Today sees another content release, with a big pile of changes and enhancements to the economy. This is the next step in a long-term plan, and I wanted to talk a bit about what we're up to.
Nearly three years ago I sat down at the PC in my spare room and started writing and coding Echo Bazaar. I can't emphasise enough what an experimental process that was. I'd taken a few months unpaid holiday from my day job to try to get it up and running (a month of which was already blocked out for paternity leave). I made it up as I went along, but I had long-term plans. I even had a spreadsheet calculating likely player progress at five different levels of engagement (from 'flirting' to 'probably a bot'). A lot of assumptions turned out wrong (more on that in another post) but the most naive thing was, I did projections for a year... on the basis that we'd never do content that ran more than a year. That would just be crazy. I thought. But the tale, as it always does, grew in the telling, and almost three years on we're still probably only two-thirds of the way to the end. So we've had to adapt the fundamentals as we go.
From the beginning, it wasn't about the economy, it was about the story. But the big lesson we learnt: you can't just dip your toe, economy-wise. Either it's a feature or it's not. If some stories require items, either those items are trivial to get or they take time and effort. If they take time and effort, people care about the details, and it's no longer just about the story.

I wanted asymmetry and texture, not just a few resources: I wanted people to be able to go, 'ooh, this storylet needs 50 Cryptic Clues, I have those, cool!' 'This storylet gave me a Radical Okapi, oh I haven't seen one of those!' So we scattered a variety of resources around a variety of places. Of course as any long-term player of Echo Bazaar knows, this threw up all kinds of other problems.

You don't know where to find that Radical Okapi when you really need one. A secondary issue is that when you've got one, you don't know whether to sell it because you need the cash, or hang on to it because you'll never see one again. The Bazaar is an exchange of last resort, of course. But if you could buy anything at the Bazaar, then every resource is the same as any other resource (although you'd always pay a sort of tax if we kept the difference between buy and sell prices).
Getting good value is fiddly. A storylet that gave you twenty Whispered Secrets a few months back feels like poor value when your highway qualities (Shadowy, Dangerous, Persuasive, Watchful) are all north of a hundred. So there's generally a pressure to find better-value ways of getting it.

Different players have different levels of engagement. Some players haunt and update wikis and take a keen interest in where to get a Radical Okapi most quickly... but a lot of players are much more casual. So if things are easy to find, it's not interesting for the economic enthusiasts, if they're hard to find, it turns off the people who are only here for the story.Our old friend the 'grind'. We need to pace story to stop everyone eating it all at once, and the traditional way to pace this stuff has been by requiring players to repeat the same action loads of times. In the medium term we have some quite radical solutions for this, but in the meantime we're gently tweaking the game to introduce more variety into the regular routine.These issues have built up over time, and changing the dynamics in a game the size of EBZ without breaking things is like trying to turn an oil tanker around in a multi-storey car-park... but we decided it was worth the effort. The current economy revamp is a move to address this. We're at about step three in an eight-part plan, and we'll change it and develop as we go. Here's what's happening today.

Nearly all the items in the new Inventory categories - Wild Words, Luminosity and so on - are now usable. That's about fifty items in all. You can now buy materials from the Bazaar and create most of the items in these lines. If you haven't experimented with these yet, it works like this: with the right connections, you can trade large quantities of cheaper items to get small quantities of rarer items, until you reach the rarest wines or the deadliest secrets.

The lines cross in some places, too, so eventually you can trade your huge cache of Whispered Secrets across to become Cellars of Wine. You'll often be able to find better ways to get them - maybe you'll happen across an opportunity that gives you access to a sudden bounty of Romantic Notions - but you won't be dependent on these ways.

And, because we're Failbetter, every one of these possible trades is its own storylet, with rare successes and other oddities, and every one of the categories teases or reveals secrets from the Neath's gigantic backstory. I think we're probably the first game ever to offer a crafting system which runs on characters and dialogue. We'll be adding more branches and variety and longer-term stories to item use; in the longest term, I would like most of the items in the game to be usable in some way.

We're adding availability information to quality tooltips, so when you see that Radical Okapi lock icon you can mouse over it and see 'You can breed Radical Okapis in the Hidden Coil of the Labyrinth of Tigers.' This means that detailed knowledge of the game world is still useful for finding unusual sources, but everyone has a clear and simple guide. We'll keep adding this to more qualities as we go.

We're tweaking requirements and rewards. Lots of these have changed, to introduce more texture, or make it easier to find better value. We'll continue to adjust as we go.

We're reducing costs in the Bazaar Sidestreets. The requirements are a bit more varied than they used to be, so you might need to cast around to find the materials, but it'll cost you fewer actions overall.

We're adding variable action costs. We're tweaking carefully, but it means that some choices will have bigger rewards and bigger costs, so you just need to click the button once. You'll also notice that a few actions, like drinking Darkdrop Coffee, are now free.

This isn't the end! There are many more changes to structure and mechanics coming, and, of course, story content that we're itching to release. As ever, we do want to hear your feedback - we're releasing the changes incrementally so we can monitor and adjust as we go.

Thanks for all your enthusiasm, folks. This is a grand experiment, and we're glad you're part of it.