PCPP Interview: Sunless Skies
The creators of Sunless Sea are flushed with success from their latest Kickstarter campaign. We talk to Failbetter Games CEO PAUL ARENDT about how Sunless Skies will combine text and graphics into a spicy melange gamers have never tasted before...
Paul Arendt is the CEO and art director at Failbetter Games, the UK indie studio behind the cult hit Sunless Sea, a roguelike game of subterranean naval exploration. In the sequel players will clamber aboard a train-like Victorian spaceship and wander amongst unknown stars. The setting, the Fallen London universe, is Lovecraftian, whimsical, and very, very odd. So much so that when we recently had a chance to chat with Paul he almost struggled to define what his new game was all about – he found it much easier to describe what it isn’t.
“What it isn’t at all is what you might call Stanley Kubrick space. Physics is much more relaxed [ laughs]. You can breathe out there, briefly. You can stay alive for about a quarter of an hour before the cold will kill you. The stars are, in fact, alive and sentient. And major power players in that area. It’s very much not lasers and Lagrange Points and gravity and so on.”
A fusion of top-down exploration and choose-your-own-adventure text encounters, Sunless Sea generated a lot of feedback, all of which Paul absorbed when conceiving the sequel. “First of all, I think people were all very keen on the story-telling. And the way we give people the chance to inhabit the world in their own way, and to uncover stories at their own pace. And I think the roguelike elements of the game, whereby death was permanent unless you turned on a sort of Merciful Mode, had a double effect. On one level it made decisions feel like they had real consequence. It made the game very frightening, particularly when you were lost and far away from home with very little health. And there was just generally a sense of peril, of threat, of loneliness, of anymoment-could-be-your-last.
“So that was great. We wanted to keep all that. But at the same time, particularly as you start getting into the late game, the fact that dying causes you to restart also meant that you were replaying a lot of content. And this is the tricky thing about trying to blend roguelike mechanics with story games. You tend to be playing the story again. And occasionally it’s a bit strange, because we have a legacy system whereby you might be playing your own son or daughter. But seeing the same characters, and those characters not necessarily acknowledging that you are a new person. So that was one of the key bits of feedback for us. Trying to square the circle of providing that sense of threat and danger, but without having to make people repeat content all the time.”
Paul’s team is attacking this problem from several angles. “In Sunless Sea, Fallen London was basically the only port where you could do a large number of things, where you could fix your vessel, where you could buy a lot of products, where you could talk to a lot of your contacts. So that meant that essentially every trip had the same loop, where you head out into the unknown and then you’ve got to make it all the way back home. In Sunless Skies, we’re not really working like that. We have a number of major ports, all of which will sort of perform the same function. The idea is that the player experience is more about heading outwards into the unknown, stopping off, and then exploring a new area. You’re more nomadic.”
This ties in with a new system to prevent replaying early game content excessively. “Once you hit a major port, your progress on major stories up to that point is fixed. So if you’ve made a big decision just before arriving at this port, and then you head out, and then you die, then your successor, be they your child or your inheritor or whatever, is also going to have to live with that decision. That world state is unchanged. But everything you’ve yet to discover is shuffled around, and subject to some procedural generation choices. That means that heading out anew will be different each time. It’s a refinement of the system.”
Paul didn’t want to give too much away about the space oddities that players will encounter, but he did frame the Sunless Skies experience in terms of culture clash. “One of the big conflicts in the game is the conflict between that go-getting, can-do Victorian Empire and the wild, untamed alien wilderness that they are trying to colonise. As the Victorians inevitably did. But this is an environment that’s fighting back.”
One of these factions is called the Scribe Spinsters: essentially flying wooden librarians. “They wear dresses made from lost pages of the books they were trying to protect. So they’ll be flying around, causing trouble for you.”
Just to make things even more complicated, Paul told us that Sunless Skies is but one possible future of Fallen London, rather than the canon future. “The whole story how Fallen London ended up under London, whether other cities ended up there as well, whether they continued their existence on the surface, is an enormous ball of lore and secrets that we could spend all afternoon talking about.”
Failbetter are also upgrading their graphics technology to better hint at the lurking horrors writhing in the void beyond human space. “While the action takes place
the experience is more about heading outwards into the unknown, stopping off, and then exploring a new area
on a 2D plane as before, we do have some parallax scrolling technology that allows us to do a lot more depth. In addition to the monsters you’ll fight on the surface, I’m rather hoping that we’ll have some giant, roiling, tentacle-y mushroom-y monsters way down there in the depths below.”
The ship-to-ship combat in Sunless Sea was completely overhauled during development, and even then Paul wasn’t 100% happy with it. With Sunless Skies his team is trying a new tack. “One of the key differences, I think, for me, is that with a sea ship you have very strong limits on manoeuvrability. They go forwards, they go backwards. They turn. Slowly. And a lot of what makes combat interesting and satisfying for me is the idea of avoidance. And the idea of strategical positioning. Obviously, now we’re in space, we’re not bound by those constraints. So we can potentially have strafing, and quite sharp and nippy manoeuvring, more interesting placement, and so on.”
They’ve already done an enormous amount of prototyping for the space combat system. “We’re not interested in making a fast-paced shoot-em-up. So our hope for it is that it will be direct fire-based, with an element of skill and strategy in the positioning. But still quite measured. And the other half of that is balancing rewards so that the decision about whether to enter combat – the risk versus reward decision – is a consistently interesting one.”
Another core feature that will be evolving in this sequel is the concept of ‘text as a reward.’ “One of the things we’re experimenting with at the moment is bringing incidental messages, log book messages, in to the game world. Because this is the sort of visual imagery that we’ve tried before on trailers and was very successful. And we thought it would be wonderful if you could be sailing around in this space and have the words of your log book appear in the same space as your ship, as you’re sailing around it. We’re just looking at all sorts of ways of bringing text and imagery together.”
One aspect of Sunless Sea that truly surprised Paul was the terrifying power of words and pictures acting in concert. “There’s an enemy in Sunless Sea called Mount Nomad, which is essentially a sort of floating mountain. And the actual asset, the piece of art for that, is maybe 100 pixels high. Maybe 200 at most. It’s a little bit larger than the player ship. And I always felt at the time: ‘It’s just not impressive enough. People aren’t going to be scared by this.’ But actually, because of the way it behaved, and because of the way it was set up in the story, players looked straight past that, and into their imaginations, and saw this terrifying thing, and Mount Nomad became this terrible nemesis. We got loads of fan art about it on the Steam page.
“That taught me that words and pictures reinforce each other in ways that are often really unexpected. If you limit, to an extent, a player’s access to visual information, and you fill in those blanks with words, then they will do a lot of incredible imaginative work for you. Finding the balance between actually showing something and only hinting at it is this incredible fruitful area to play in.”
Sunless Skies is due to enter early access this August, and is due to launch in May 2018. You can find more details at failbettergames.com. JAMES COTTEE