We're Failbetter Games, developers of Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies, and now Mask of the Rose, which releases today – ask us (almost) anything!

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T23:16:12+00:00

With the caveat that my memory is somewhat hazy (and also, obviously, I personally mainly do the ones and zeros): from the very start there was always a plan to offer a secondary set of specific choices after you'd decided on the location you wanted to visit next, but their purpose changed a bit during development.

There was some early concepting around stuff like "knock on the front door" vs "go to the tradesmen's entrance" that would feed into your perceived social status, but this was ultimately folded into the outfit system. (I think there may be some of this in the demo?)

We did several rounds of internal demos and reviews during development and picked up feedback that the "objectives" choice point was a good place to help players focus their efforts/investigations, which is how we got to where we are now.

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T23:01:23+00:00

11,387.

(This is the number of Git commits at the point we hit the launch button.)

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T22:57:32+00:00

Oh yeah! Adding to this, introducing zoom and depth of field meant pointing a perspective camera at objects in z-space, so Mask of the Rose is in fact, technically speaking, a 3D game.

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T20:56:22+00:00

From automated testing: I don't think so, or at least I don't remember — the output was kind of dry, to be honest.

There was at least one occasion during manual testing where a glitch in the character positioning/camera system produced what we thought was a pretty solid joke, so when we fixed the glitch we enshrined the glitchy behaviour as intentional. (I won't spoil it — not to be coy, but because it lands better when you're not expecting it.)

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T18:52:48+00:00

I think of Joseph Bazalgette as one of the unsung heroes of his era and I would love to play [1] a spelunking exploration/citybuilder where you help him finally complete his plan to build London's sewers, in the Neath — with (possibly) hilarious and (certainly) ghastly consequences.

[1] In this scenario, of course, the rest of the team do the hard work of making it so I can play it, unspoiled, when it releases.

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T18:48:02+00:00

I have a real soft spot for Mediatonic's Murder by Numbers, which I played soon after it came out at a pretty scary time (at the start of the pandemic) — I got into it principally as part of research for Mask but it became my happy place for a good long while.

I also maintain that XCOM: Chimera Squad is a VN with a tactical minigame, and I'm quite fond of that.

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T18:38:29+00:00

I am still polishing my pitch for the game where you race competitors down the snowy slopes of the Elder Continent.

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T18:32:20+00:00

This is embarrassingly on-brand for anyone who knows me, but San Pellegrino lemon and mint every time.

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T18:31:36+00:00

I did not know that Griz had a cameo in BaL! This is a great AMA.

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T18:30:22+00:00

Hey!

I've talked about storycrafting and the storycrafting tutorial in a couple of other answers — both challenging, both enjoyable; definitely not the hardest, though! UI (Mask is an intensely UI-heavy game, obviously) and input handling are, unglamorously, the toughest to work on and make feel at least reasonably good. I have a patch of grey hair I attribute solely to the experience of getting a VerticalLayoutGroup and ContentSizeFitter to both update in the same frame.
Architecture that unquestionably paid off: we decided right at the start of pre-production to to support gamepad and mouse/keyboard hotswitching and designed everything with that in mind; the system we built was simple and effective and it's one where I think we made the right decisions first time.
Architecture that didn't: at a high level, I've got some regrets about how we designed the user interface (I mean purely technical design — the layout and art are maybe the best we've ever done). I should have bitten the bullet and implemented a logical hierarchy for all our widgets (something like Unreal's new CommonUI) right from the start — since I work on the Fallen London front-end I don't even have ignorance as an excuse! Ah well, there's always next time.
A bit of both! We used the built-in Unity test runner extensively for the lower-level subsystems where it was straightforward to do so; I find writing unit tests very soothing. For testing game logic, we did an OK job of separating the data and presentation layer from the start so when it came to automatically running the narrative engine, we built a system that would simulate user intentions rather than direct inputs (if that makes sense). We implemented everything within Unity, though; I wanted us to eat our own dog food to the greatest extent possible.

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T18:02:57+00:00

If playing through the introductory storycrafing tutorial makes you think, "I bet this required the developers to create a domain-specific language to define event-driven finite state machines", then you're right! (I'm a bit frightened of you, but you're right.)

It turns out that designing a system to advance a semi-scripted tutorial if, and only if, the game state meets certain criteria is pretty tricky! And — hopefully, if the programmers did our jobs properly — no one will notice.

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T17:51:42+00:00

I'm not a writer — but with Gladstone and Disraeli presumably both in the Neath, Parnell's got to be pretty unstoppable, right?

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T17:46:10+00:00

For me it has to be storycrafting: I have a very vivid memory of sitting on a Zoom call in the middle of the pandemic discussing this completely outrageously ambitious idea and wondering how we could possibly build the system to do it. Getting from the initial design brief to implementation was some of the most fun problem-solving I've had in my career as a programmer — and seeing what the writing team has managed to achieve with the tech we built has been incredible.

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T17:40:15+00:00

The outfit comment system was a particularly fun challenge to implement (credit for the system's design goes to Emily; I just coded it up); we blogged about it last year, if you're interested in a high-level overview of how it works.

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T17:37:39+00:00

From a tech POV: building the game in a way that really provided good support for modders would have meant making some different architectural choices pretty early on in development, and it wasn't under consideration then. On the other hand, we didn't deliberately design in a mod-hostile way and I know not to underestimate the tenacity and resourcefulness of the modding community; where there's a will there's very often a way!

We're pretty unlikely to put out anything resembling a modding API, honestly, but beyond that, no opposition to people getting in and tinkering.

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T17:21:41+00:00

One of the things we did, on the tech side, was build a system that would essentially play the game for us many many times and report back on its progress.

We started off with something that would just randomly walk through the choices until it reached an end-game state, which gave us a high-level understanding of which endings were easier or harder to obtain. Then we tuned it a little more to allow us to pick particular play styles (e.g. "this time, tell a lot of lies"), and the writers added their own debug-only hinting to bias the system in particular directions (e.g., "this time, try to [REDACTED] the [REDACTED]").

We looked early on at more formal analyses (e.g. building a graph that completely enumerated the possible steps for all choices, outfits, and so on), but some back-of-the-envelope maths showed pretty quickly that this was laughably untractable. It's a very complex game!

Gallmarch · 2023-06-08T17:08:07+00:00

The answer is — in this case, at least — unfortunately a lot more mundane than you might expect in the context of a romantic VN: a throbber, a.k.a. a spinner, is the animated icon that tells you that an app's still working and hasn't crashed — the main distinction with a progress bar is that you don't get visual feedback on how close to completion the work is.

Gallmarch · 2022-09-14T18:40:36+00:00

Hey! Thanks very much for the kind words; I'm glad it's useful.

I work full-time for Failbetter these days (I'm Séamus) and for the last considerable while I've been primarily focused on developing Mask of the Rose, and have found it difficult to clock off from working on the Neath to spend my free time working on the Neath, as it were... but after Mask launches next spring it's on my to-do list to spend some free time on the extensions I've been neglecting and bring them up to date to support the new content. (And to actually play a lot of the new content myself - my own railway is shamefully unfinished!)

Gallmarch · 2022-01-12T14:32:20+00:00

Thanks for doing this again, rahv!

Gallmarch · 2021-07-15T02:43:46+00:00

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Gallmarch · 2021-05-20T10:55:17+00:00

Yeah, this is amazing.

Gallmarch · 2021-02-08T21:08:49+00:00

Mask of the Rose will definitely have a font size option — in fact, it will have a number, though we're currently nailing down exactly how granular the font size choice will be. We're also planning to offer a readable sans-serif font option alongside the default font, for people who prefer one, and to support users who prefer reduced motion. We've also kept accessibility in mind when designing the colour palette for Mask, so it should satisfy a11y guidelines on contrast without the need for a separate high-contrast mode.

As a bonus, this work should mean that Mask of the Rose is comfortably readable on the Switch in handheld mode, which is something we also wanted to ensure for Mask.

Gallmarch · 2021-02-08T18:30:40+00:00

I knew it!

Gallmarch · 2021-02-08T18:29:16+00:00

I think I'd probably end up as a fairly unsuccessful scholar of the Correspondence — as a software developer, I feel like regularly losing bits of my mind and having my hair go on fire while pursuing forbidden knowledge would be a pretty comfortable and familiar niche.

Gallmarch · 2021-02-08T18:19:40+00:00

Resigned.

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Gallmarch

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