Danny: 00:00 Welcome pawns, spirits, cultists, ancient horrors, one and all to the Titans of Text podcast. We are your hosts, Danny Austerity Nissenfeld Eric: 00:08 and Eric Oestrich Danny: 00:11 and we have with us today the incomparable Alexis Kennedy, who is the co-founder of Failbetter games, the studio behind Fallen London and the Sunless sea and Skies series as well as the co-founder of Weather Factory, the team behind Cultist Simulator and the upcoming Book of Hours. This is the promised departure for us at the Titans from text only games into, well, text mostly games. We're going to delve into his journey with narrative driven games and the intricacies of maintaining a strong narrative element within a modern game. Welcome to you, Alexis Kennedy. Alexis: 00:47 Thank you very much. Danny: 00:48 Let's get into a bit of your history. What books were you into growing up? And did you play any games when you were a child? Alexis: 01:00 Ah, yes, yes, and yes. When I was growing up, it was depressing a long time ago now. Uh, and iit's hard to remember the books that have shaped me, which ones I read when I was very young and which ones came in later or I re-read. But obviously, you know, Tolkien, Le Guin, there is the pillars, but that's true of everyone. And something slightly less obvious things. Roger Zelazny is probably my favorite dead writer I think, dead genre writer. I think David Mitchell was probably my favorite living writer. I came across Zelazy in my early teens. I guess; really profound effect. Most people who've read Zelazy will see my work and see the shadow he casts across it. Mary Renault I keep coming back to, she wrote a lot of historical novels set in particularly Ancient Greek times and it's a really vivid evocation of a world that's gone and her prose is absolutely lapidary. And I read the king must die her re-telling of the Theseus myth, again I think early teens. Her influence is less obvious, but it was one of the things I kept coming back to for Sunless Sea, which is after all a sort of Mediterranean environment a lot I stole from the Odyssey in terms of visiting islands. Alexis: 02:19 Anita Mason. She's not much talked about now, but I read one particular book of hers in again my early or mid teens that really left a mark. It's called the Illusionist. It's a retelling of the story of Simon Magus a minor character in the Bible and in a very recontextualized, a very skeptical retelling of some of the Christian, the federally point of view, doctrine of mythology. And with my first introduction to things like gnosticism and views of the occult that went beyond Tolkien or wizards in pointy hats and again left a mark. Tim Powers and James Blaylock I think always deserved discussing together because they were lifelong friends and I don't know if they'rre still alive and they may still be lifelong friends and they invented fictional authorities in both their books, both of those write very mannered, very unusual, very imaginative novels. Often set in the Victorian era, not exclusively, which I think anybody's played Fallen London will immediately get a good sense of. So what I was thinking about about books beyond La Guin and Tolkein I have read. Sir Tom Stoppard, very famous, British Playwrite, the most famous living British playwright. I didn't really read anything except genre fiction when I was growing up. I started reading genre stuff when I lived in Poland for a bit and the only english language library was British Council, which had two shelves of books. So I had to expand my purview beyond that. But Tom Stoppard I came across years before in a church. I found couple of plays he'd written lying in a Pew, when I was practicing the church choir. Every Good Boy Deserves Cabbage and Professional Foul, both of which are very playful, very sinister, works about language and politics. Alexis: 04:13 And I think that sort of playfulness with language, with language wasn't something I was aware that you could do at the age eleven. So that's the books. Games, so I think there are two games that really; I played a lot of games all the way through growing up to university. But in terms of digital games our neighbors and apple 2, I don't think I ever played it myself, but I certainly, but I watched out neighbors' kids the wizardry games, I think the very first Wizardry game, that was sort of early CRPG experience. And that I guess was foundational and the other thing was the original version of Elite which was tremendously influential and original space sim at a time before you had space sims at all. I was 13 it was 1985 in the fall when it came out. And this whole idea of being able to explore the world, at your own pace, was something unprecedented the games, which normally at that point, you know, level based, most games couldn't even save. And that again, crystallized my understanding what games could be. Those are the things my childhood I guess. Danny: 05:24 Uh, you mentioned, you mentioned Roger Zelazny, who happens to be my favorite author of any genre frankly. What is your favorite book or what is the book the most affects you, I'd like to ask. Alexis: 05:39 That's a good question. I think it would depend on my mood. I love Lord of Light. I think it's not aged brilliantly, but I think it still an extraordinary novel. It's very competitive and it became sort of a running joke at Failbetter Games after I gave it to my co-founder three times because I forgotten I had given it to him first two times over the years. So eventually I started giving it to him every Christmas, a new copy? The Amber Series was where I first came across Zelazny and that was just unlike anything I'd ever read. This sort of Chandler-esque prose, that was very muscular, very poetic at the same time coupled with these stories of compelling larger than life immortals. Alexis: 06:23 But I think hiss short stories are what I love most because they never outstay their welcome. And Zalazny was brilliant; I mean, he was a superb prose stylist and a compelling proctor. But not unlike Chandler I think he didn't often didn't know how to end a story. There's a lot of, I think once you're a writer especially you can see when he's making it up as he goes along and he does that brilliantly, but sometimes he runs out of road. I re-read Roadmarks, one of his minor books again recently and you can really tell by sort of 80 percent of the way through the book that he's gone out of ideas and he's trying to tie all the pieces together so I think short stories. Danny: 07:03 So you mentioned Lord of light and I can't help mention all, well all the games that you're known for that you're working on sort of have a rebirth mechanic and especially Sunless Sea has a huge part of the sunless series is the rebirth mechanic and the continuing in another role that's related to your other character. And of course Lord of Light is all about rebirth, about the whole Buddhism, that techno Buddhism that they get into there. I find that interesting that you had mentioned Lord of Light specifically. Alexis: 07:37 A lot of my games do unusual things with death or centralize death. And I think a lot of Zelazny's stuff plays with the idea of that; he has a lot of immortal characters, he has a lot of characters reborn. What you're seeing in Lord of Light can reduce their memory, or give it to you in some other form. I guess death in my games comes from two directions. Creatively, the story I've told before is that my co-founder, and also my fiance Lottie said to me at one point, "A.K. are all your games about death?" And I never really thought about it. But said instead rather embarassingly I said, yes, yes, I guess they are. My father died when I was very young and my brother he killed himself and I was 21 so it's had this sort of presence in my life and I think I'm often interested in poking around the subject to death in games where you can be playful about it and where death is fundamentally not pertinent. Alexis: 08:33 That's the most important thing about death in games. You can always start again, which is the exact opposite of how death works in life. And formally, I'm interested in messing around with the structure of games and the way that we play and the kinds of experiences we have with them. And we have this very clear expectation of how death works in games. It works in one of a few ways, you know, you die and start over or you die and start from a checkpoint or you die and reload because it's an RPG that doesn't expect you to die. I'm interested in games that do something different with it. I'm interested in building for the entire experience, of playing a game rather than just building for the experience of playing until death. So you carry bits over from loop to loop and the game acknowledges that you've played it before, both through the fiction and the mechanics. Alexis: 09:24 So I think, I think, yeah, it doesn't draw directly from Zelazny, but certainly I was very interested in a lot of the things he was and certainly he was a big influence. I wouldn't say it's unrelated. Eric: 09:33 Okay. So we've heard a bit about your background of books and games. So how did you take the two and merge them together? Alexis: 09:44 So I was, I didn't know what I wanted to do for a very long time. I did linguistics at university. I was an English as foreign language teacher for a bit, which is fun, but obviously not I was meant to be. I was a English school teacher, secondary school our equivelant to high school, which really wasn't me. And then I became a software developer for a while a lot of sort of reasonable bright and dissatisfied people drift into.It's a good reasonable fine living. Alexis: 10:12 But again, I didn't love the idea of spending the rest of my life sitting in meeting rooms, talking about details of implementing insurance software. So I always wanted to to write, I mean since I was a kid, but a lot of people do and it seemed unattainable. I always wanted to make games ever since I understood what games were, and that also seemed unattainable. I used to sit there and try to write. I wrote a novel, which I couldn't get published because it wasn't very good and I kept trying to design games I did a lot of TTRPGs when I was growing up at university and ran a lot of my homebrew stuff. I was interested in doing something commercially. But what I found was every time I sat down and write fiction and got the itch to do game design and every time I sat down to do game design got the itch to write fiction. Alexis: 10:55 So eventually, rather belatedly, it occurred to me that I could do something to combine the two. So I ended up trying to build a very strongly narrative game that was as much story as it was game. And this is 2008, 2009 when this sort of text-based rennaisance was just taking off. This is when you're about to see things like choice in games, things like Inkle's work, 80 days and Heaven's Vault and that lot. A lot of more innovative storytelling approaches to things like Firewatch and Oxenfree were still over the horizon. A lot of mobile games weren't really a thing. Lots of sort of choice based branching story mobile games, all those were way off, Reigns. All these sort of things were still just over the horizon so a very different era. And I was mostly web developer at that point, so what I sat down and decided to do was web-based and I can't tell you haphazardly I made so many design decisions about the company and about the game. I just did the stuff seemed interesting that I knew basically, technically how to do and I didn't focus on mobile games at all cause I kind of thought mobile was a bit of a passing fad, which is I think the most wrong I've ever been about anything ever. And I calculated how long people would take to get through the Fallen London content when I first put it together. And remember I put together a spreadsheet. I had four columns, which something like casual, engaged, passionate and bot for how long people would consume the content. And what I found after a week was that the more engaged players had the consumed content more quickly than I thought a bot would consume it. Alexis: 12:39 And this really set the tone for the next 10 years of my career. Realizing again and again that players like story, players like content, they will consume it much faster than you expect. Only a few will, you know, not sort of the people creeping around on the edges. But the core players will tear through it it like a forest fire tearing through the driest of forests. And so a lot of my work since then has been trying to find out how to produce content effectively enough and how to maximize the interesting of content by using game mechanics. And also, I think that a lot of people quite understandably called a lot of my games grindy have been seeing me react to the initial trauma of spending days writing something that players finished in 10 minutes. I'm still struggling to recover. Danny: 13:30 So are the thing about games and you've mentioned some of this is that, people want to create a more immersive experience than they get through oral storytelling or written storytelling through a novel. The player in a game, whether it's, you know, the most simple choose your own adventure book all the way through what we have now with virtual reality where you know you can actually be the character in the game. You're literally in the game as far as your senses can tell. And of course you become the protagonist through game mechanics, through choices. How did you balance that when you were developing Fallen London game mechanics versus just raw storytelling? Alexis: 14:15 I want to cover this from a couple of angles. First of all, I think I have to, I differ slightly, well, let me put it this way. I think a lot of people might make games in order to make more immersive stories. I don't think that's exactly why I do it because I think if you're sitting, if you're reading a really good book, if you're reading Lord of Light for the first time, there are many more immersive experiences. You know, you're really in it to the end. I remember reading George R.R. Martin. Who is a hell of a storyteller but isn't a particularly outstanding prose stylist. And I still remember picking up the first Game of Thrones book, reading the first 50 pages with this slightly sort of snooty expression on my face, "I guess it is okay for a fantasy doorstop novel" and then literally waking up at three o'clock in the morning with my face smeared across the pillow and drool on the pillow because I've read through until the end of the book and fallen asleep 10 pages from the end because I was so gripped. So that's immersive. VR is immersive and whether you make a choice, sometimes even is less immersive. Alexis: 15:12 I've played choice based game where I am totally uninterested by badly designed choices that asked whether I want to turn left or right or even just interested by well-designed choices but it pulls me out at the moment and it really reminds me that I'm an onlooker making decisions. So it can be more immersive but I think it's not the only thing, and the not-the-only-thingness of it is one of the things that I kept coming back to in Fallen London is that people come to games and story games for many different reasons. Some people really want to pretend that they are in that virtual environment, some people don't want to be taken out of it at all so that they want the fantasy of actually being in a Nocturnal Boroque London. Alexis: 15:57 And some people really enjoyed the mechanics, the features and challenge and some people want to be told the story they don't want to experience the story and they they treat mechanics as a obstacle to get through to deal with. Fallen London taught me lots of things I thought I knew about the way people consumed, or wanted gain so raw because they were based on the way I consumed or enjoyed games. And those, those weren't true of them. And I think one of the, one of the formative experiences that led me building Fallen London and led to me learning about how to negotiate its problem was Baldurs Gate. The first game that that really put Bioware on the map. So Baldurs Gate was a very traditional CRPG in lots of ways, but one of the reasons it stood out, is it had a very strong, especially for the time, story line. Alexis: 16:46 You are a, spoilers for 20 year old game, brought up in a remote monastery and your ancestry is mysterious. Then you're forced to flee suddenly and your mentor is killed in the middle of the night. Then you have to track down what's going on and all this is also the thing of it dozen fantasy novels, which is why they did it, but it was the first time I felt like I'd been in a game where I could enjoy the gamey stuff while also being inside one of the stories. So I guess immersive is an appropriate term in that there is that feeling of being inside. But also, although I enjoyed the gaminess. I kept playing Baldur's Gate and being so gripped by the story I wanted to level up at speed and plow through. I didn't want to enjoy the gameiness. And so I kept thinking, why can't you make a games that's all story? Why can't you make it just about the interesting plot bits in between and we don't have so many popcorn fights slowing you down. Alexis: 17:37 And then I tried to make it with Colin and then instantly I realized why, I said instantly it took me a couple of months. Which is that holy hell story takes a long time to put together. But if you design a combat system, you can keep putting combats in the game and people would keep playing them. It may take you a long time, but you've built something that gets redone. And story is definitionally the stuff that tends to happen once where a system is the stuff that tends to happen again and again, but because the world is complicated and because um, the human, humans, ingenious creatures, there's a lot of middle ground between these two. There's stories that you can repeat. I mean even in noninteractive stories, if you're reading an epic poem, but listening to a ballad, there'll be a chorus you hear again and again. Alexis: 18:30 Or there are systems, which we'll have scripted bits that you play through once to they're more story aligned, you know, you do, do you want, this is the version of combat where you play and it's impossible to do damage with bladed weapons, they hacked in something slightly specific. So I spent a lot of time learning in Fallen London how to do things that were stories that had bits of system in them where you could repeat and on a good day the repetition felt like something systemic rather than something grindy. On a bad day it just felt grindy. And that I think is really where I started to get excited about what still excites me, which is the point where the narrative is expressed through system and system expresses narrative points. So, for example, in Cultist Simulator, the fact that you have to put funds in your time verb every 60 seconds or your health starts failing, it is fundamental to the story. It's because I wanted to tell a story that was about the tension between art and life; the hidden and the mundane. So I want this constant reminder that you gotta put beans on the table. Eric: 19:45 Do you feel that additional emphasis on game mechanics such as the naval combat in Sunless Sea enhance or detracts from the experience? Alexis: 19:55 If I felt like it detracted from the experience, I wouldn't put them in. So let me drill down a bit. Do you, how do you feel do you think that they detracted from the experience? Danny: 20:09 Uh, you know, I mean, I've, I've played all of them. I like to make the comparison between skies and sea. Not to knock the work of, of Failbetter on Sunless Skies, which it's an excellent game, but it feels more like a game than Sunless Sea did. Sunless Seas felt more about the, the story and the, and the narrative elements than Skies does specifically. And a lot of the time in Sunless Sea, I kind of felt like, I wish I didn't have to shoot at these ships or run away, mostly run away from the lifebergs I wish I didn't have to constantly run away from these things and I could just get to where I wanted to be to advance the story. And I understand that if you took out all the naval elements of sunless sea, it wouldn't feel like you're driving a ship. Danny: 20:57 It would just feel like Fallen London essentially where you're just ending up at port, this port or that port doing something. I feel like it definitely depends on how you execute it. Like in the difference between sea and skies. If you make it too gamey, if you make it too much about being in, in the sea or fighting the ships, we're taking, taking Sunless Sea if it was more about that. If you had to fight them to get items to advance more often. I definitely think it would have detracted from it. I think it can detract from the story in the immersiveness for sure. Alexis: 21:33 I think that's a very fair response is the best way to put it. I think he's also a very good response in that you said a lot of the things that I would have said if I hadn't ducked out of answering it. And I think also it accounts for some of the defensiveness when when they say, well you know, do you think that it detracted? So there's three things there all the which are a little bit different. And the first thing is, as you say, if it wasn't for the naval combat, it would be like Fallen London. And one of the things the naval combat and the sea travel does is act as punctuation as pacing. So that by the time you get to another island, you really care about it. And also there is a sense of threat that means that you are always watching the water around you because you are thematic point of view what wanted people to feel in Sunless Sea was that every time they pushed out into this, this black, it didn't know whether they're going to make it the other side or not. And if you do that in a game, and this is what the challenges of game design. If sometimes they don't make it the other side, then they're upset because they haven't made it the other side; but that's the risk. Similarly, if you want it to feel like somebody's really gone on a journey one of the ways you can do that is making it take time. There are other approaches but that was tje intention; I really ferocious base when I was at Failbetter. I said the ship has to stay slow or people won't feel like they've been on a journey. Alexis: 23:04 So having said that, I don't think ship needs to be quite as slow as it did. We tweaked the speed over the course of development. That was the first actual video game I've made. And I think maybe it could have been 10% faster, maybe it could have been 20% faster. Maybe the engine upgrades could have arrived a bit faster. Definitely could be more things to do on the voyage. But we were tuning as we went and given the choice between making people take a long time to get somewhere and letting them get there straight away. I'd go for the first. But I was really specific about this in the post-mortems we did at the time. It could have been better balanced. So that's the second thing. The third thing that's worth saying is that the combat, I think it was a, so to Liam Welton who is the primary coder and the UI designer of the game, did most of the combat and I think he did an amazingly good job considering how quickly he did it. Alexis: 23:58 Initially we were going to do a turn-based combat thing where you actually said it went from separate cards, battling screen for the duration of the battle and then the back of the sea and nearly everyone hated that and it took you out of the sea experience and always took time to do. And it just wasn't, I hadn't done a very good job of designing it. So towards the end of the developmentt period when we'd made more money than we expected to from early access from the Kickstarter had gone a bit better than we expected to. We had more resources. We thought maybe we can actually make it real time combat, which initially we thought was beyond us and we did and it wasn't that hard and it basically worked. But nobody has ever played Sunless Sea and said that the combat is the best feature. It adds something to it but it's got its problems and Skies and I very specifically don't want to cast shade on skies. But I think not even but, I'd very definetely don't want to cast shade on Skies. Alexis: 24:58 And I think this is really the difference in what I do now and what Failbetter do now, and this is one of the reasons why I left Failbetter and founded another studio. Because at Failbetter I built a machine that made a particular kind of game and then they're still happy to be making that, but I wanted to go out and make other kinds of games. I am very interested in artistic effect, even if that makes it a bit less fun. I don't want to make games not fun because I also want to make money through games. There's lots of people making really interesting art games and scraping by on Patreon, so we want to be a bit more commercial than that. Alexis: 25:35 Cultist Simulator, Sunless Sea, that both these things that to quote one of my favorite reddit comments, they would have got the reddit commentor failed if they handed it in as coursework for their first game design and they should because they departed from traditional wisdom of game design. Failbetter with Sunless Skies obviously wanted to make something that felt more like people's expectation of a game where I would be inclined to fix this Sunless Sea problem by saying, okay, we're going to do other things with the long journey to make it more interesting and we're going to do things with combat that make it serve a different purpose. Failbetter, quite recently, we're going to speed up the journey a bit and we're getting made lean into making combat combat so that's a bit more like a traditional game. I think they did pretty well and that's fine. But that's really at Weather Factory we've said our raison d'être is experimental narrative games with an indie aesthetic. There is room for a certain kind of game that breaks the rules a bit and does things that you probably shouldn't do except for people who really like them. And that's what I'm interested in doing. Danny: 26:36 You mentioned the journey in sunless sea and um, I remember when I started playing it the journey was difficult. And like you said, you could've been a little faster. The engine upgrades could've been a little cheaper or come sooner and it didn't hit me how important the journey was in that game, until zubmariner came out and the DLC came out, I was like, oh, this is great. I can start playing the game again and check out this zubmarine thing. But when you're under water, the journey isn't the same. It's not as impactful. The backgrounds don't change the,environment you're going through doesn't change. Uh, there's less enemies. There are enemies obviously, but there's ways to, easier ways to avoid them and it's less difficult just being underwater in that game. And I didn't realize how central that was to Sunless Sea was the parts that I was like, I wish I could go a little faster and get through this. Danny: 27:35 Uh, because I kept feeling like I'm never going to make it. I, I like, I can't play this game because I can't accomplish it. And then Zubmariner came out and I was like, wow, this is too easy now. And the game doesn't feel the same. Like I'm just going place to place and it doesn't even matter. I found it interesting that you pinned on that journey thing and the punctuation part of it, uh, like the gravedigger scene in Hamlet, uh, the many gravediggers scenes, um, that interruption in a play in a long, a long dramatic place specifically are really important. And they're central. You can't just have three acts of drama because people get tired of it. Alexis: 28:13 Exactly this. And, and I, yeah, very mundanely, much less mundanely than talking about hamlet, I think about, I think about sandwiches. And I think about cocktails. You know, I'm currently happily sipping, um, gin and tonic as I sit here. It's mostly composed of tonic water. You know, otherwise, you know one I would be the worst for wear but two, you want a little bit of flavor in something that enhances the flavor or a sandwich. You know, the peanut butter sandwich and sourdough bread is one of the great achievements of human civilization. And everyday I'd be thanked for its existence, but sourdough bread is much less interesting than the peanut butter. But the peanut butter only composes, like, you know, 20% of it, 10% of it, whatever, the sort of quantity that you get of story in Sunless Sea or gin and tonic. Alexis: 29:05 But I don't eat peanut butter out of a jar. If I did, I would get very tired, very quickly of peanut butter. So finding that balance of pacing to event is tremendously hard, is one of the things I think that the really good writers do so effortlessly. It took me a long time to realize they were doing it. A lot of novice writers try to make sure something is happening all the time. All the fact that it has is to get really bored very quickly because something's happening all the time. In games, similarly, if the story comes at you all the time, you stop being able to track it because there were too many events to, to, to make sense of. So having a little bit of negative space is useful, but of course if you overdo it, people drift away. And especially if it's a slow game, some people will always drift away. Even if most people love your game, there will be a proportion of people who say, screw that guy you know I have better things to do with my time. Environment: 30:01 Danny: 30:04 So let's move on to your current projects. Environment: 30:06 Eric: 30:09 What's that knocking? Environment: 30:09 Danny: 30:12 Okay. You know, someone's knocking at my door. Sorry guys. Uh, let me, maybe if I ignore it. Environment: 30:23 Danny: 30:23 Okay. This, this is obviously not going away. Um, you know what? Uh, Alexis, we'll edit this out later. Let me go see who that is. I, no one really even knows I'm here. I'm really, really sorry about this. Speaker 4: 30:55 Danny: 30:57 Uh, no one was there. There was a letter on the ground. Uh, I, I don't know. It has a picture of a lantern on it. Eric: 31:08 Are you sure this is something you should be doing? Danny: 31:12 I think really it's just a letter. What, what harm could a letter have, let me open this. Danny: 31:20 It says the door in the eye is closed. Heed the moth, but do not follow. Find the librarian to release the Knock. Environment: 31:30 Danny: 31:30 Jesus Christ. What the hell? The letter like literally just burned up like flash paper. Eric: 31:38 What's going on over there? Danny: 31:39 God, I don't, I don't know. This is creepy. Um, you know what? Sorry Alexis. Uh, let's just move on. I know you're short on time today and I'll figure out what the heck is going on later. So you've mentioned the Book of Hours is, and I'm quoting your tweet from mid January, uh, you called the, the reason for making it to create an extremely relaxed Cultist Simulator expandalone. Did this idea come about from user feedback from players, uh, or during the Kickstarter with when the Alpha phase is still going on for Cultist Simulator? Alexis: 32:20 Did it, I mean, oh my God, did it. So Cultist Simulatior is a very, very divisive game. I think it's easily the most devisive game I've made so far and that's going some. Because it was intended to be a tutorial on this game where the experience of working out what was going on was the game and it was also intended to be quite a vindictive game that would kill you if you did things wrong because I wanted this sense of dabbling in the unknown. And if you don't pay careful attention to what's going on, it can be overwhelmed. And again, you know, tuning is hard and very quickly the whole, so I think I made some elements a bitt less vindictive and between the elements in it that would make it overly vindictive and the people who liked the story, liked the lore, liked the mechanics really got impatient with the harshness of it. Alexis: 33:12 There was a lot of feedback that may be next time people could enjoy our writing and arts and design arfe not constantly having to monitor their failure conditions. So that was one thing. And on the back of, you know, similar feedback about Sunless Sea. I'm terrified of the sea and I want everyone else to be terrified of the sea as well. On top of that, honestly there was my own feedback, so I'd be making games for 10 years and Fallen London is in some ways very relaxed some ways very mean, Sunless Sea and Cultist Simulator are both quite brutal. I wanted to do something a bit more, more chill too where I feel I would like a break, both from having to make mean games and from having to get the feedback that often comes with making mean games. And one of the things that I became aware of as I started to dig into the design having done then reaching years that I have like a lot of very strong feelings about books and I've said Book of Hours I wanted to be a, I think I love letter to the majesty and terror of books. And it sounds like I'm joking and I say with a smile, but I'm not entirely perhaps not even really joking because books contain all the wonders and terrors that could fit in human imagination are contained in books while they're waiting to get into human imagination. And I wanted to make a game that alluded to and that allowed people to enjoy that. Eric: 34:45 So for the diehard Cultist Simulator fans out there, um, is there anything new that they'll be able to find in the Book of Hours? Alexis: 34:55 Lots. I put together the Secret Histories, the Cultist Simulator universe, very much with the idea that I wanted to make a number of games set in it. Because one of the accidental good decisions that I made of the many decisions I made at the beginning of Failbetter's time was to establish something that could be the beginning of a shared world, multiple games. I hate the word franchise because it's so commercial sounding. But I guess that, and I wanted to build a really rich toy for people of that frame of mind to dig into an explore and theorize about from different directions. In Cultist Simulator people were a cultist or an occultist; they're a Magus trying to achieve immortality. Here I want to provide a new point of view of somebody who's more of a civilian in the secret wars, uh, but deals with people who are both more or less extreme than the original player. Alexis: 35:52 And obviously if you want to find out about the lore of a secret world that the occult library that contains the secrets of it is a good place to be. And finally, one are the things we keep coming back to in preproduction on the Book of Hours is if knowledge is power, then librarians are some of the most powerful people in the world because they put all the knowledge under lock and key. And even if the player is heavy air quotes, just a librarian, they're also deciding what knowledge people who come to the library will get, so rather than being the person who comes to the Oracle and asks for information, so the oracle deciding what information to dole out and how that will change the course of events. And you also curating the books in the library. So it's going to be you who decides which version of history is the one that's curated into existence, which is one of the big themes of the Cultist Simulator universe. Danny: 36:53 So, uh, looking into, and perhaps I know it's not out yet, but even beyond the Book of Hours, how deep into this world of of the Secret Histories as you call it, uh, the hidden in the macabre are you and the other people at Weather Factory going to take us is there a long plan for more, uh, delving into the Secret Histories? Alexis: 37:16 Emphatically yes. I think there's a least two, maybe three more games. We have a parallel project to Book of Hours, which I reffered to as the codename precopious, which we're being unusually enigmatic about. We will be talking about at some point but that is also the secret histories universe and we'll talk more about that soon. And the other two things that I would love to do in Cultist people are on the cultists point of view. Book of Hours is going to be, like I say, sort of a civilian and I wanted to do a more traditional protagonist and not two ways where you're playing with hunters who tracks transgressors of the invisible laws down and does things to them so we see another perspective. And then, although it's much more challenging though I'd love to do it. I've talked about a game where you actually play in secret histories, terms Name level and Hour level entities. So the demons and gods of the setting. I'd love to do something like that, but explicitly I've, I've wanted to come at this from the point of view of creating a mythos that people can really sort of get into and roll around and wrap themselves up in and argue about for years and it's going to take years for all the secrets to unroll. Eric: 38:46 And I guess finally what are the projects are out there that you would say really understand the commingling of narrative and game mechanics and get it right. Alexis: 38:56 As I get more zen with age, I spend much less time saying why didn't these folk do it differently I would have done it like this. And much more time saying it's interesting those folk who did it differently I would never have thought of that. And lots of folk take an approach that's very different from mine but really interesting. So sort of one end of the time spectrum. This is a really old game, but it's one I always talk about. King of Dragon Pass did one of the games that the first got me thinking in terms of of narrative and system together. It is on IOS I think IOS and android now. And it's a story systems strategy thing about running a tribe of pseudocounts. It's in a very unusual universe. Brilliant piece. Completely impenetrable UI but if you persevere it's so good. Alexis: 39:46 The gentleman responsible for it is doing Six Ages as well, which I'm eagerly waiting to come to android. And at the much more recent end of the continuum, and it's not out yet at all, but I've, I've got, I've had my hands on the Beta, uh, Disco Elysium very unusual name. I think it's the best written game I have ever played in my life. And that's not something that I say lightly because I've played a lot of really well written games. The writing is extraordinary. The story is elaborate and fascinating. The setting is really unusual and they have done a lot of low key, very thoughtful, unusual changes to the system. And the way the system supports the narrative. It's a detective story. They call it a detective RPG because it has some traditional RPG like elements set in a very unusual sort of contemporary setting. And the systems include a inventory slot system where you equip beliefs and those affect the way your character interacts with the world and the skill system where your skills are NPCs, who talk to you, and occasionally betray you or confuse you. And those are sort of the headline interesting points. But the thinking about system that's gone into it is really next level. So just Disco Elysium it's an Estonian studio. I hope to have it out this year. So I really want to play the final version. Danny: 41:20 That sounds terribly interesting. Alexis: 41:23 It's so good Danny, I very rare I sit playing a game with my mouth open. I think Torment, Planescape Torment was the last time I had that sort of drop jaw expression. Danny: 41:37 Oh, Torment was an excellent game. Um, and of course Weather Factory has uh, Cultist Simulator recently had expansions, um, of other characters to play and the Book of Hours is also on steam. It's not out. When is that projected to come out? Alexis: 41:54 So, uh, I have to do the plug or my cofounder would never forgive me. We do have the Ghoul, the Priest and the Dancer DLC now or steam for a couple of days. We've got Cultist on mobile as well and the DLC will get there as well. A lot of people were asking for it on mobile for ages cause it really suits the touchscreen. Book of Hours we expect to release in the first quarter of 2021 and we're usually pretty good at deadlines. We are launching the Kickstarter for it on the 29th of August. And if the Kickstarter fails we probably won't make it because even if we can fund it then if a Kickstarter fails a pretty good sign that there's actually not really enough interest in the game. I do worry sometimes that my Twitter is a bit of an echo chamber and then maybe there aren't going to be people in the world interested in a library RPG. But we'll see 29th of August. Danny: 42:53 So I'd like to thank you for coming on the podcast and talking to us and, and relating all this, all this amazing information about your life and, and Weather Factory's, efforts and um, Fallen London and all of that. Just thank you so much. Alexis: 43:10 Well thank you. And thank you for asking me a bunch of interesting in distinct questions.