Introducing Ourselves: Failbetter Games

[HannahFBG]

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us for the inaugural Studio Spotlight developer takeover! We're delighted to be first in line to enjoy these new forums with you. Thank you Stevie for inviting us! We promise not to spill anything on them.

We're Failbetter Games from London, England. You might know us from our games Sunless Skies and Sunless Sea. We make narratively interesting, deep, dark, and weird games that play with the intersection of horror and whimsy.



We released Sunless Sea in 2015 after running a £100,000 Kickstarter and a successful Early Access period. Sunless Skies followed after another Kickstarter (£378,000!), and more Early Access. We've been hugely gratified to be nominated for over a dozen awards for Sunless Skies, and it's been named one of the games of 2019 by all kinds of media, from The New Yorker to the Guinness Book of Records (yeah, really).

Alongside those games, we run a browser game set in the same universe called Fallen London, which just turned ten years old at the weekend!



In the last decade, Fallen London has grown from a handful of stories to a 2.5-million word epic with tens of thousands of monthly players and over a million registered accounts. We're pretty sure it was the first commercial RPG to include a third gender option, and shares a setting with Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies.

This week, we'll be leading some threads about our work and expertise, and there's a fantastic giveaway going on right now for our games and some very spiffy playing cards.

I'm Hannah, your host for the week, and I'd love to know if any of you have already played our stuff, especially if you remember coming across Fallen London in the last ten years!

 

[SWard]

Hello Hannah and Failbetter! Welcome to the forums.

Amazing to have you with us for launch week!

 

[FlyingGuppy]

Hey Hannah! Congrats on Fallen London turning 10! (I think it first hit my radar maybe 6 or 7 years ago.) Looking forward to hearing how you accomplished it all!

 

[HannahFBG]

Thanks! It's wild to think of it being a decade old. I've been working on it for five years! And I still love the old beast.

 

[SWard]

Is it in the Guinness book of records? Did they send you some Guinness?

 

[HannahFBG]

Still waiting for the Guinness. No, we were listed in games of the year so far in one of their digital publications. Wild! We could have been in there for Most Words in A Game 2019, but I think Disco Elysium has pipped us.

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the PC Gamer forums, Hannah! It's a pleasure to have you grace us with your presence!

 

[PCG Rachel]

Hi Hannah Welcome to the PCG forums! Big fan of both Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies so excited for the threads this week.

 

[FatherShark]

Super excited for the threads this week! And actively getting to participate in the community! HUzzah!

 

[CParsons]

Hi Hannah and Failbetter. Welcome to the PC Gamer forums, and thank you for joining us!

 

[Mobyduck]

Hi Hannah! Although I never play for too long, I always come back to Fallen London from time to time to experience it. It's definitely a very unique game, with a very interesting world. Even though I learned about the company through Sunless Seas, Fallen London is my favorite.

I tried creating a game using the tools you provide a couple times, but it's a pretty challenging task. Still, I appreciate that you let people experiment with it. Hope y'all keep finding success in the game world.

 

[HannahFBG]

Hey all!

@Mobyduck Yeah, StoryNexus is hard to use. If we were going to recommend a tool, we'd probably suggest Ink. We're very glad to be blessed with writers and freelancers who can make StoryNexus sing!

 

[Mobyduck]

Hey all!

@Mobyduck Yeah, StoryNexus is hard to use. If we were going to recommend a tool, we'd probably suggest Ink. We're very glad to be blessed with writers and freelancers who can make StoryNexus sing!

Thanks for the suggestion. I like writing on my spare time, so I will take a look!

 

[ChrisFBG]

Hi all! I'm Chris Gardiner, Narrative Director at Failbetter. I've been Narrative Director since halfway through the Zubmariner expansion for Sunless Sea and all through Sunless Skies. Before that I was Head Writer and before that Writer at Failbetter.

 

[SéamusFBG]

Hi everyone! I'm Séamus, a programmer at Failbetter. I worked as a contractor on the 2018 redesign of the Fallen London front-end, have contributed some post-launch features and fixes to Sunless Skies, and am excitingly forbidden to speak about what I'm up to at the moment. I started playing Fallen London on a quiet afternoon in Barcelona in late September 2016, wrote a couple of quality-of-life extensions for the old website, and things gradually got out of hand from there.

 

[LesFBG]

Greetings folks. I'm Les, I'm Failbetter's Quality Analyst and I've been with the company since 2017. Most of my work to date has been on Sunless Skies, and it's still a big focus at the moment as I'm working on the Sovereign edition for the console ports (and PC). I also worked on the PS4 version of Sunless Sea and am currently working on the Xbox One and Switch versions too. I've also worked on the recent Fallen London re-architecture and will be jumping back onto Fallen London soon to test some of the new features we have planned. Alongside all of that I'm the build engineer, I act as the support contact for Skies and Sea and I'll generally be found prowling our community spaces looking for way to resolve people's issues.

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, @ChrisFBG ,@SéamusFBG and @LesFBG ! It's a pleasure to have you with us. We hope you'll find this your second/third/x^n home

 

[HannahFBG]

Yay the gang's all here! If anyone has questions for the team, fire away. We've got a lot of writing content coming and some art stuff too, but the team can answer all manner of questions about our games.