Travelling At Night
Today’s announcement is about Game Three, which we can now unveil as Travelling at Night: a dialogue-driven choices-matter combat-free CRPG. We’ve been prototyping it since HOUSE OF LIGHT came out, the prototyping’s going great, and we’re keen to press ahead with it.
Here: a widget so you can wishlist it and find out a little more about it. Please tell everyone you think might be interested. Attention is our lifeblood and the more wishlists we get, the more confident we’ll be putting resources into it.
Well, I’ve been making narrative games for fifteen years but I’ve never made a traditional isometric CRPG. It’s a grand and grandly developed form, like opera. If you’re a composer – even if you’re Philip Glass and you’re trying to reinvent music – after fifteen years, you often eventually end up wanting to have a go at an opera.
I’m not trying to reinvent anything, although anyone who’s followed my previous work will know I’ve long skewed away from the mainstream approaches to games narrative. I designed Fallen London and Sunless Sea to use ‘storylets’ – bundles of resource-locked, resource-providing choices – because I was looking for a way to link nuggets of story loosely through resource-based narrative. (I originally called it ‘quality-based narrative’, after the term I used for resources in FL, but later I worried that sounded like I meant ‘quality narrative, not that other rubbish’.) It was a long step away from traditional branching narrative, and from dialogue trees.
Cultist Simulator took that idea further. All the ‘story’ in Cultist is presented through text fragments on cards, and as the output of recipes. There isn’t any distinction between the story and gameplay layers at all, and there’s nothing you could mistake for a dialogue tree. Book of Hours skews back in a slightly more traditional direction. There are descriptions of objects you can click on as you navigate an imagined space, and (especially with the extra Visitor stuff in the expansion) there’s some tens of thousands of words of dialogue. But it’s not much like CRPG dialogue, and the game isn’t a space that you scoot an avatar around. It’s still firmly in the experimental Weather Factory mode.
But Lottie and I like CRPGs. Torment exploded my view of what could be possible in narrative games, like a tiny anarchist in an architectural model. Some of you will also know that I did guest writing at Bioware and Telltale back in the day. Very few of you will know that I was also narrative consultant for a bit on a really promising and heavily NDA’d CRPG for a developer I admire and on a franchise I like. I had to turn down narrative lead, because I was busy making Cultist – I turned it down with considerable regret, followed by considerable relief when the game was later axed without ever being announced – but that sense of regret remains.
We like CRPGs, but we also like cost control. That’s one reason we stayed with the cards and slots. Making games on a strict budget means you don’t need a giant success to keep eating, and CRPGs are, as I said at the top, opera. Every game I’ve ever made has been an RPG of some kind, but ‘CRPG’ means a really specific set of expectations that tend to go together. However! One of Disco Elysium’s audacities was to show that you can throw out some of those expectations – like combat, or an array of NPC companions – and still make something that feels like a CRPG. Lottie and I have debated whether to use the phrase ‘discolike’, because ‘discolike’ comes with its own set of expectations, and we don’t want anyone thinking we’re pursuing that distinctive nihilistic funny sex’n’drugs’n’disco vibe. Still we did want to acknowledge our creative debt to the possibility DE opened up – the possibility of finding an audience for something CRPG-esque with really unorthodox creative choices.
To tie this up: there’s a kind of discipline I learnt from doing constrained resource-based game narrative that has already proven really useful on the CRPG work I’ve done. But this is still new territory. We’re going into it with enthusiasm and humility, and we’re taking our time.
As with our other projects, we’re happy to start talking about Travelling at Night early. It’s one of the micro-indie’s few advantages, that we can practice open development because we don’t need to worry about stealth mode or share prices. So watch this space for updates. But please always, always bear in mind that this is open development, not an investor prospectus. As an indie, when you talk about something you’re working on, and it doesn’t get into the final game (because you changed your mind; because it didn’t work; because you didn’t have budget) then there’s sometimes some grumpiness from players who get overexcited about ‘broken promises’. Honestly our community is more chill and more mature than many, and we rarely get any of this stuff, but it does still make us a little nervous when we reveal what we’re working on.
So if you see anyone getting worked up because we decided not to include the ‘lignified city’ on the Steam page, or reworked the Passions system, or cut the medicine mechanics, remind ’em that nothing we say before launch is a promise. We’re not crowdfunding. What you’re getting here is the equivalent of us talking enthusiastically in a coffee shop about our work that day. And the other side of that is that we’re always curious about what people think – what’s exciting them, what’s not working for them. Absolutely please do drop us an email or leave a comment if you have thoughts. This is half the reason we put this stuff out there. It might not change at all. But it might.
Some details, then, to start with!
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- We’ve moved away from the intentionally inchoate player-cipher of CS and BH. Instead you have a really specific character, who uses the name Spencer Hobson – a name some of you will recall from Cultist and Book. Everything I said at the bottom of this post remains true.
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- The art direction is determinedly non-realistic – about as far in the non-realistic direction you can go and still be plausibly CRPG. There’s always been a crackling gapful of possibilities between text and images. Lottie and I are enjoying finding ways to bridge the gap. Those overlays, for example, that you can see in the sceenshots. Or: I like putting people in the scene because you’re having a conversation about them, even when they’re not strictly present.
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- There won’t be a codex. There will however be footnotes. This isn’t Cultist, where the whole game was putting together the fragments. There’s ten years of context, and we need to ease the path for anyone who’s just starting out with the Secret Histories. We’re trying out something experimental here with footnotes, though.
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- A half dozen of the Hush House visitors – plus Nina, Medea, Christopher, Teresa, Giorgiou, Orsolina, Crooky, Kitling Ripe – are in talks about their schedules to see if they can make it into the game. Bunch of new faces too, obviously.
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- There are currently four Careers, sixteen Skills, and nine Passions to guide roleplaying and choose agendas. Plus Experiences, Memories and Signs. This should give you a general idea of the level of character customisation. It’s not Pathfinder, but it’s not Cultist Simulator either.
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- We’re looking at a production schedule of between two and four years depending on internal aurorae and external storms. It’ll be Windows/Mac/Linux as usual, it’ll be on Steam and GOG as usual. I would expect that we’ll do post-launch localisation as usual; we’ll talk about other platforms post-launch as usual, but I’d really like to launch on Steam Deck day 1 if we can. Alpha, beta, playtesting is all tbc.
- We’re working out a trans-European itinerary. You might visit the British Isles; you might make it was far as Moscow or Massachusetts. But this is mostly Europe by train. A different Europe; a Europe with holes in France through which you can see the stars, a Europe where there are Seglaz-bearers as well as Trümmerfrauen reducing the rubble mountains, a Europe where the rain doesn’t always fall the right way. But one of the keywords on the whiteboard is ‘hope’.
fuck yes take my money
Oh. my. goodness. I could not be more excited.
You have my money as soon as I know where to preorder the Perpetual Edition: you’re the only studio I trust with preorder these days.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m in.
I couldn’t be more excited! Guess it’s time to do another House of Light playthrough and really lock in a bunch of info to prepare 🙂
Really exciting news! I loved both CS and BoH, and through it all your narratives and world-building have been the best I have ever experienced in this medium. I think a CRPG will be the perfect way to experience this world, so I can’t wait to play it. Consider me seated at the front of the hype train, making choo-choo noises =).
I was already all in, but you mentioned Massachusetts, so that means I am required to buy 100 copies and leave just as many negative reviews if we don’t get at least a Boston mentions. /s
Can’t wait!
Holy $hit AK & BV, the screenshots on Steam are absolutely breathtaking. The idea of this kind of immersive Secret Histories experience sends a frisson of delight up my spine. I don’t recall how I initially ran across Cultist Simulator, but after that summer, I have been a die-hard WF acolyte and covetous merch hoarder. Book of Hours was a revelation; Travelling at Night looks like a revolution. Consider me all-in.
Yes, looking forward to buying it few hours after launch, just like its predecessor!
Good luck and I hope the development goes smoothly as possible, or at least as smoothly as these things can do when performing such a shuddering enterprise in a jagged world.
I look forward to it
Right before reading this, I woke up from a dream about reading a Borges novel…so I’m in an odd headspace reading this. But I’m excited! I’m excited about exploring this bizarre world, about creating interesting characters, about having some effect on the world, not necessarily in that order.
This was a lovely thing to wake up to albeit that the sky was awake and the birds talking loudly at 05:35. Yes I will wishlist and I am interested. Disco and Torment both know my name so I look forward to sharing stories with Travelling at night.
Very excited to see more going forward. Wondering how ‘The Affair of the Endless Guest’ may play into all of this, given the protagonist’s(?) name.
Really exciting! When I heard this game was gonna be named for a book from Cultist, I figured it’d be Traveling at Night or the Locksmith’s Dream, but I will admit that I was hoping it’d be Those Indignities Perpetrated By the Deceitful Fraternity of Obliviates lmao. so greatly looking forward to this game!
This sounds incredibly difficult, but I think you might just bring it off. 🙂 I love the idea of a game like this, and I’ve spent way too much time playing things like BG3, PoE, Tyranny, and probably lots more that I can’t remember right now. Weirdly, Disco Elysium didn’t do it for me, I think for a bit of a silly reason. My character walked so slowly I seemed to spend all my time going from one place to another, rather than doing actual gameplay things. Please don’t do that!
I think this is difficult because when you have an “encounter”, I imagine there will need to be lots of resolutions depending on the skills the player has built up. All those will have to be written. If you were writing a conventional CRPG, you would have to do more work up-front on the combat system, but then the encounters would be a matter of putting down some enemy NPCs and trying to keep them reasonably varied.
Will the game be open-world or more linear? If it’s open-world, you’ve got the extra problem that the NPCs mustn’t refer to the danger posed by the Whatsit Army when you’ve already defeated them.
I think you’ll find a way past all these things, though, and I’m really looking forward to playing the game when it’s done!
And here I was, hoping the third game would be named after “something something DEEP MYSTERIES something” 😞.
More seriously, I’m incredibly excited about that new game. Based on the breadcrumbs you previously left for us, I was wondering if it was going to be some kind of visual novel. I’m even more happy to know it’ll be a RPG.
The screenshots you posted on Steam look gorgeous, I really love the art direction so far. And of course, they only titillated my curiosity even more. It looks Rose is joining the eight other core principles. Maybe you could say more to us about that in the future?
Congratulations and best of luck on the new endeavor! It’s bittersweet for me, though, as I’ll probably never play it, despite being a huge fan since the Fallen London days (I remember changing my itinerary on a hike in Japan so that I would have cell service to keep burning my candles).
It’s entirely my own fault. As a trans person from a small and hostile town who wasn’t able to be honest with myself after decades of hostile media, I have always loved the medium of video games’ ability to allow me to be someone I was never able to even admit to myself I wanted to be and couldn’t be in real life. I have never been able to play a game that forces me to be a male character (and there are already so many of those out there) although I recognize they may be great games.
I have done some game dev work and a lot of QA for indie devs and recognize how features that may seem simple can be impossible, so I don’t really expect anything to change, but I do wonder if you’ve considered a defined female option as well. Either way, I’m sure the new game will be amazing whether I’m able to play it or not, and I hope you sell a million copies and make all the money you and your incredible team deserve. Best of luck!
Yeah, I
Pressed enter to confirm my details and it sent the comment early – what can you do!
I was going to say that yeah, I know that feeling – I’m a trans woman too, and it can feel like a whole body lock-up to even distantly consider putting that hat on again. One of my favourite parts of CS and BoH was being able to inhabit that “player-cipher” (as AK brilliantly put it) and colour their blank canvas with my own little imagined idiosyncrasies. For that reason some character flexibility, just in terms of their name or how they might look, does feel like it’d be a positive.
However, playing as an existing character, even a male one, wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be with Disco Elysium! it felt more like I was watching a show, where I could occasionally pull the strings and influence how things played out. I wasn’t Harry DuBois, even if I had some hand in deciding what he might do at any given point.
It doesn’t feel impossible for Spencer to have reinvented themselves, especially considering their temporary leave of absence – hell, our old pal Ysabet (from the exile DLC? Anyone remember her?) managed it, and she’s just your run-of-the-mill long! So idk, it could be on the table? But I know AK and lottie will have thought long and hard about this, and I’m willing to trust them in telling the story they want to tell. TaN is going to be different from CS and BoH, and maybe that’ll be very much for the best! I have no doubt that in order to experience the new wonders WF have in store we’ll have to let go of a few familiar comforts – but whether that’s worth it is always going to be a very personal decision <3
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I do really trust the devs to do things right, it’s my own personal problem and I know exactly how hard adding a female option can be when you’re trying to tell the specific story of a specific person in a video game. It’s just a little bittersweet and frustrating when there are already so many games where a male character is the default or only option to see some of my favorite devs choosing that route for their new game. I guess my only hope is the only way I’ve been able to play some of the games out there with a default male protag–modders! Here’s hoping! I always feel like giving players the option to mod your game can give it so much life beyond what it would have without. I guess a girl can dream, even if she can’t handle being forced to be Harry DuBois or Spencer Hobson.
I can’t decide if I am more happy you will take the time to make the game well or impatient because I don’t get to play it right now! It sounds like it is going to be amazing. I love the art style, and I am really happy you haven’t strayed into photo-realistic territory.
I just bought The Lady Afterwards at the Christmas market and hopefully I will have time to convert some friends to my Secret Histories cult* before Travelling At Night is launched. On that note, I kind of hope you will include some kind of multiplayer co-op. I don’t know how it would work, but having the ability to do custom scenarios in the world for friends (like you can in Neverwinter Nights) would be awesome.
*) I don’t actually have a cult, I do all my blood sacrifices to the Maid-in-the-Mirror alone. 😉
This looks absolutely wonderful! My mind is ablaze with possibilities and excitement for the game. I will be avidly following its development, and I hope you enjoy making it as much as I’m sure I’ll enjoy playing it. Wishlisted!
You know, depression hits pretty hard. But you know what slaps even harder? Yeah, another masterpiece from the world’s best indie developers. Sorry, black dog, but you sure as hell won’t get me before I get to play this one out.