Today’s announcement is about Weather Factory's third game, which we can now unveil as Travelling at Night: a dialogue-driven choices-matter combat-free CRPG. We’ve been prototyping it since HOUSE OF LIGHT came out, the prototyping’s going great, and we’re keen to press ahead with it.

Here: a widget so you can wishlist it and find out a little more about it. Please tell everyone you think might be interested. Attention is our lifeblood and the more wishlists we get, the more confident we’ll be putting resources into it.

https://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/2915730/Travelling_at_Night/

Congrats to everyone who’d successfully guessed the name and/or genre from the teasers! You’ll all have noticed that the genre is a bit of a departure for us. What gives?

Well, I’ve been making narrative games for fifteen years but I’ve never made a traditional isometric CRPG. It’s a grand and grandly developed form, like opera. If you’re a composer – even if you’re Philip Glass and you’re trying to reinvent music – after fifteen years, you often eventually end up wanting to have a go at an opera.

I’m not trying to reinvent anything, although anyone who’s followed my previous work will know I’ve long skewed away from the mainstream approaches to games narrative. I designed Fallen London and Sunless Sea to use ‘storylets’ – bundles of resource-locked, resource-providing choices – because I was looking for a way to link nuggets of story loosely through resource-based narrative. (I originally called it ‘quality-based narrative’, after the term I used for resources in FL, but later I worried that sounded like I meant ‘quality narrative, not that other rubbish’.) It was a long step away from traditional branching narrative, and from dialogue trees.

Cultist Simulator took that idea further. All the ‘story’ in Cultist is presented through text fragments on cards, and as the output of recipes. There isn’t any distinction between the story and gameplay layers at all, and there’s nothing you could mistake for a dialogue tree. Book of Hours skews back in a slightly more traditional direction. There are descriptions of objects you can click on as you navigate an imagined space, and (especially with the extra Visitor stuff in the expansion) there’s some tens of thousands of words of dialogue. But it’s not much like CRPG dialogue, and the game isn’t a space that you scoot an avatar around. It’s still firmly in the experimental Weather Factory mode.

But Lottie and I like CRPGs. Torment exploded my view of what could be possible in narrative games, like a tiny anarchist in an architectural model. Some of you will also know that I did guest writing at Bioware and Telltale back in the day. Very few of you will know that I was also narrative consultant for a bit on a really promising and heavily NDA’d CRPG for a developer I admire and on a franchise I like. I had to turn down narrative lead, because I was busy making Cultist – I turned it down with considerable regret, followed by considerable relief when the game was later axed without ever being announced – but that sense of regret remains.

We like CRPGs, but we also like cost control. That’s one reason we stayed with the cards and slots. Making games on a strict budget means you don’t need a giant success to keep eating, and CRPGs are, as I said at the top, opera. Every game I’ve ever made has been an RPG of some kind, but ‘CRPG’ means a really specific set of expectations that tend to go together. However! One of Disco Elysium’s audacities was to show that you can throw out some of those expectations – like combat, or an array of NPC companions – and still make something that feels like a CRPG. Lottie and I have debated whether to use the phrase ‘discolike’, because ‘discolike’ comes with its own set of expectations, and we don’t want anyone thinking we’re pursuing that distinctive nihilistic funny sex’n’drugs’n’disco vibe. Still we did want to acknowledge our creative debt to the possibility DE opened up – the possibility of finding an audience for something CRPG-esque with really unorthodox creative choices.

To tie this up: there’s a kind of discipline I learnt from doing constrained resource-based game narrative that has already proven really useful on the CRPG work I’ve done. But this is still new territory. We’re going into it with enthusiasm and humility, and we’re taking our time.

***

As with our other projects, we’re happy to start talking about Travelling at Night early. It’s one of the micro-indie’s few advantages, that we can practice open development because we don’t need to worry about stealth mode or share prices. So watch this space for updates. But please always, always bear in mind that this is open development, not an investor prospectus. As an indie, when you talk about something you’re working on, and it doesn’t get into the final game (because you changed your mind; because it didn’t work; because you didn’t have budget) then there’s sometimes some grumpiness from players who get overexcited about ‘broken promises’. Honestly our community is more chill and more mature than many, and we rarely get any of this stuff, but it does still make us a little nervous when we reveal what we’re working on.

So if you see anyone getting worked up because we decided not to include the ‘lignified city’ on the Steam page, or reworked the Passions system, or cut the medicine mechanics, remind ’em that nothing we say before launch is a promise. We’re not crowdfunding. What you’re getting here is the equivalent of us talking enthusiastically in a coffee shop about our work that day. And the other side of that is that we’re always curious about what people think – what’s exciting them, what’s not working for them. Absolutely please do drop us an email or leave a comment if you have thoughts. This is half the reason we put this stuff out there. It might not change at all. But it might.

Some details, then, to start with!

• We’ve moved away from the intentionally inchoate player-cipher of CS and BH. Instead you have a really specific character, who uses the name Spencer Hobson – a name some of you will recall from Cultist and Book. Everything I said at the bottom of this post remains true.
  
  
• The art direction is determinedly non-realistic – about as far in the non-realistic direction you can go and still be plausibly CRPG. There’s always been a crackling gapful of possibilities between text and images. Lottie and I are enjoying finding ways to bridge the gap. Those overlays, for example, that you can see in the sceenshots. Or: I like putting people in the scene because you’re having a conversation about them, even when they’re not strictly present.
  
  
• There won’t be a codex. There will however be footnotes. This isn’t Cultist, where the whole game was putting together the fragments. There’s ten years of context, and we need to ease the path for anyone who’s just starting out with the Secret Histories. We’re trying out something experimental here with footnotes, though.
  
  
• A half dozen of the Hush House visitors – plus Nina, Medea, Christopher, Teresa, Giorgiou, Orsolina, Crooky, Kitling Ripe – are in talks about their schedules to see if they can make it into the game. Bunch of new faces too, obviously.
  
  
• There are currently four Careers, sixteen Skills, and nine Passions to guide roleplaying and choose agendas. Plus Experiences, Memories and Signs. This should give you a general idea of the level of character customisation. It’s not Pathfinder, but it’s not Cultist Simulator either.
  
  
• We’re looking at a production schedule of between two and four years depending on internal aurorae and external storms. It’ll be Windows/Mac/Linux as usual, it’ll be on Steam and GOG as usual. I would expect that we’ll do post-launch localisation as usual; we’ll talk about other platforms post-launch as usual, but I’d really like to launch on Steam Deck day 1 if we can. Alpha, beta, playtesting is all tbc.
  
  
• We’re working out a trans-European itinerary. You might visit the British Isles; you might make it was far as Moscow or Massachusetts. But this is mostly Europe by train. A different Europe; a Europe with holes in France through which you can see the stars, a Europe where there are Seglaz-bearers as well as Trümmerfrauen reducing the rubble mountains, a Europe where the rain doesn’t always fall the right way. But one of the keywords on the whiteboard is ‘hope’.