Travelling at Night News

[p]I came to the upsetting conclusion this week that I'd written almost 2% of the likely final word count of Travelling. Less upsetting than you'd think, because we spent most of the last few months setting up infrastructure and tooling, and writing now goes at a much livelier pace. It's still basically a year of solid writing minimum (just writing! never mind the other stuff!) but the even less upsetting news is, I enjoy that, and I s'pose you lot are also interested in that or you wouldn't be following this weird little indie artefact.[/p][p]'Less upsetting.' I've spent a lot of the last week in alternate 1948 Antibes, some of which is notably upsetting. It's under the thumb of the French State, for starters, whose motto is not LIBERTÉ EGALITÊ FRATERNITÊ but TRAVAIL FAMILLE PATRIE. None of those are bad things in themselves, but priorities, you know? The French State, aka the Vichy regime, no longer existed in 1948, but the Secret Histories in Travelling are in several respects more visibly alternate than they were in previous games. Look closely at this war memorial:[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]There's a reason for the variation, but it was also very useful when I was working out Spencer's timeline, to make sure he could plausibly get out of the seminary before the war ended, so he could serve as a chaplain-exorcist and start struggling with his faith. An early version of Spencer, btw, had him as a strayed member of the Shepherd Society, our Jesuit-alternatives, but oh my days, have you seen how long those guys train for? He couldn't have packed that in alongside fall from grace, semi-failed writer, semi-successful stage magician ("Father Brass"), Bureau investigator, disgraced medical student, Légion du Seuil medic, Worm hotel. As it is, his CV is very full and it feels right that he's bumping into old friends and adversaries all over Europe.[/p][p]Back to the Histories. You might be familiar with the Darlan Deal - when a Vichy admiral in Algeria defected to the Allies, changing the course of the war in North Africa. This was controversial, to put it mildly. Darlan was a high-level collaborator in a parafascist regime about which the kindest thing you could say was that it deported fewer Jews. In our own History, this complexity is somewhat tidied when Darlan is assassinated the following month. On Christmas Eve, by a royalist Resistance fighter associated with a plan to restore the monarchy, in the person of the Count of Paris, Henri d'Orléans, who is at this time enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria... because honestly actual history is much more inventive than me. Meanwhile Hitler decides the Vichy regime has outlived its usefulness, the Axis occupy Vichy, and in 1944-5 occupied France is liberated as a single entity.[/p][p]But in Travelling's History, enough of Darlan survived the assassination to keep working with the Allies, developments on the Eastern Front mean that the Axis can't execute Case Anton with enough force, and France remains divided at the war's end. Darlan's anti-icarian sympathies win American recognition for the French State. The regime is still a hive of ex-collaborators, but Darlan has held elections - banning Gaullist and Icarian candidates for 'security reasons', but reluctantly allowing women to vote - and reversing les Statuts de Juifs. Even the most vigorous Vichyist hard-liners are more hysterical now about raveleurs, tarasques, the Carapace Cross, and other hybridities which are not only immoral but also contagious.[/p][p]Which brings us back to 'some of Antibes is noticeably upsetting'. Reconstruction, in this History, is more than just ('just') feeding the starving and rebuilding from rubble. If you want to rebuild, you may need to send a shovel-gang first to cleanse the bomb-crater of what the G.I.s call 'Puppy Mike', and you'll want the shovellers to wash with caustic soap afterwards. It means that if you can see stars through a hole in the ground, you need to watch for sticky widows, when most people can't even see sticky widows. (Spencer can. There are a couple of possible reasons for that.) It means that if you enjoy a tumble with the likely lad passing through, you need to worry not only about pregnancy and social diseases, but also the risk of growing teeth and hair in the wrong places. It means that 'dead' can be a matter of degree - this was true in our 1948 too, of course, because 'lost' 'presumed dead' 'changed name and secretly remarried' 'lost memory and living in a fishing village' were somewhat interchangeable. But here one can walk around with significant bits of one's soul missing; or you can be something that would like to be alive, and nearly is.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]The Incorporates of the West (and the Ministries of the East) can provide protection against this sort of thing. Eighty years on, even before the advent of  Trump and Vance, the heady complexities of the European attitude towards America - parvenu but cool superpower, late but essential ally, flattener of local difference, bringer of jazz and chocolate and hope - those complexities have become tired and blurry. We wanted to relineate the complexity. In Travelling's 1948, the sanctioned officers of Incorporates are conduits of Coronal (celestial, or irradiate, or heretical) power. Nail a dollar bill to your door lintel, and the sticky widows might pass by. But there are reasons someone might balk at nailing up that dollar.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Your engagement with complexity in Travelling at Night is through Spencer. Born in Paris, raised in Kerisham. How French is he, how British? How human? How closely is he prepared to work with the Office of Onteiric Coordination? Is he sympathetic to their concerns about the Carapace Cross? If he gets into bed with them in the short term, will he betray them to the Ministry of Spires later? And so on. All the kind of choices you'd expect. To match the back-lighting.[/p][p]In Antibes, where Coronal influence is very strong - that is, around the Sanitarium Aujourd'hui - the sun literally shines brighter. The terminator between the two sides of Antibes is very clear. (Our composer - of whom also, more later - has given us two versions of the Antibes theme to fade between as you cross it.) The infected wounds in the buildings have closed. There are still starry abysses, where the skin of the world parts under too much tension, but the air has the glossy texture of the best advertisements, and the dappled rose never grows.[/p][p]Which is to say, if you take a look at the store page, there are fresh screenshots. And if Antibes is in some parts upsetting, Caen is downright alarming. I haven't even talked about the 'daffer' that Ysien insidiates offer, but in Caen, you can see some of the benefits of accepting it.[/p]

[p]

[p]"Mrs Kille asks Morgen if she has ever considered 'Medea's path'. A silvery sadness glints in Morgen's eyes; she says that it is barred to her, and unexpectedly quotes a passage from the Book of Suns about the commission of sins in twilight..."[/p]

[/p][p](from HOUSE OF LIGHT)[/p][p] [/p][p]Tomorrow is June the 28th, once again. What more could we become? I'm not sure Cultist's Aspirant ever considered running away to join an occult circus and sculpting a new world from the shrapnel of the old, but maybe she should have dreamed more. I think we could all become more acquainted with the goth jocundity of Rosa Mundi, the itinerant circus at the heart of Travelling At Night. So here goes.[/p][p]Choosing where to pitch the circus forms a large part of the branching storylines of Travelling. From your starting point in Antibes, will you go north to Kionn, then Schloss Nagelsburg, to track down a contact in Vienna? Or will you hightail through France, cross the Incorporate bridge over the English Channel, and meet an old friend in Brancrug? Everywhere you stop, Rosa Mundi will encamp and begin to welcome visitors. Here's a view of one Rosa Mundi settlement, in a pleasant green place. Not everywhere you camp will be quite as welcoming, though once you pass through the entrance the festoon lights and low, jolly music make you almost forget the bleak world outside...[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]There's a lot going on here - may I draw particular attention to Tamarack the horse - but let's talk about tents. The round top in the centre is where Rosa Mundi performs its climactic theatre pieces, merging commedia dell'arte with the Secret Histories into something Mr Agdistis would be proud of. Another belongs to Arun Peel, who may sell you useful and only slightly suspicious medical and narcotic supplies. A third will be your own, where you'll be able to change clothes, plan your next steps and recalibrate before choosing where next to send the circus. More on the remaining tents and their occupants later down the line.[/p][p]There is one person you should meet now, though. Here's Medea, the 'other' manager of Rosa Mundi, a quieter but no less sinister counterpart to Nina, the poster-girl of Travelling's hero art.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Medea, the 'only living ex-Ligeian', used to run a chaikana under the walls of the Monastery of the Fifth Cup. Nina, the Witch of Lagasse, used her own (in)evitable Winter demise to troll Julian Coseley. I'm sure you can all imagine how cheerfully and amicably these two terribly powerful and ancient women cohabit with their definitely shared ultimate goals. The truth is, no-one knows who really controls Rosa Mundi. The best people have come up with is that Medea and Nina 'share' it, in the same way that a bull shark shares the ocean with a Portuguese man o' war. Whom the shark and whom the jellyfish I leave to you. Spencer will have to choose between them in various ways, and I do not envy him.[/p][p]Speaking of things I don't envy Spencer for, he is a wounded gentleman with many visible and invisible scars. One kind of them are potentially useful augmentations known as Signs: you've already seen mention of these on the character sheet UI and the character creation screen. You'll be able to bear a number of these, but your first one will be allocated automatically to you based on your chosen Passion, Skills and points allocation. Please remember that details may change over the course of development, but for now, here are the first nine Signs you can be afflicto-blessed with:[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]I wonder what people can glean about them and what they might do from their names and designs![/p][p]For our part, we're celebrating June the 28th with a long weekend by a rocky sea. Normal service will resume mid-week. For now, all the blessings of the kinder Hours upon you. Thank you for exploring the Secret Histories with us, whether that was setting one foot through the Way of the Wood, reclaiming your birthright as an occult librarian, or reforging myth-wrecked Europe. More Travelling news soon.[/p]

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[p]"Keep the circus going inside you. Keep it going, don't take anything too seriously. It'll all work out in the end." — David Niven[/p]

[/p][p]Every RPG player knows the 'MMO outfit' problem. This is where you wear whatever clothes increase your stats most effectively, regardless of the visual effect. This is where you end up looking like you woke up in a bin after a wild night out. This is cleverly co-opted by Disco Elysium, where Harry DuBois actually has woken up in a bin. It works that he sometimes dresses like this:[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]This remains a problem if you're Spencer Hobson, the best-dressed member of the Suppression Bureau, inspired in part by David Niven:[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]We hope to crack the MMO outfit problem in Travelling At Night by turning it into a mini-crafting system where you combine individual items into one visually coherent outfit. The stats of that outfit may change based on the components used to construct it, but the visual won't change. You'll always look good. Maybe swapping your Ribbed Pique Shirt for a Pleated Bosom Shirt will up your White Tie outfit's Sophistication bonus, or adding a Cornflower Boutonniere will augment its Dignity buff. I should say before AK puts an edit in here that these are example ideas I am painting for effect, and not actual details in the game right now - but you get the main idea.[/p][p]Here's a current, very janky, first look at some of the outfits in-game. Please excuse Weird Bug #3525238473248 where Spencer's eyes have turned Secret Histories pink.[/p][p] [/p][p][/p][p] [/p][p]Let's take the Father's Day outfit (name not necessary final!) as an example. Here are the current items you can combine to create it:[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p] [/p][p]You'll need one of each of those categories to create this look. More complicated outfits will include an outer jacket as well as a hat - making them harder, but potentially more rewarding, to craft. Father's Day is simple! And extremely fetching![/p][p]Hopefully this will keep the fun of finding new, distinct pieces of clothing - cashmere-blend Errols! A single-breasted gallivant jacket! MONK SHOES! - without making you look like a lunatic. I've done a bunch of historical research into men's fashion of the 30s and 40s to source the component parts, which should add some nice period flavour. Did you know the reason most pockets today are 'patch pockets' (pockets with an open, unfastened top) is because materials were more difficult to come by during the war, so it was considered thrifty and patriotic to eschew the formal flap pocket? Did you know that the gabardine trench-coat was first devised for the British Army in WW1, but became a fashion staple once Bogart wore it in Casablanca in 1942? Did you know that high-waisted fishtail trousers are incredibly flattering on a gentleman? As a heterosexual woman who's watched lots of Gene Kelly films, I did know that.[/p][p]One more thing we're experimenting with is where you find these things in the first place. I can't tell you how many times I've killed a mountain lion in Oblivion and gained a lion pelt, the arrow I killed it with, and a spoon. Why the mountain lions of Cyrodiil go round carrying cutlery is a secret only known to Bethesda. Perhaps they are employed by Skooma-addicted Khajiit. Perhaps there's a big lion cave on the Gold Coast I haven't discovered yet where all lions go for gumbo lunch. This knowledge is concealed from me. What I do know is that every time I find a spoon on a cat it breaks immersion, and we very much want you immersed in Travelling At Night.[/p][p]So we don't want you finding a Silk Topper under a rock. And there's no combat, so you can't find a pair of Oxblood Brogues on some guy you just shot. You'll find items throughout the world in reasonable places (made-up but representative examples: Strathcoyne's wardrobe at the Sanitarium; a costume trunk at the Rosa Mundi; etc). You'll also probably know a tailor in every major city, because you have a reputation for knowing all the best outfitters in Europe. You can then order any pieces you particularly want - provided the tailor has them - to be delivered at your next city, adding a little bit of strategy to the mix. More on that later when the design is locked down.[/p][p]Adrien - our returning freelancer who drew a lot of BOOK OF HOURS and is responsible for most of the environmental art you've seen recently - sent me this as part of his research for bombed-out Caen:[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]This is Holland House in Kensington, 1940, after a night of the Blitz. It *also* may have a special second meaning that we will reveal in due course, but more on that later...[/p][p]This photograph is such a testament to humanity's ability to get on with things, even in the maddest and darkest of times. Spencer's been through a war and Worms have been through him. But he's damned if he's going to drop his standards because of one or two little catastrophes. A man still needs his tailored suit, his fitted jackets, his freshly-pressed silk scarves. It makes him who he is, in a world that has unmade itself. Also, the Maids-in-the-Mirror like it. I hope you will, too.[/p]

"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). 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, surprises, 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' 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', 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, 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. 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, we could use a very well-regarded piece of middleware: PixelCrushers' Dialogue System.

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:



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…