With the release of the City in Silver, we have finally closed the chapter on the Railway storyline. The Feast of the Rose approaches, and you are probably waiting to hear what’s coming next.

But Janus’ month is a good time to look both forward and backwards. So more than a simple roadmap blog, I want to look at how we did last year – and set some goals for the future.

Looking back

2023 was an eventful year; we tried to accomplish a lot, and I think we did. Here’s a few of the specific goals we had in mind last year.

Conclude both Evolution and the Railway in a satisfying fashion

One of the points of feedback we got at the (original) end of the Railway story was that Marigold didn’t feel big or significant enough – we scoped it at the same size as a normal railway station, and players inherently felt like the end to such a major storyline should have more heft to it.

When we were planning the Zeefarer cycle and the storyline that would become Evolution, we took this into account and scoped for a ‘capstone location’ – a bigger, splashier addition to the game than an ordinary railway station or zee port. For Evolution, this ended up being Irem; for the Railway, the tracklayers’ city grew in scope (massively!) to take on this role.

I think both versions of this have been a success, with a ton of positive feedback from the players. They reflect their writers – Irem is cryptic, distant, absurd, and more than a little cruel; the City in Silver is drenched in amazing attention to detail.

It’ll be quite some time before we do something like this again – we don’t expect to get to that point of the next major storyline in 2024 – but when we do, we do hope to integrate the ending of the story more closely to the location than we did with Irem; and we hope to keep both the scope and the schedule better in hand than we did with the City in Silver.

And yes, I’m including City in Silver in this retrospective of 2023. We finished it last year, it just had to have its ship date moved up a few weeks. It totally counts.

Keep up Estival

Estival is a yearly challenge we’ve set ourselves, and so it’s a yearly point of attention. There’s dozens of things we have to keep up every year (all the other festivals, the monthly Exceptional Story) but Estival is the only thing that’s fixed in the year and also has to be completely reinvented each time.

I feel like we’ve done pretty well all three years we’ve done this. Estival 2023 was a definite success, but one that comes with a lot of lessons to carry into next year – I’ll talk about it when I get to goal-setting for 2024.

Improve the new player experience

This is something many of you never saw: over the course of 2023, we made several changes and additions to the early game, tweaking and adjusting various elements of the early Making Your Name tracks.

It’s very hard to really track the effect something like this has quantitatively, but we’ve seen a good amount of qualitative feedback that this has worked out well – it’s easier to get into Fallen London, which means the game is healthier, which means we get to do more cool stuff. These sorts of improvements are as important as anything we do.

Goals for 2024

Here’s what we are focusing on for this year. Please remember: a goal is not a promise. We try to only promise things that we are very certain we will deliver. Here, though, I’m trying to set a bar to measure how we do next year – and that carries the possibility that we might miss, or change plans, or rethink what we’re doing.

Introduce (and land) a new major storyline

I’m going to leave you all hanging for a bit longer on what exactly this is and what it’s about. On one level it’s exactly what a lot of you expect. On another it’s nothing like what you expect. I’m looking forward to revealing more, in due time.

Reinvent Estival, again

While last year’s Estival was successful, we think the formula we’ve established for the first three Estivals is something we can’t keep up as-is. There’s a degree of ‘apocalypse fatigue’ setting in for these kinds of stories. So, Estival in 2024 has to find some new ideas.

I think Estival will always be a festival built around player participation, an unfolding story, and you-had-to-be-there moments. But the exact shape of that, and the themes we’re exploring, can definitely shift and change. We want Estival to stay surprising, and so it has to keep changing.

Continue improving the early game

And into the midgame. We want to keep improving the Making Your Name tracks, generally making sure that players going through this progression aren’t stuck grinding for long periods of time and that the length of time it takes to get to the content boundary isn’t unreasonable.

Fallen London is built around being a real-time game that you play over the course of weeks and months; we have to exist in that space. But we want to make the game friendlier to players who might have just created an account because they heard about the wild new things that are being added to the game now.

We’ve already shipped some adjustments to Heists and Casing aimed at making that section smoother when players first encounter it; other areas we plan to look at include the University, Forgotten Quarter Expeditions, and Mahogany Hall (among others).

Refocus the street level

Which is to say, find some more space to tell more grounded stories set in London. The monthly Exceptional Story is often a venue for this, but it is of course not available to all players, and I’ve wanted to find a bit more space for this type of storytelling in the game. Fallen London has spiralled far afield from the types of stories you encounter in the early game, and I don’t think we want to stop exploring the outer reaches of the setting – but it’s a bit out of balance at the moment.

There are specific plans for this, but they are as-of-yet a secret.

Expand the game’s mechanical space further

Fallen London has a bottomless appetite for new ideas: new stories, new places, new mysteries. And as we add to the game, those new additions come with new mechanical elements – wheels, items, economies, events. For this to be sustainable we need to keep giving ourselves tools to make additions to the game.

Last year, we introduced features like Boon and Burden slots, which are a really useful expansion of what we can do. This year, we want to continue this work. It’s still way too soon to talk about any of our plans in detail, but I wanted to call this out as part of goal-setting.

What’s coming in February and March

Much of what’s coming in 2024 is still unformed, and not ready to be talked about in detail. But we do have a couple of things to announce.

February: the Feast of the Exceptional Rose

The yearly festival of masks and romance begins right on February 1st. The main festival runs for two weeks, through February 15th; after that, there’s another week to spend any remaining Masquing, until February 22nd.

As usual, there are new companions to collect, but we’ve also added a couple small extras.

One you already were expecting: the ability to gain a Destiny, or change your Destiny, during the Feast of the Rose. This helps balance those opportunities out throughout the year, so there’s no longer a six-month wait between the end of Christmas and the Fruits of the Zee festival.

I wrote the Gates of the Rose myself, and I hope you’ll enjoy them. You can find this opportunity in the main Feast of the Rose opportunity card, which can be drawn in London during the festival.

The other small extra… well, read to the end of this post.

March: A new World Event, and another roadmap

We don’t want to keep adding World Events so often that players don’t get a chance to experience the existing ones – especially popular events like the Midnight Whale. But every so often, it’s time to introduce a new one.

This one is still in the oven. Sometime after it, still in March, we expect to have another roadmap – with more solid details on our future plans, the next major storyline, and more.

One more thing…

A long time ago, as one of the rewards for the Sunless Sea kickstarter, we added the Parabolan Panther to the game. The Panther is a companion with the notable ability to breed litters of Parabolan Kittens – which then can be given away to your in-game acquaintances.

That Kickstarter was a several years ago; players come and go, and the breeding population of Parabolan Panthers is, nowadays, rather limited. Plenty of players have a kitten, but if you want one, you have to track down one of a handful of long-time fans who have a panther.

So, today we’re adding a new short Fate story to the game; you can now grow your Parabolan Kitten into a full-fledged Parabolan Panther, complete with the ability to give you more kittens… so more people can know the joy (?) of having the apex predator of the Viric jungle as a house pet.

Starting with this year’s Feast of the Rose, you’ll also be able to give away Lovingly Be-Ribboned Kittens to your acquaintances, lovers, crushes, paramours and mortal enemies. Hence why we’re launching this today, a week ahead of the Feast – we want to give players a little extra time to raise their existing Kittens before the event starts.

We hope you’ll enjoy this little early Feast gift. If you have a Parabolan Kitten, you can start this story for 20 Fate by using the Kitten in your inventory.