"It's not a loop - it's a spiral!"

That's Alan Wake, in Alan Wake 2. If you try to attribute the quote in the normal way, you get this:

"It's not a loop - it's a spiral!" - Alan Wake, Alan Wake 2

which looks ineluctably like a typo. Anyway, spirals. Tomorrow is the seventh anniversary of the release of Cultist Simulator. A couple of thoughts about how we got here from there, and how we got there from somewhere else.

When I started making Cultist, I'd never coded anything in Unity at all. hadn't done any actual coding since I built the Fallen London CMS (once nicknamed 'Jonathan' and later rechristened StoryNexus[www.ifwiki.org]). Once that was up and running, I focused on writing interactive narrative inside that CMS. Which did have loops, ifs, variables, a lot like a programming language - but a very soft-cornered, simple, limited one.

It occurs to me that it might seem odd for a programmer to go from using a versatile and powerful programming language to using a soft-cornered, simple one. One reason is that I wanted, from the start, to build a system that let a team work on expanding a big organic narrative - hence 'storylets' - and I knew that most people who wrote for Fallen London wouldn't be programmers. But there are two other reasons I want to talk about.

The first is that I like the player to be able to build a mental model of what's going on inside the game. Game mechanics can be poetic, in the way a skeleton watch is poetic. If the framework is simple, or even elegant, you can make that poetry visible by making it visible through an interface that works like clear glass - or at least a translucency through which you can see the glow of differently coloured lights.

The second is that the constant shift back and forth, between the writer-designer's stance and the coder's stance, makes one's brain ache. Ambiguity[dfan.org], surprises[dovetail.com], the unconventional - they're not things you seek out when you're coding. Meanwhile all the deadly enemies of reasonable, readable, maintainable code are the friends and familiars of vivid writing. Interactive narrative lives in the lightning-riven hinterland between those two stances. If you just surprise your players, you get frustrating dream-nonsense. I went to Chris Avellone (still, for my money, the single most accomplished writer-designer walking the earth) for advice on Travelling, and one of the things he told me was "Treat your dialogue options like an interface selection screen." When you're trying to build consistent, stable, and bug-free mechanics on the one hand, and trying to make 'every word do as much as possible'[weatherfactory.biz] on the other... you can't do both things at once. It's like getting out of a bus and on to a bicycle, but behind your eyes. Hence the brain ache.

So you minimise the ache by sketching out the mechanics first. You put placeholder text like GIRL SAY NO EAT PIG that you replace in a writing pass later. 99.99% of the time you replace it, anyway. Using a stable searchable phrase to mean 'UNFINISHED!!' is a showsaver. I favour 'fnord[en.wikipedia.org]', a habit I picked up in my salad days from a gentleman named Towlson.

But still the brain, she ache. Coffee help, but coffee no cure. In a microstudio you can't throw the final product over the wall and forget about it. You have to keep going back and forth between text and mechanics, talking to localisers, fixing bugs. And the real problem isn't the brain ache, it's the mistakes. If you're driving a bus and still thinking like a cyclist, it's easy to miss things.

That's why I described the CMS as 'soft-cornered' above. It limits the harm you can do and it allows you to make small, intuitively accessible changes, without changing the fundamental framework. When I started making Cultist, my first goal was to set up a framework that I could change when I was thinking like a writer-designer, without having to shapeshift into a coder and back again every time. (Expecially since, as I said above, I'd never coded in Unity! I needed help with the UI part of Cultist[www.martin.nerurkar.de], and I didn't want to have to go back into the non-framework code and change things that at the time I only half-understood).

In Fallen London, storylets are unlocked when your character has (or lacks) qualities at a particular level. Choices in storylets can then increase (or reduce) some qualities. Which in turn unlock new storylets. Round and round we go, a spiral not a loop.

In Cultist Simulator - and later Book of Hours - recipes are storylets, aspects are qualities. There are two big differences: aspects are local, and choices are implicit. 'Aspects are local' - a Fallen London storylet can always see whether you've got Shadowy 50, but a CS/BH recipe will only know you have Forge 10 if you can fit it, via element cards, into the slots. 'Choices are implicit' - you never get a numbered list of choices  on a Cultist verb window. It'll show you the result you get from one particular combination of aspects, and you can (only) change the choices by changing the combination.

And these two differences are closely intertwined. Local aspects allow the player to experiment, implicit choices mean the results aren't visible before you find a solution. There are exceptions and refinements to everything I just said! but that's the principle of the thing. Neither approach is better than the other - they're different designs for different games (although I wish I'd hit on the elements-have-aspects relationship in Cultist back in the Fallen London days - it would have saved a lot of duplication).

On to Travelling at Night.

Our very early sketches had it using something like the aspects-and-recipes system (for reasons lost to time this is known as the 'Castle of Ghost Kittens' phase). But when we decided it was going to be, formally speaking, a CRPG, that fell away. The CRPG form expects dialogue trees.[weatherfactory.biz] Dialogue trees mean explicit choices. Explicit choices meant we would need to take something more like the FL than the CS/BH approach.

I'll be honest, I wasn't thrilled about writing yet a third framework before I could get started on the content. Fortunately, as we've mentioned elsewhere[weatherfactory.biz], we could use a very well-regarded piece of middleware: PixelCrushers' Dialogue System[www.pixelcrushers.com].

The heart of PDS is this kind of thing, which will look comfortingly familiar to anyone who's used any of these kind of toolsets[nwn.fandom.com]:

But where are the qualities and/or aspects in this?

Well out of the box, PDS gives you Lua scripting, an absolutely standard, versatile, powerful way to check and set variables, or add your own custom functions, like this:

Coder or not, you can probably get a general sense of what that code checks and does. But coder or not, you would probably struggle to remember the syntax and the variable names when typing it in a text box. And coder or not, you would have to be fairly sharp-eyed to notice that there are three typos in the 'Script' box, one of which would crash the game. Lua scripting is not soft-cornered. It's not the kind of thing you can slip casually back into halfway through a writing session, without risking mistakes.

This is not a flaw in PDS or in Lua. Power and versatility are edged and bladed weapons, and Lua is such an anything-goes environment that it's not straightforward to validate it. Fortunately, one of PDS' many virtues is that it's really customisable. I spent the last couple of weeks getting friendly with Unity's GUI system, bolting my own tooling on to the side, and can now do this inside PDS:

and this:

...which makes writing sessions considerably less of a white-knuckle experience.

It was nice going back to 'Qualities'. Aspects in Cultist Simulator were nearly called 'Qualities'. It's a usefully versatile word. I went with 'Aspects' partly because of the occult context, but partly out of an irrational desire for reinvention which I've now grown out of. I'll talk another time about how Qualities in Travelling are different beasts than the ones in Fallen London - more vertebrate, you might say. A spiral, not a loop, like the man said when OOPS NEARLY A GIANT ALAN WAKE 2 SPOILER.

I have just now noticed that I made it 'cashRepublic' not 'cashState', which is serendipitous because I didn't have a good end for this blog post. As it is, I can now show you this snippet:

and this godawful vexillological delinquency. Pétain adopted it as his personal insignia in the Vichy years, and in our divergent history, where the wars are won but France remained divided, it flies yet over Antibes.

“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…