How I Got Into Games, Part III: Cutting the Cord
PART 1, or, How I Started Making A Game In Only Six Months With No Idea How To Do It And No Money
PART 2; or, How I Set The Game Underground And Also Accidentally Acquired A Co-Founder
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Day on day I alternated between writing code and writing storylets, while Paul alternated between writing copy for a corporate client and drawing oddities for me — ‘moon-pearls’, ‘a reprehensible lizard’, ‘a bottled soul’. Very quickly, I found that Paul worked best when given a clear but minimal brief.
Sometimes I’d try to give more specific directions. Generally that wouldn’t work out too well. Either Paul would ignore the detail of my instructions, and I’d get peevish, or he’d follow them, and the work would be the worse for it. Partly because this was because Paul had a lively imagination of his own, often went in directions I wouldn’t expect. Partly because this was because I had then, and have now, the visual aptitude of a cave salamander.
A lesson I started learning then, but didn’t absorb properly for another four years: if you’re lucky enough to be working with someone who’s good at their job, step the hell back.
The Echo Bazaar user interface, though, was where both our weaknesses overlapped. I’d been working in web development for a decade, and I had a decent idea of the principles of good UI, but every time I actually tried to put a design together it looked like an eight-year-old had jammed a design into a screen with their thumbs. Paul could make things look much better, but all his instincts were based on print, and his solutions would often have basic usability mistakes or look weird on a screen.
I paid Andrew Thompson, a friend-of-a-friend web designer, a grand total of a hundred and fifty pounds to put together some HTML templates that gave us a stronger start. Most of his work changed and disappeared over the next few months, but it was Andrew who suggested indicating the number of actions remaining with a candle. [The candle originally went in a bottle whose label carried player stats. The bottle went, but the candle remains to this day, ten years on.]
Paul and I had our first real fight over the UI. I wanted to give players the ability to send postcards from different districts of Fallen London — a rather half-baked attempt to add virality. The rest of the UI was already so crowded that we ended up consigning the TOUR GUIDE / SEND POSTCARD button to the no-man’s-land at the top right hand corner of the screen, where the human eye rarely trespasses. I didn’t love that, but like a lot of novice game designers, I had put too much in the UI and I couldn’t decide what to prioritise. So I asked Paul to make the button as conspicuous as possible.
He made it look subtle, attractive and completely inconspicuous.
I emailed him and asked him to amp it up a bit.
He sent me a version with a subtle, attractive greenish border that looked charming and left the button as invisible as before.
We went round a couple more times, with Paul reluctantly adding pixels, and my emails becoming incrementally less polite. Eventually, after a half-hour silence, he sent me a button design with an absurd giant lime-green border that made the button the most visible thing on the page. It was the most visible thing in the whole room. It might have been visible from space.
I deduced that my pestering had driven him into a rage, and he’d gone upstairs for a bit to growl to his partner about my iniquities, then come back down and sent me a caricature to teach me a lesson. So I rang him up and he reluctantly admitted that I had been exactly right. I apologised for the pestering, he apologised for the growling.
He sent me one last email with a final design. “Here you are,” (he wrote). “I thought it might help to match the lettering and colour with the welcome message, and give it an underline to reinforce its linkiness. If this doesn’t work I admit defeat and will do exactly what you tell me, up to and including a giant pair of bright green breasts.” And the design was actually great, though a year later, when it turned out the original idea just didn’t work and no-one really used it, we embarrassedly retired it from the game.
And this was the template for my and Paul’s relationship over the next seven years. We’d work together happily and well except when our egos collided over, invariably, something really trivial. We’d exchange ever more heated messages until one of us had the sense to ring each other up and lower the temperature, and then we’d continue on excellent terms for another few weeks until we argued over something else trivial. Sometimes I’d put my foot down; sometimes Paul would have a completely preposterous idea and I’d explain to him in vexed bullet-points why it was so preposterous and sometimes by point five I’d realise to my chagrin that he was actually right.
I miss it still.
Over the next month, Fallen London started to come alive. We shared it with more friends, until we had forty, fifty, sixty players. In theory it was public, now, but we didn’t announce it anywhere. To give you an idea of the scale we were operating at, I was excited when a hundred-follower Twitter friend signed up. We still weren’t making any money, of course. I’d found a service designed for free-to-play games which I could use to sell virtual currency — Fate, I called the currency — but I didn’t feel I could do that until there was more content in the game.
‘More content in the game’ became a recurring theme. Players burned through content. Early on, I’d put together a spreadsheet with four scenarios for different levels of engagement: how many actions a ‘casual’, ‘interested’ or ‘enthusiastic’ player would get through every day, and so how much new content I’d need to add to prevent them from running out. The fourth level of engagement I called ‘probably a bot’ because I assumed that no human player would really spend that much time playing the game, but theoretically, if someone timed their actions carefully, it was the theoretical maximum number they could play if they slept eight hours a night. Obviously our keenest players reached that level in the first few months.
I was learning a truth that any veteran game designer could have told me. Players always consume your work faster than you can produce it. Not only do they find ingenious ways to get through more quickly, because the Internet is always smarter than one person or team, but also, it only needs one or a few enthusiasts to consume all your work before it’s ‘finished’. This is partly an illusion. The majority of slower-paced players are still playing and enjoying it. But now there are spoilers out there, and your most enthusiastic fans are looking for a reason to keep playing.
I started to feel like Gromit in the chase scene in The Wrong Trousers, desperately laying down track right in front of the train. Everything was taking longer than I expected. I was still doing all the technical work, too, and there were a hundred bugs and problems. The system I used to get content into the website was clumsy and time-consuming. I hadn’t realised how much I would need to edit and tweak content after it was live. There were two things I hoped might help.
The first was involving other people in writing the game. Paul was the most immediate and obvious choice — he was a writer himself, and his terse wryness was a good match for the emerging Fallen London mood. But Paul didn’t have much time, and he’d started trying to become an artist because he didn’t really like writing any more. I had a couple of university friends — Chris Gardiner and Nigel Evans, who I’d been gaming with for two decades and who were both unproven but (I thought) talented possibilities. They were both keen to be involved, and I liked the idea of working with both of them. But both of them had full-time jobs, and we couldn’t afford to pay anyone anything, so that would have to wait until there was some possibility of revenue somewhere. Still, I started to plan for it.
The second thing was to start looking for ways to let players repeat content without feeling they were running on a hamster wheel. Players already repeated a lot of content. You might remember those Facebook games of the late noughties where, as a mafioso or vampire or whatever, you’d click a button saying ‘fight a thug’ twenty times and then level up so you could click a button saying ‘fight an underboss’ a hundred times and then level up to clicking a ‘fight a boss’ button. You were plainly performing the same action every time, with the same text, but the game just cheerfully ignored that.
I’d expanded the formula, made it more complex, and added different paths for success and failure, but I borrowed the cheerful heedlessness of repetition. In Fallen London, you could catch a black cat twenty times, then a tabby cat fifty times, then a grey cat a hundred times… There was some variation. You were levelling up your Shadowy by doing so; you’d get Secrets or other rewards you could spend on equipment; but you were still reading the same text a lot. It worked well enough to keep people playing, but neither I nor they were especially happy with it.
This is where I hit on something that immediately became a Fallen London hallmark: naming characters as Adjective Noun. You might be hired to write poetry by a gentleman identified only as the Swivel-Eyed Patriot; you might trade gossip with a lady you knew only as the Affable Spy. I reasoned that a player might half-assume that there were any number of Swivel-Eyed Patriots or Affable Spies, but it might be much harder to believe there was more than one Augustus Fothergill or Carlotta Enderby.
It never quite worked as I intended, but it did establish a stylised, half-real atmosphere that meshed nicely with the emerging mood of the game. It also proved to be an incredibly economical way of introducing information about the characters, and in helping players — who’d come and go, playing half a dozen times over the day — to remember who was what. We never stuck to it universally — Clathermont the Tattooist, and the Masters of the Bazaar themselves, were early exceptions — but it quite quickly became one of the ways in which Fallen London fans identified themselves.
We were now two months into my six month sabbatical. Fallen London was now in stealth pre-alpha. It was fine for friends to give feedback, but it was too ugly, unstable and minimal for public exposure. I had four months left. I set a soft deadline for the public alpha of early October’, and a hard deadline of 30th October. On the 30th, Paul and I planned to attend a multi-disciplinary conference for game and tech stuff called ‘Playful’. We could shop the game around and share business cards. The plan wasn’t really much more sophisticated than ‘make contacts and hope someone would give us publicity and/or money’. So time was short. Around then, though, something very disruptive happened. To be fair, it was something of which I’d had plenty of advance warning.
On 26th August 2009, I woke at about 7 am to find that my wife Ana, normally an enthusiastically late sleeper, was already up and dressed. ‘I’m in labour,’ she explained casually. But I thought it was better if you got some sleep.’
Ana and I are divorced now, but I thought then and still think she’s an intensely admirable, if often frightening, person. ‘I went into labour but I thought it was better if you got some sleep’ was and is very characteristic of Ana.
Ana’s labour lasted twenty-four hours and is one of the many things that over the years have made me shamefacedly glad I was born male. We spent many of those twenty-four hours in a natural birth centre, where Ana had initially firmly insisted she would make do with only gas and air for pain relief. After about twenty hours of eternity, she started to change her mind and asked for an epidural. The hospital next door to the birth centre — the insurance policy if anything went wrong — had no spare beds at all and the nearest one was forty minutes’ambulance journey away.
The midwife urged Ana, and urged me to urge Ana, to stick with Plan A. ‘If you go now,’ she said desperately, ‘your baby will be born in the ambulance. You don’t want that.’
I looked from her to my convulsing wife and I remembered the hours of National Childbirth Trust training and I said rather feebly ‘I’m sorry, I think I’m just supposed to be Ana’s advocate’.
We got in the ambulance. By now Ana was raking at her thighs with her nails.
The baby wasn’t born in the ambulance.
By the time we got to the hospital, of course it was too late for an epidural anyway. So Ana gave birth to our daughter without any additional pain relief.
One of the half-dozen worst moments of my life was the moment I heard a nurse say, very quietly, that the baby’s heart no longer seemed to be beating. I still feel the world tilt when I think of it. An indeterminate and agonising number of seconds later, they realised that the heart monitor had slipped off in all of Ana’s groaning and writhing.
I remember the first sight I had of my daughter Sonja: the top of her head, smeared with the green slime of baby poo. (Babies often open their bowels as they’re born. I have been recounting this moment to Sonja for years since then, and first she found it funny, and then she found it excruciatingly embarrassing, and then she found it funny again.) I remember that I said ‘Your daughter’s coming! I can see her!’ and Ana wailed, quite understandably, ‘I DON’T CARE!’
Things I learnt about umbilical cords that evening. One, they’re bloody tough. For an insane couple of seconds I thought they had given me a pair of child safety scissors to cut it. Two, they are full of blood. I mean of course they are. Their whole purpose is to carry blood to and from the placenta. But there I was hacking away at something attached to my infant daughter with a pair of scissors, and suddenly blood was spurting out of that something. I horrifiedly imagined I’d hurt her, and then I realised it was finished and no-one seemed worried.
All the things that happen post birth happened.
I changed my first nappy.
They let me sleep in the chair beside Ana while Sonja lay in a plastic box next to the pair of us. Ana, who had been doing the actual work, abandoned consciousness gratefully until the morning. But I didn’t sleep much. I kept thinking: Sonja has only been in the world a few hours. Her purchase on it is so tentative. What if she slides straight back out of life?
Ana and I were together for another two years. Then we spent a year-plus apart. We tried to make it work one more time, gave up, and separated for the last time when Sonja was six. After ten years of relationship and five of co-parenting, I still don’t feel I understand Ana particularly well, nor she me, which are probably pretty good reasons to have got divorced. We made each other unhappy, and both of us would tend to regard our marriage as a mistake, except that neither of us can, for a second, regret Sonja.
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So that’s the birth of the game and also of my kid. Next time, I’ll talk about why people keep saying all my games are about death.
This is a draft excerpt from my upcoming book, Sex, Lies, and Videogames.
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