News

We are genuinely delighted that our fun idea for a port which grew as we received more backers to the Sunless Skies Kickstarter has come to fruition. Here is the complete breakdown of everything unlocked for the port through your support. Thank you! Part I: The Royal Society The once-moribund Royal Society of inventors, explorers, […]

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF) was announced last month as the first-ever nonprofit to support the success and growth of all forms of interactive fiction — text adventures, choice-based games, visual novels, and more. The IF scene is close to our hearts, and our founder emeritus Alexis Kennedy is an advisory board member. We spoke […]

Olivia Wood is editor at Failbetter Games. She’s on twitter here: @babelfishwars I’m very new to the games industry. My role perhaps only exists because of the very particular nature of Failbetter’s games and my refusal to take “No, of course we don’t need an editor. No, seriously. Stop making that noise.” for an answer. […]

Chris is Head Writer at Failbetter Games. You can follow him on Twitter at @CHGardiner. Last year, after decades of scheming and the imaginative murder of countless rivals, I became Head Writer at Failbetter Games. That means I manage our in-house content team and our cabal of freelancers. We create the stories for Sunless Sea, […]

Cash DeCuir is a writer for Failbetter Games. You can follow him on Twitter @CashDeCuir. Not long after graduating from college, I applied to be a writer at Failbetter Games. I’ve been working with the company for nearly a year, and I’ve learned a great deal in that time. Though I can only share five […]

Over the years, we’ve published a great deal of information on writing for interactive fiction. Some of the posts are pretty old – and our thinking has moved on. But it’s interesting to see how our thoughts have evolved – and there’s stuff to be gleaned even from the earliest posts. I’ve collated the most-relevant […]

This final post sharing the Failbetter writers’ guide discusses writing prose for Fallen London. This guidance helps establish a consistent tone and quality, and discusses particular techniques we’ve learned to favour or avoid. Previous posts on this theme are here: Writer Guidelines (internal process for pitching and creating content) and Designing for Fallen London. Writing for […]

In the previous post we shared the guidelines for the pitching and writing in-game content. This time, we’re sharing best-practice guidelines for designing for Fallen London. This is an evolving process. We’ve learned a lot in the six years since Fallen London’s inception, and no doubt we’ll continue to adapt and improve these practices in […]

Two new writers will soon be joining Failbetter, so we’ve taken the opportunity to update and formalise our internal writing guidelines. We felt they might be useful for those with an interest in narrative design, so are sharing them in a short series of blogs. Below are our internal guidelines for pitching and creating content. […]

Romantic narrative in games is often criticised for being superficial, with a short narrative arc that’s mostly about sex. But some romances are superficial, and mostly about sex. They can still be used to explore character – and to provide more underpinning for the SUNLESS SEA theme I talked about here and here, that of […]