Weather Factory

We’re now two weeks on from the release of the Travelling at Night demo on Steam. To Lottie’s and my immense relief, it’s gone really well. The response we’ve had is by far the most positive I’ve seen to the preview version of any game I’ve ever worked on, which is a bloody good thing because it’s also the most ambitious game Weather Factory has ever worked on.

More about that below. First, the demo launch experience expressed through the medium of graphs.

These are the builds we uploaded to Steam since the beginning of the month. Little ripple of release candidates pre-launch, followed by a torrent of hotfixes post-launch. Four patches on the day after launch! Then an update most days until, blessedly, we put out no builds at all over the weekend and won’t today.

All in, we got 1,200 bug reports and support requests since August 10th (for all our games, but the vast majority lately have been Travelling). To begin with, they were coming in faster than I could keep up, and the first thing I’d check when I woke was how they’d stacked up overnight. We fixed the typos, the narrative loops, the inventory bugs and the billion cases where Spencer bent a tree or a lamp-post into a Möbius-like sort-order-confusion knot, and the reports tailed off, just as the player numbers were also calming down post-launch, and this morning when i got up I only had one report.

“Player numbers calming down post-launch”. The second day was the peak. Demo numbers are always smaller than actual launch numbers – both Cultist and Book were about 3000 players immediately post-launch – so it was hard to guesstimate what we expected – but the Book demo topped out at 229, and we launched that during Next Fest, so that seemed a highball estimate. In fact, we topped out at 563 – 30,000 installs, about 20,000 actual players, and half of them played for at least an hour.

Total revenue at this point, to be clear, £0 so far; but PHEW people like the game!  They liked the art style, they liked the characters, they understood that the slightly wonky animations are a work in progress, and they wanted to know what happens next, which in a narrative game is the only thing anyone can really ask for. Our greatest fear is that if we got a ‘huh’ or a ‘meh’ we’d have to stop and retool the game, delaying release, and the overwhelming response has been ‘hurry up and release already’.

And people really liked the Footnotes! This was a particular relief to me. because provision of that much information through a labyrinth of links is a new vector for us. Inevitably and understandably, not everyone liked getting more information up front. Some do hanker for the teasing drip-feed of Cultist Simulator. But there was just no way we could drop a brand new player, someone who had no experience with the Secret Histories, into a rainy street in Antibes in medias res and expect them to work it out. Each Secret Histories game (including The Lady Afterwards) tries to cater to an audience that overlaps with the audience for the last one. Plenty of players liked both Cultist and Book, but for every two people who were relieved to be able to explore the Histories at their own pace in Book, there was one who found it a disappointment because they missed the challenge of Cultist. So it goes.

(But, those who yearn for scarcity and obscurity, don’t be too disappointed just yet. There is a lot of information on the surface. There is also a lot which will reward close and patient investigation of the intertextual and then non-specific. I was very pleased to see a couple of commenters clock Gene Wolfe as an inspiration.)

So what’s next?

We have a good slate of UI improvements coming. These include !! but are not limited to!!

• the crafting UI, which is still too confusing. Alls I can say is, you shoulda seen the original crafting UI. This is the third or fourth iteration of, probably, five or six iterations. We’ll get there.
• the dialogue interface, which is still a little bit stutterier and clutterier than we want. The typewriter effect for text, in particular, was the one thing that we really didn’t expect this much unhappiness about. We’ll either remove it altogether or make it a config option. Removing it altogether will be much easier, so if you feel you’d miss it, now is the time to sing out and make an argument for it.
• a clutch of accessibility and availability issues like supporting non-QWERTY keyboards. These are the kind of things that get pushed to the back of the queue, but now the demo is live, we have to sort them out. (I’m still embarrassed that I let the demo go public without adding a middle-mouse-button alternative for Mac and touchpad users.)
• what we refer to internally as the QUAD PROBLEM: a knot of four overlapping UI issues (what exactly is giving me these bonuses? what do the Trespass, Obscure, etc. Aspect locks mean? why did that thing get used up that I didn’t expect to get used up? and can I please see how many Francisques I have before I start spending them in dialogue?) which all need fixing but are hard to fix independently
• Increasing Skills and Passions: it’s intentional that you can’t increase them much in the demo, but I made a silly error that underestimated just how hard it would be to find the Experiences. I need to fix that, but I want to do it alongside a UI improvement
• the map. You only actually use it once in the demo, but there’s a particular issue with the contrast on the TRAVEL button that made three or four people think it was broken, and another particular issue where being locked into departure makes it looks like the whole game is broken. And it’s a showpiece that Lottie wants to buff up.

And then it’s back to building the other major destinations in the game. There are more than a dozen of those, but we have art and story for them all, so you’ll see those start to pop a lot sooner. And when I say ‘pop’, I mean that as each city is ready to receive visitors, we’ll be including them in the closed betas that we’ll continue to run, right the way up to release. If you’re interested, make sure you’ve signed up for pre-released testing – we’ll be releasing more keys later in the year. Watch the skies.