The Making Of...
How the makers of Fallen London sailed far beyond the sea
How Failbetter Games sailed far beyond the sea with star-faring simulator Sunless Skies
Format PC Developer/publisher Failbetter GamesOrigin UK Release 2019
The British empire never made it beyond the atmosphere, but in a way, its history is one of space conquest. Lacking landmarks, 19th-century sailors navigated using the stars. To map the heavens was thus to help expand Britain’s reach as a naval power. Victorian British ideas about outer space were also shaped by the experience of colonising other lands. “They didn’t know about the vacuum – they didn’t have any concept of what that means,” Failbetter artist Tobias Cook reflects. “They thought about outer space in terms of how they thought about other frontiers.” A game about what an astral British empire might look like, if astrophysics itself were reimagined along Victorian lines, Sunless Skies magnifies those frontier daydreams, then holds them up to a carnival mirror. “So much of the world is Victorian interpretations of X or Y, and how we could reflect and distort that,” Cook says. “Play on the naïveté, while introducing a substantial dose of horror.”
Like its predecessor, 2015’s Sunless Sea, Skies is a top-down naval simulator featuring procedural map generation, with key locations shuffled around every time your doughty starfaring locomotive succumbs to the abyss. Before it entered Steam Early Access in 2017, the procedural generation was much more comprehensive: it applied to every interactive object, be it a lonely asteroid homestead or a bustling port. This randomness was more in tune with the directionless void that rouses such terror in the game’s 800,000-word script, but it also made for a less engaging world. “It was enormously challenging to make areas feel contiguous,” Cook says. “They might all be supposed to share a style according to the text, but on the outside, it was difficult to marry them together, because they were literally floating in space. Which makes sense, of course, but it didn’t make for very interesting visuals. I think it’s the sort of thing that works better in 3D where you can see distant objects, but in 2D the emptiness was a lot more oppressive.”
Failbetter eventually discarded the procgen system in favour of a world of semi-randomly linked segments, whose contents were arranged by hand. “It meant there was a loss of freedom for players but it led to a much more authored experience, where we could better anticipate the player’s path and design according to that,” Cook tells us. “And it also changed what we could do with the visuals enormously. It was the difference between designing a void, and designing a house. As soon as we had hallways and passages, [together with] sea metaphors like peninsulas and islands, it allowed us to build much more densely, and made it easier to create a more believable, consistent space.” The game’s user interface, effects and animation suite
STARTING IN THE REACH FURTHERS THE GAME’S CRITIQUE OF IMPERIALISM BY TURNING LONDON INTO AN ALIEN PLACE
were similarly reworked before final release in January 2019. “I think of Skies as quite an old-school early-access game, in that a lot was changed. If you compare it with the final launch… I’m biased, but it’s night and day to me.”
In particular, Sunless Skies evolved around the interplay between two regions of the world. One is Albion, the smoggy, industrial heart of Britain’s celestial dominions. The other is the Reach, a fermenting, fungal cocktail of Victorian hinterlands, from the Arctic through the tropics to the plains of North America. Failbetter pivoted between these during early access. “Originally our plan was to start in London, like Sunless Sea,” head writer Chris Gardiner recalls. “And then Adam Myers, our CEO, suggested moving the player’s starting location to the Reach, for a couple of reasons. One was that the Reach is a more familiar environment for gamers – it feels like Elite, with lots of wilderness and bastions of civilisation that you’re travelling between. It also gave us more time to work on the look of Albion, which was demanding.” Starting in the Reach also furthers the game’s critique of imperialism by turning London into an alien place. “It doesn’t feel like home – it feels strange to you, which helped us with this theme of interrogating empire.”
Each region aims to evoke a different kind of horror. Albion is about the squalor and despair wrought by the industrial revolution; here, you’ll find engineers turned to glass after labouring for too long in the light of a Clockwork Sun. The Reach is about not being in control of your own flesh. “‘Corruption’ isn’t quite the right word, but it’s the horror of your person starting to break down,” Gardiner says. “In the Reach, you can get infected by spores that make you think things.” Beyond the Reach lies Eleutheria, a manifestation of Victorian Britain’s fascination with, and dread of, Greek mythology, with London’s Orientalised arch-rival, the Khanate, lurking somewhere on the rim. Last to be added is the Blue Kingdom, a realm of funereal stone – and malevolent paperwork. “We wanted that to be about the horror of bureaucracy,” Gardiner says. “Bureaucracy entering into areas we consider sacrosanct from it, like death.”
Besides different veins of horror, each Sunless Skies region is a meditation on a particular facet of imperial culture and ideology. The Reach explores how empires dictate the very categories of knowledge, justifying their predations by classing those they trample as lesser. “There are vast fungal intelligences in the Reach, and certain storylines interact with them, brush up against them, but the empire doesn’t even recognise them as entities they should deal with or respect,” Gardiner says. The Blue Kingdom, meanwhile, includes stories about how empires may fall to a cultural invasion. “There’s a story where the Kingdom sends a mission to the Reach with the intention of colonising Albion. But the Blue Kingdom colonises via philosophy and aesthetics – they establish a colony and spread their viewpoints to artists and writers and thinkers.”
If these places are unnerving they are also mesmerising, made up of shifting layers of terrain that stretch above and below the field of play. In Eleutheria, moonlight flares the contours of a sunken cloudscape. In parts of the Reach, giant beehives bulge from catacombs of fern and soggy bark. “It’s sort of this soup of phobias,”
Cook says of the art direction. “We’re a particular enemy to trypophobes.” The game’s 2D parallax techniques are “fairly traditional”, he adds: to summarise, objects are sorted into folders according to their height within the world, and manipulated programmatically to suggest 3D depth. This may sound straightforward next to creating a ‘true’ 3D engine, but complications arose often during development when editing regions or moving objects between areas.
“With our specific approach, it requires you to use quite complex hierarchies to keep all those hundreds of layers ordered and moving in concert correctly,” Cook explains. “This can be helpful for organisation and produces reliable results, but it’s time-consuming keeping everything structured correctly, and can also be more difficult to edit. If you work in ‘true’ 3D space, that hierarchy isn’t necessary because you control depth by literally moving the object deeper in the scene, but that approach has its own complications, primarily because of the way 2D orthographic cameras work.” As Sunless Skies travelled through early access, Failbetter found its parallax techniques weren’t quite a match for its ambitions. “The tools we developed right at the start of early access allowed for seven layers, off the top of my head. If we wanted more layers we had to break things. In a very structurally sound way, obviously! But there was a lot of bending of the rules for the earlyaccess technology to execute what we wanted.”
While Failbetter’s artists and programmers were embroiled in such challenges, Gardiner and the writers were trying to find a balance between capturing Victorian prejudices and empowering players regardless of their race, sexuality or gender identity. “The society we depict is probably a lot more accepting of different genders and races than is historically accurate,” Gardiner concedes. “But then again, it’s common to underestimate the presence of marginalised people, because they are marginalised! And also we are making this game for a modern audience, and it’s important to us that everybody feels welcome playing it.”
Where the developer felt unable to do this balance justice, it brought in experts – among them Meg Jayanth, writer of the interactive anticolonial travelogue 80 Days. “A key question from that consultation was: who is paying for this?” Gardiner says. “Because empires are good at justifying abhorrence, and they are good at distributing responsibility. The British empire could hide the cost of its colonisation of India, because
India was far away. So whenever we were coming up with some sci-fi idea related to empire, we would ask, who is paying for this? And the answer is: hardly ever the people at the top.”
For its representation of trans and non-binary characters, Failbetter referred to an advisory panel convened by the consultancy Queerly Represent Me. “We wanted a matter-of-fact presentation of marginalised genders. That had two elements to it. One, their character stories didn’t have to be 100 per cent about their gender – their gender could be a minor element or it could be completely incidental. But also it meant that their gender had to be clear, because this was something we’d struggled with before. It can be very hard to be clear that somebody is of a marginalised gender, without being gauche and clumsy.”
Among the prominent non-binary characters is the Incautious Driver, an officer you can recruit early on whose mind is being overtaken by a sentient fungus. “One thing the consultant wanted us to be very clear about is, we didn’t want to suggest that their fungal infection is what made them nonbinary,” Gardiner recalls. “They were always nonbinary – the infection was this whole other thing. They suggested a scene where you see their childhood doctor’s notes, and it makes clear on there that they’ve always been a “they”. But we also didn’t want it to be like sneaking a look at their notes, because that’s disempowering. So there’s a scene where they ask you to go with them to the doctor, and they ask you to fill out some paperwork for them, and there’s a line about the field for gender being ‘straightforwardly crossed out’. That all came out of the consultation.”
One of the ironies of Sunless Skies is that the game itself reflects the colonisation of British culture by its former colony, the United States. Many of the jokes about British manners are for the benefit of Americans, who make up the larger share of Failbetter’s fanbase (Americans feature in the game too – one of the Reach’s storylines is essentially a retelling of the War of Independence). “We play up certain bits for that audience,” Gardiner admits. “Like tea! There’s a lot of talk about tea in Sunless Skies. That is a thing that we joke about in Britain, but it’s something other nations joke about more than we do.”
Lest this sound calculating, many stories in Sunless Skies have roots in the developers’ private lives. Take the Fatalistic Signalman, a grizzled officer whose dearest friend is the ancient locomotive he once served on. “There’s a bunch of workshop scenes where hobbyists maintain old engines, purely out of love and nostalgia. All that stuff is taken completely from my childhood – my dad was part of a society that looked after, restored and documented a specific class of locomotive.” Moments like these add warmth to the game’s withering portrayal of jingoistic hubris; they are the points of light that guide you through its brutal cosmos. “There’s a strong strand of nostalgia in Britishness, and sometimes that manifests as harkening back to days of empire, and sometimes it’s smaller and more specific,” Gardiner says. “It’s preserving traditions like older types of train. Or morris dancing.”