just got even more words.

I ran some Reddit ads last week to get the word out about Travelling At Night. It may seem odd to be doing it so early in the dev cycle - we're still in pre-production! - but we take the Lord of Light approach to marketing: "An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time. One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding."

Surprisingly, these were our best performing Reddit ads ever. Travelling gained 2,500 wishlists in one week with a cost of just over $500, and a blinding CTR of 1-5% (generally, a Click-Through Rate of ~1% is considered a good result). A lot of this was because I followed ParsleyMan's extremely useful advice on r/gamedev about his ad setup, so thank you to him! But the ads also made a splash for other reasons, good and frightening. Here's a sampling of insights gleaned.

Sunless Skies fans were most interested when we microtargeted AK's Failbetter creds ("From the creator of..."). Fallen London fans were most interested when we ran more general campaigns ("Twelve years ago you were hollowed out by the Worms from under the world..."). This is weird because AK had very little to do with Sunless Skies: he came up with the original concept but didn't write any of it, as he'd left so he could work on Cultist Simulator by that point. Perhaps it's just that Skies is the most recent PC entry in the FL universe, so fans are hungriest?

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader fans were notably keen, making up nearly 30% of all clicks from our general campaign. Owlcat Games make great narrative-driven CRPGs, so this makes sense, and it's encouraging that the communities of bigger and shinier CRPGs are already taking an interest in Travelling.

Our most successful ad was this one:

It had a high 5% CTR from all who saw it, and a totally banonkers 10% CTR from members of r/cultistsimulator. Who knew: Secret Histories fans are nuts for the lores. I think r/cultistsimulator responded so well because there's less awareness of Travelling in the non-official subreddit where we rarely cross-post, but the same level of excitement at being spoken to in the specific language of the Secret Histories.

Our least successful ad was this one:

It was part of our general campaign, had the least clear direction for why Reddit should care (Is it a CRPG? Is it even a game? Wat) and was shown to the widest range of people. It still had 1% CTR, which is great. But it seems people are not intrinsically fascinated by the phrase 'occult carnival' like I am.

Disco Elysium fans are very interested. This is wonderful because anyone who enjoyed Disco Elysium has a high chance of enjoying Travelling At Night. But I actually turned the DE-specific ads off early because they were generating so many organic posts in the subreddit - people sharing screenshots and discussing what this game was - that I got a bit scared. Some were just sharing there was another Disco-like coming up to join others like Rue Valley or Summer Eternal's unannounced project. Some were wondering what this interloper game was and if it was a rip-off. (Thankfully, lots of DE fans know Weather Factory and said 'Weather Factory don't just copy stuff' and 'actually, AK has the chops'. Thank you extremely much to them.)

However, some DE fans did not like me leaning * too much * into their game. I thought the Pysche-skill 'Inland Empire' (itself a reference to David Lynch's film of the same name) would be a fun way to connect Disco's worldbuilding with Travelling's. So I used in-game Disco formatting and ran copy that started: "INLAND EMPIRE [Medium: Success] - Europe, 1948: myth-scarred ruins, night-sky abysses...". Most people who saw this understood what I was going for and responded positively. But some people saw it and thought we were plagiarising actual content from Disco Elysium and sticking it wholesale into our game. For the avoidance of doubt, we are not. But lesson learned: let people know Disco is an influence and we love it; don't go into its house and raid the fridge. Sorry, DE fans!

Similarly, our current UI seems to cause concern. We’re explicitly using Disco‘s vertical UI as our starting point because it’s a great innovation which makes the reading process more enjoyable for text-heavy narrative games. I’m not worried about it being too similar in the final game, because I know there’ll be a bunch of iteration before we actually launch (see below for how BOOK OF HOURS‘ UI changed over time). Disco, like all art, built on existing work – we’re also using the Pixel Crushers’ Dialogue System[www.pixelcrushers.com] middleware which they used to build their Feld Playback Experiment UI[web.archive.org], and we’re both arguably building on previous games like Shadowrun Returns/Dragonfall/Hong Kong which (we think!) were the first CRPGs to use a vertical sidebar for their dialogue. But now I know that if people love something and see something else that looks a bit too much like it, they get antsy. Noted.

Earliest version, featuring a full-screen port-hole effect

Updated version: simplified buttons, first iteration of card trays

Final launch version

The more informed people became, the more positive they were. If you're aware of the game dev process, you see this game and think 'it's clearly in the early stages, but one to watch'. If you don't, you think: 'lmao'. If you've heard of Weather Factory, you think 'hey, they do good writing, I'm theoretically up for this'. If you don't, you think 'this looks awfully familiar - are they ripping off something I love?'. This is definitely worth thinking about when we move into more general ads later down the line: I live in fear of r/gaming's 45 million subscribers responding to ads I run.

Finally and most importantly: word of mouth eats everything for breakfast. These ads did great, even though we have little to work with so early on in development. But even when things got a bit hairy like those organic DE posts, people talking about Travelling At Night had a huge impact on wishlists overall. So if you're jazzed about it - and I hope you are! - please tell people about it for us. That's the closest we can get to a Roger Zelazny army, except rather than making war we will make dialogue-driven occult choices, and that sounds good to me.

Merry Christmas, everyone! We're rounding off the year with a live AMA on the Weather Factory subreddit, starting in about half an hour. Come talk to us about anything Travelling At Night, Secret Histories, what's all this about a spooky carnival then, etc.

(We reserve the right not to answer any lore questions, but anything we can answer, we will.)

The AMA starts at 6PM GMT / 10AM PDT. Hope to see you there!

Bring snacks.

Today’s announcement is about Weather Factory's third game, which we can now unveil as Travelling at Night: a dialogue-driven choices-matter combat-free CRPG. We’ve been prototyping it since HOUSE OF LIGHT came out, the prototyping’s going great, and we’re keen to press ahead with it.

Here: a widget so you can wishlist it and find out a little more about it. Please tell everyone you think might be interested. Attention is our lifeblood and the more wishlists we get, the more confident we’ll be putting resources into it.

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/2915730/Travelling_at_Night/

Congrats to everyone who’d successfully guessed the name and/or genre from the teasers! You’ll all have noticed that the genre is a bit of a departure for us. What gives?

Well, I’ve been making narrative games for fifteen years but I’ve never made a traditional isometric CRPG. It’s a grand and grandly developed form, like opera. If you’re a composer – even if you’re Philip Glass and you’re trying to reinvent music – after fifteen years, you often eventually end up wanting to have a go at an opera.

I’m not trying to reinvent anything, although anyone who’s followed my previous work will know I’ve long skewed away from the mainstream approaches to games narrative. I designed Fallen London and Sunless Sea to use ‘storylets’ – bundles of resource-locked, resource-providing choices – because I was looking for a way to link nuggets of story loosely through resource-based narrative. (I originally called it ‘quality-based narrative’, after the term I used for resources in FL, but later I worried that sounded like I meant ‘quality narrative, not that other rubbish’.) It was a long step away from traditional branching narrative, and from dialogue trees.

Cultist Simulator took that idea further. All the ‘story’ in Cultist is presented through text fragments on cards, and as the output of recipes. There isn’t any distinction between the story and gameplay layers at all, and there’s nothing you could mistake for a dialogue tree. Book of Hours skews back in a slightly more traditional direction. There are descriptions of objects you can click on as you navigate an imagined space, and (especially with the extra Visitor stuff in the expansion) there’s some tens of thousands of words of dialogue. But it’s not much like CRPG dialogue, and the game isn’t a space that you scoot an avatar around. It’s still firmly in the experimental Weather Factory mode.

But Lottie and I like CRPGs. Torment exploded my view of what could be possible in narrative games, like a tiny anarchist in an architectural model. Some of you will also know that I did guest writing at Bioware and Telltale back in the day. Very few of you will know that I was also narrative consultant for a bit on a really promising and heavily NDA’d CRPG for a developer I admire and on a franchise I like. I had to turn down narrative lead, because I was busy making Cultist – I turned it down with considerable regret, followed by considerable relief when the game was later axed without ever being announced – but that sense of regret remains.

We like CRPGs, but we also like cost control. That’s one reason we stayed with the cards and slots. Making games on a strict budget means you don’t need a giant success to keep eating, and CRPGs are, as I said at the top, opera. Every game I’ve ever made has been an RPG of some kind, but ‘CRPG’ means a really specific set of expectations that tend to go together. However! One of Disco Elysium’s audacities was to show that you can throw out some of those expectations – like combat, or an array of NPC companions – and still make something that feels like a CRPG. Lottie and I have debated whether to use the phrase ‘discolike’, because ‘discolike’ comes with its own set of expectations, and we don’t want anyone thinking we’re pursuing that distinctive nihilistic funny sex’n’drugs’n’disco vibe. Still we did want to acknowledge our creative debt to the possibility DE opened up – the possibility of finding an audience for something CRPG-esque with really unorthodox creative choices.

To tie this up: there’s a kind of discipline I learnt from doing constrained resource-based game narrative that has already proven really useful on the CRPG work I’ve done. But this is still new territory. We’re going into it with enthusiasm and humility, and we’re taking our time.

***

As with our other projects, we’re happy to start talking about Travelling at Night early. It’s one of the micro-indie’s few advantages, that we can practice open development because we don’t need to worry about stealth mode or share prices. So watch this space for updates. But please always, always bear in mind that this is open development, not an investor prospectus. As an indie, when you talk about something you’re working on, and it doesn’t get into the final game (because you changed your mind; because it didn’t work; because you didn’t have budget) then there’s sometimes some grumpiness from players who get overexcited about ‘broken promises’. Honestly our community is more chill and more mature than many, and we rarely get any of this stuff, but it does still make us a little nervous when we reveal what we’re working on.

So if you see anyone getting worked up because we decided not to include the ‘lignified city’ on the Steam page, or reworked the Passions system, or cut the medicine mechanics, remind ’em that nothing we say before launch is a promise. We’re not crowdfunding. What you’re getting here is the equivalent of us talking enthusiastically in a coffee shop about our work that day. And the other side of that is that we’re always curious about what people think – what’s exciting them, what’s not working for them. Absolutely please do drop us an email or leave a comment if you have thoughts. This is half the reason we put this stuff out there. It might not change at all. But it might.

Some details, then, to start with!

• We’ve moved away from the intentionally inchoate player-cipher of CS and BH. Instead you have a really specific character, who uses the name Spencer Hobson – a name some of you will recall from Cultist and Book. Everything I said at the bottom of this post remains true.
  
  
• The art direction is determinedly non-realistic – about as far in the non-realistic direction you can go and still be plausibly CRPG. There’s always been a crackling gapful of possibilities between text and images. Lottie and I are enjoying finding ways to bridge the gap. Those overlays, for example, that you can see in the sceenshots. Or: I like putting people in the scene because you’re having a conversation about them, even when they’re not strictly present.
  
  
• There won’t be a codex. There will however be footnotes. This isn’t Cultist, where the whole game was putting together the fragments. There’s ten years of context, and we need to ease the path for anyone who’s just starting out with the Secret Histories. We’re trying out something experimental here with footnotes, though.
  
  
• A half dozen of the Hush House visitors – plus Nina, Medea, Christopher, Teresa, Giorgiou, Orsolina, Crooky, Kitling Ripe – are in talks about their schedules to see if they can make it into the game. Bunch of new faces too, obviously.
  
  
• There are currently four Careers, sixteen Skills, and nine Passions to guide roleplaying and choose agendas. Plus Experiences, Memories and Signs. This should give you a general idea of the level of character customisation. It’s not Pathfinder, but it’s not Cultist Simulator either.
  
  
• We’re looking at a production schedule of between two and four years depending on internal aurorae and external storms. It’ll be Windows/Mac/Linux as usual, it’ll be on Steam and GOG as usual. I would expect that we’ll do post-launch localisation as usual; we’ll talk about other platforms post-launch as usual, but I’d really like to launch on Steam Deck day 1 if we can. Alpha, beta, playtesting is all tbc.
  
  
• We’re working out a trans-European itinerary. You might visit the British Isles; you might make it was far as Moscow or Massachusetts. But this is mostly Europe by train. A different Europe; a Europe with holes in France through which you can see the stars, a Europe where there are Seglaz-bearers as well as Trümmerfrauen reducing the rubble mountains, a Europe where the rain doesn’t always fall the right way. But one of the keywords on the whiteboard is ‘hope’.