Animation Lead on Wanderstop! She/Her & Transgenderrific! Past: Radial Games, Gaslamp Games



MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

Every time I see a Fallen London story written by a contractor, I get genuinely really curious how failbetter onboards new writers to the setting. Like, assumably not every single writer they contract is intimately familiar with the universe already? (Maybe they are, I don't know how they pick people). But assuming not, how does that person go from complete newbie to pitching an interesting idea that feels entangled in a world in a reasonable development timeframe? Does FB just dump a lore bible on people? Is there a process of like, the contractor pitches a vague concept and then people suggest appropriate setting elements for it?

Maybe this is all far more mundane than I'm making it out to be but it's one of those things where FL players in particular have such high expectations for setting details and flavour to be absolutely EVERYWHERE, I imagine that has to involve some degree of directorial guidance. Playing in someone else's pool is a thing that everyone does in gamedev sooner or later but the deeper that pool gets the bigger demands on the onboarding process. I always wonder what that looks like internally.


bruno
@bruno

This is something we think about a lot because it is indeed very challenging. I won't go into nitty gritty details of how it works, but:

  • We approach people we think will be a good fit based on their prior work, but yeah we generally don't have the luxury of working with folks that have pre-existing familiarity with the setting.
  • A first-time contractor is almost always going to be writing a monthly Exceptional Story, and the parameters of those constrain how much mechanical complexity and setting detail they're going to have to deal with. An ES is supposed to be about one thing – a character, a location, an event – and usually there's no space to go tying in every aspect of the setting.
  • We treat onboarding as a pretty substantial chunk of work and just assume people will need to take some time to do it. We have some lore documentation written specifically to give people an overview introduction, in addition to our more direct internal docs that just go over lore elements wiki-style.
  • There's a back and forth pitching process, and during that process we're also pointing the freelancer towards the setting elements that relate to what they're working on.
  • All ESs are edited by an in-house editor who knows the setting, so they can spot issues (ideally early on – we do multiple in-progress milestones) and also suggest or point out connections. The idea is that the contractor only needs to familiarize themselves with the central setting elements that factor into their story, and the editor can bring a broader understanding to guide them, make sure we hit the little connections and grace notes players expect, etc.

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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

all of these FL posts are tempting me to dive back into that pool after so many years. I played this a lot when it was new and then never again for many years, it would be rad to see how it's changed in the intervening time

in reply to @bruno's post: