How I Got Into Games, Part II: ‘Where Are My Sodding Crickets?’
I started writing. But obviously, if you’re writing for a game, you can’t just sit down and type long-form into a document like this one. And if you’re making the game as you write for it, then you have to build the game, too, and you have to build some means of deciding what words are going to be displayed when, and how to display them.
And, just as importantly, you need to build a tool to add and edit and update the words, and the rules about which ones are going to be displayed when. You can just write them straight into the actual code used to build the language, but that’s nearly always a terrible idea. It’s hard for the developer to write, it’s hard for the developer to read, it’s complicated and fiddly to change, and above all, it means that everyone writing for the game needs to be comfortable with programming languages. Writer-programmers are fairly rare, and in 2009, they were even rarer. It had started to dawn on me that if I were going to make a business of this, then writing and programming and running the business were actually three whole different jobs, and there was only one of me, and probably I needed to give some thought about how I could bring other writers into the fold.
So I also needed to build a tool to allow me to manage the actual words in the game. I went through two other completely different approaches before I settled on a web-based system of drop-downs and text-boxes. For reasons that’ll become apparent later, I called it Jonathan.
[In 2020 there’s a rich ecology of tools that integrate, or can be made to integrate, fairly usefully with game technologies: Twine, ink, Fungus, articy:draft, ChoiceScript, etc. etc. In 2009 there was nothing like this — the now-venerable Twine and ChoiceScript were just hitting their first releases. There was a thirty-year tradition of tools for text adventures/parser games of the GET LAMP, GO NORTH variety, but unless you actually wanted to write a traditional text adventure, those weren’t much use.]
So to sum up, I was building a web game, designing a web game, designing a story system, designing a setting and story, and building a tool to get the story into the web game. Every time one of these changed, I needed to adjust the others. If this sounds like trying to build a car while intermittently changing your mind about whether it’s electric or petrol or steam-powered, or, in fact, not a car but a boat… it was.
Fortunately, software is much, much easier to change than physical objects, so it was fiddly rather than impossible. It all more or less worked, though because I’m not a very good programmer, it ran like a dog, it was a more than a little ramshackle, and I made a number of mistakes which would haunt me and my hapless collaborators over the course of the next seven years.
At the core of the system were those axes of ambition I mentioned above — Dangerous, Persuasive, Shadowy, Watchful. Each of these was a number that gradually rose as you played relevant bits of story, and which in turn unlocked further bits of story. So at Persuasive 5 you’d be hanging out in bohemian pubs and trying to scrape acquaintance with interesting people. At Persuasive 100 you’d be a courtier or a celebrated poet. This gave a shape to the initial, very baggy idea of ‘you’re in a subterranean metropolis and you… do stuff’. And it gave the player an initial choice of directions to follow: do you think of your character — or yourself — as Persuasive, Dangerous, Shadowy or Watchful? I could have called them ‘Social’ ‘Combat’ ‘Stealth’ and ‘Intelligence’, but that would have been way less evocative, and I was starting to realise how important carefully-chosen names could be.
I read about the rat-bounties of European cities, and I decided that monster-hunting would be an inglorious profession like rat-hunting. I decided that cat-catching would be a means to practice Shadowy skills, but that it would be an honourable and co-operative sport indulged by cats, of whom there would be hierarchies from the tabby through the ginger to the night-black. I wondered what the inhabitants of a subterranean city would eat, and the obvious answer seemed ‘mushrooms’. I imagined that a poet trying to get started might be commissioned by a purveyor of mushroom wine to write endless semi-commercial odes to mushrooms.
By this time, Paul had come back with the icon-sized sketches of, among other things, a castle made of jawbones; an ear trumpet; a fanged black glove; a white raven; “an ear-y sort of flower”. He was obviously learning as he went, but they were likeable and distinctive and much better than I’d hoped for. Of course by this point the brief had already evolved, and perhaps a quarter of the illustrations were already redundant. I should probably confess that this was pretty much the dynamic of my and Paul’s future creative relationship.
Paul wanted to know what I had meant by ‘a characterful sort of bat.’ Heroic, he asked? Louche? Sleazy? “Sleazy would be nice,” I said. “The sort of bat that would insist on finishing its cigarette before it got on whatever it was getting on with.”
After a couple of iterations, he gave me this wonderfully woeful creature:
When I put it in the game as an item the player could purchase, I named it the Sulky Bat, and gave it only and entirely this description:
Where are my sodding crickets?
And that was Fallen London in a nutshell: crepuscular, energetic, very gently profane. Though it wasn’t called Fallen London yet. It was still the Fifth City. We’ll come to that in a moment.
By now I had a prototype. It wasn’t a very advanced or attractive prototype. But it was a web page where you could choose between little snippets of story — I called them ‘storylets’ — and click a button to make choices. Different choices would give you different, sometimes randomised, effects. Pick a pocket, and you might increase your Shadowy skills and gain a Bottled Human Soul, or you might get caught and gain a point of Suspicion or Scandal.
[ Inspirations! I’d played David Dunham’s brilliant King of Dragon Pass, and Morris & Thomson’s absurdly complex and evocative gamebook series, Fabled Lands, which had shown me the kind of thing you could do with chunks of loosely connected story.]
Under the hood of the game, Suspicion or Scandal or your Shadowy skill or, indeed, a Bottled Human Soul were all the same sort of thing — all qualities. A storylet could adjust your qualities, reducing your Suspicion level or giving you more Souls. But storylets were also unlocked by qualities. You couldn’t see some storylets, or make some choices, unless your Shadowy or your Scandal were high enough. In fact, if you could see some storylets, the game would force you to play them — if your Scandal got too high, you’d need to leave town for ‘the tomb-colonies’ for a while, like Byron fleeing England for Italy.
This meant a lovely virtuous cycle of stories unlocking stories — or stories becoming unavailable again as your qualities changed. I quickly started to realise how flexible this could be. You could, in theory, play all of this story in almost any order — it was non-linear, but the qualities made sense of the order it happened in. I realised almost immediately afterwards how bloody difficult it was to plan, pace and organise a story that was this flexible and this non-linear.
(I had no real idea at the time how innovative this idea actually was or how influential it would be. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, there’s sort of a benefit to inexperience. If I’d known what I was doing, I’d have been less ambitious, and the phrases ‘storylet’ and ‘quality-based narrative’ would have remained uncoined.)
The way I hoped to make a business out of this was simple: you could only play so many storylets per hour. After that you had to wait to top up again. I hoped to take advantage of a cliff-hanger effect. I hoped that some day I’d be able to charge people to top up their actions early — the model that the Facebook games used. It seemed a slender hope, but I was two months into my six months of sabbatical, and I knew I needed to find some way to generate revenue from this rickety, ridiculous, Goblin Market Christmas Carol idea.
So I needed feedback. I was terrified of feedback. I wasn’t a professional writer or a designer. But I’d read enough about writing and design to know that early feedback was essential. I shared Echo Bazaar with a handful of equally nerdy, D&D-playing friends. They were instantly enthusiastic, and peppered me with feedback and suggestions, but they’d all been playing my tabletop games for years and they were the most sympathetic audience imaginable.
So I thought twice before I shared it with Paul. I liked him a great deal, but he intimidated me more than a little. He was an urbane, amiably cynical gent whose career had meandered through theatre and journalism or film criticism. I knew he liked geek stuff, but I knew he wasn’t the kind of helplessly enthusiastic geek that I was. I was afraid he might find Echo Bazaar endearing at best, or lip-curling at worst.
But I mailed him a link to the prototype. “This is very charming,” he mailed back. “I want more actions!”
In years to come, I was to learn how useful charming could be as feedback. Charming commits to approval without committing to enthusiasm. Charming is not negative, but it is nuanced. Charming is always tactful. Even then, I had some sense of this. My potential illustrator had not said fabulous or brilliant. But he had said he wanted more actions. And I wanted more icons.
I went round to Paul’s place to chat about next steps. He was living in Forest Hill at the time, in a graciously sized flat in a leafily serene suburban road. He had a whole basement as a study, with uplighting and sketches on the walls and an actual computer desk. I looked round it and became overpoweringly conscious of the temporariness of my own workspace, with a monitor perched precariously on a filing cabinet in the nook between that window and that giant chest of drawers.
But most of all, I knew Paul was a real writer. He was a daunting presence, too: a big, charismatic man, with a wry and sometimes acerbic sense of humour, and the measured, gravelly voice of a drama school graduate who’s spent twenty years smoking journalism-approved quantities of cigarettes.
I tried to talk persuasively about my plans. I wanted Echo Bazaar to be a multiplayer game, I said. I wanted people to make their own stories about survival in a nocturnal metropolis. I felt there was a real gap for intelligent narrative games. I knew it was a long shot, I said, what with me just being a web developer with no creative background, but it should be a fun project. Paul nodded. He scrolled through the Echo Bazaar web page. He pursed his lips. Enthusiasm did not radiate from him.
I rallied: I reiterated my desire to pay him properly. This was partly because I wanted to do the right thing, but also because I wanted to be pragmatic. Even back then, I had a dim inkling that difficult money questions were best answered early, and that paid work is generally better quality than work offered for free.
Paul hesitated, and then, to my total astonishment, he said: “Well how about instead of a fee, you cut me in for a percentage?”
“I mean that would be great,” I said. I barely heard what I was saying. A real writer believes in my project! A real writer thinks it might be worth something! That brought me up short.
“It would be great,” I said again. “But look, you know, it’s very likely that this project will make literally zero money ever.”
Paul said he didn’t mind. He’d lost his regular gig at the Guardian the previous year. He had a copywriting contract for 12p a word for another month, and nothing after that. He was fed up with writing anyway, and he really liked the idea of making a living as an artist. Besides, he’d come up in theatre. ‘Literally zero money ever’ wasn’t as off putting to him as it might be to most.
I still insisted on paying him two hundred pounds up front, because the whole plan still seemed so outrageous to me. That, and a hundred and fifty pounds for a friend-of-a-friend web designer to make my web app look less ugly, was the whole of the budget for the whole of the pre-launch budget of Echo Bazaar.
(As it happened, seven years later, revenue from Echo Bazaar was well past two million quid, and it’s still printing money today. ‘Cut me in for a percentage’ was, as Paul and I later agreed, one of the best suggestions he ever made.)
I offered him ten percent of the business, and he said that was fine. Neither of us really had any idea how much or what it might mean, but it seemed right. I was still wary of going into business with someone else, after a couple of abortive experiences with other friends, but Paul was a freelancer with no day job, used to working weird hours on his own recognisance. And there was no way I was going to be able to learn to draw.
So Failbetter Games was now a partnership. I didn’t actually incorporate a company for another six months — I didn’t really know how to go about that, and I was unnerved by the legal complexities and half-understood costs — but we put the handshake deal in writing, and that worked out.
Now things moved up a gear. Paul wasn’t in full-time — he still had his freelance gig to honour — but now he was committed. He stepped up the speed he was churning out icons, which was good, because I kept adding to the list. He started trying to put together logotypes and illustrations of the Fifth City. The logotypes and branding were okay and I had to be tactful about them, because I certainly couldn’t do any better, but the illustrations were amazing. He found a sepia-tinted monumental style like Piranesi’s Carceri prints, specked with glowing lamps and windows. It breathed promise and menace and the night under the earth. I was already very glad we were working together.
But Paul really couldn’t get on board with the larger story. Where exactly was the Fifth City? he kept asking. What was the player doing there? Why? They were all good questions, and at this point I still only had very vague answers. The game was still too much tone poetry and too little plot.
“What if — “ I said eventually — “what if it’s actually London? It all looks like London anyway. What if London had been, I don’t know, stolen by bats or something, and dragged down under the earth?”
And that was it; that was the piece that fit, and the city became Fallen London. It gave Paul something he could get his teeth into, and it gave me something I could jump off from. I could invert and subvert the history and geography of London, which is an interview-friendly way of saying ‘there was plenty of raw material when I was trying to make stuff up.’ I decided that the entities that had stolen London were reordering and renaming its districts, but I wanted to leave clues that players could follow through a labyrinth of references.
For instance, Marylebone Road became Ladybones Road — because of the coincidence of sounds, but also because Marylebone is derived from a Roman Catholic church of the Virgin Mary on a bourne, or stream — Mary-at-the-Bourne — and I liked the suggestion of Catholic relics that ‘Ladybones’ gives. The coincidence of sounds allowed players to enjoy spotting the reference, but the other connection meant there was a tiny reward for going digging, and a signpost that it was worth digging elsewhere.
So, too, Baker Street Underground station. Baker Street was the first Underground station built in London, just around the time that London ‘fell’ in the fictional history. It became ‘Moloch Street Station’, where the trains from Hell come and go. Most players would vaguely recognise that ‘Moloch’ is a demonic sort of name and make the connection to Hell. Some (or anyone who Googled it) would realise that there’s a persistent tradition that the Canaanite god Moloch received sacrifices of children when they were cast into a brass idol with a flaming furnace in its belly… rather like a baker’s oven.
I’m prouder of some of the references than others. Watchmaker’s Hill was Greenwich Park, home of the Royal Observatory and the Prime Meridian where Greenwich Mean Time is calculated: I still think that works pretty well. But Covent Garden, named for a convent, became Veilgarden. That was honestly a bit on the nose. And ‘Wolfstack Docks’ for the London dockland area called the ‘Isle of Dogs’ was definitely the product of late-night desperation.
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This is a draft excerpt from my upcoming book, Sex, Lies, and Videogames.
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