A little under ten years ago (dear god) I tried, and eventually gave up on, building what I called at the time a "general-purpose QBN system". That is to say, a system for storylet narrative that could be used as narrative middleware or as a narrative scripting engine, like Ink or Yarn Spinner.

A lot has happened in the intervening time, and I've come to this problem with a different perspective. I now think this is feasible. It's so feasible, in fact, that I've done it.

What changed? Well...

• I spent four years working with Failbetter Games' StoryNexus system, which back in 2017 was already not available to the general public. I wrote that original article having just shipped Voyageur, of course, which is significantly inspired by StoryNexus; but between then and now I've written an order of magnitude more material intended for this kind of narrative, and I have a much clearer picture of the kinds of affordances I want.
• Yarn Spinner's model of storylet narrative (what it calls node groups) usefully solves for a lot of storylet narrative use cases, which effectively narrows what I'm trying to do to the use cases that Yarn isn't particularly suited to. I feel happier building something opinionated for a narrow use case.
• The overall success of both Ink and Yarn led me to conclude that a middleware-style DSL tool was the way to go, rather than something with an obligate GUI.
• I simply decided to level up my technical skills to the point where I could do it.

The result is lyre, a new narrative scripting language designed specifically for building storylet narratives in the vein of games like Sunless Sea, Voyageur, Fallen London, and the various third-party games that used to be available on StoryNexus.

Now, to be clear: I am not releasing lyre yet. I plan for a first public release sometime later this year, after the release of the first game made with it (which should be a short piece of IF and should be out, hopefully, at the end of the month). This post is a preview, though the lyre compiler and runtime are already working software. I'm writing this mostly to start articulating some of the design choices and intentions while it's still all fresh in my mind; I'll probably write more about it down the line when it's out.

"Storylet narrative" is a very broad term that can include everything from Citizen Sleeper, to Sunless Skies, to the event system in a Paradox game. The specific concept lyre is built for is a narrower and more specific design, where...

• Game state is represented entirely^[1] in terms of qualities. Qualities are essentially variables meant to be exposed to the player as visible information. Every time a quality changes, this is made visible to the player.^[2]
  • Consequently, all changes to persistent state in lyre are explicit; the language disallows silently mutating state as a general rule.
• The story is made up of storylets, individual narrative nodes. Every storylet has branches, possible options that can be chosen from them. Branches lead to other storylets; once the player has completed a run of storylets, however, they can then return to a hub area. Lyre calls this the anchor.
• Qualities determine which storylets are available and the possible outcomes of branches, but players are in control of which branches they take; the language is designed for quality-based narratives as open story spaces rather than as a way of assembling a story by supplying specifically what happens next.

This scopes lyre down to a practical design. It's not trying to cover every use case, and particularly it's not trying to cover the main use case of Yarn node groups.

A taste of lyre

Here's a commented sample of what lyre source code looks like, which is a partial implementation of Road of Darkness:^[3]

// Lyre files are made out of nested, structured definitions. This line
// defines a storylet with `start` as its internal name and "Forest Clearing"
// as its visible title; the `anchor` keyword marks that this is a hub area
// the story returns to if it has nowhere else to go.
storylet anchor start "Forest Clearing"
    """
    You stand before a crossroads that splits to the left and right. A man
    stands next to the path on the right, wearing a large black velvet cloak.

    { 
    // Arbitrary expressions are allowed in { } blocks inside body text, and
    // their evaluation gets interpolated into the text as you'd expect.
    if scarf_color then 
        // You can even nest interpolated text inside other interpolated text.
        `Your { scarf_color } scarf is reassuringly warm.`
    else
        "You are wearing a warm scarf." }
    """
    branch "Examine your scarf"
        """
        What color was it again?
        """
        // `show` creates a condition on whether this branch is visible;
        // there's also `req` for locking a branch without hiding it.

        // Conditions in lyre require special syntax, because they have to be
        // legible to the language system which creates a player-visible
        // description. Specifically, they always have to name a quality
        // and a comparison operation in a sort of subject-verb-object
        // structure.
        show ( scarf_color == "" )
        -> select_scarf_color
    branch "Take the left path"
        // Just like in Storynexus, lyre inherently supports "branch text",
        // ie additional detail or extra story attached to branches.
        """
        It looks well-lit. Inviting even.
        """
        // Every branch leads to one or more other storylets. They can have
        // arbitrary conditions; the story routes through the first one
        // with a condition that evaluates to true.
        ( asked_about_thief ) -> ending_escape
        // The compiler enforces that branches must have a default route.
        -> ending_death

    branch "Talk to the man"
        """
        What's he doing hanging around here?
        """
        -> thief_conversation

    branch "Examine the cloak"
        """
        It drinks in the light, doesn't it?
        """
        // A "result" in lyre is like an anonymous storylet that you can
        // write right inside the branch. Lyre isn't designed for deep
        // tree-like narrative structures; results can't contain branches.
        // This strictly limited nesting makes lyre's syntax work, where it's
        // neither a bracket language, nor an indentation language, nor a
        // depth-marker language like Ink.
        -> result "Curious indeed"
            """
            It drapes rather loosely about his shoulders... to your trained
            eye, it looks rather like a powerful magical artifact that absorbs
            the light from the surrounding area.
            """
            effects if ( !cloak_knowledge )
                +cloak_knowledge

// Every quality has to be explicitly declared. Many of them will have
// information meant to go into an inventory or game state screen.
quality cloak_knowledge: boolean "Examined the Cloak"
    """
    You've taken a closer look at the Cloak of Darkness.
    """
    // Lyre comes with a system for creating generic messages to communicate
    // quality changes (and an API for replacing that with a custom system).
    // But a quality can also have a custom function to create those messages;
    // this is the simplest case where it's just the same string every time.
    describe_change: () => "You add your observations to your mind palace."

Structure, affordances, and influences

Most narrative scripting languages are designed like markup languages; mechanical information exists inside "islands" in a "sea" of body text. Lyre isn't designed like this, mainly because lyre stories are closer to Inform stories than to Ink stories; the ratio of mechanical information (code) to textual information (content) is higher. Text exists as quoted strings, separate from code.

In lyre, state is meant to change only through explicit quality changes. In the sample above, for example:

effects if ( !cloak_knowledge )
    +cloak_knowledge

Means "if cloak_knowledge is false, then set it to true."^[4] This is only allowed within effects blocks inside storylets (or results, which are basically just anonymous storylets).

Basically, every time the player takes an action in lyre, all of the effects of that action happen sequentially and they all live in the same place. It's a different way of thinking about narrative state—Ink, Yarn, ChoiceScript, and Twine make no distinction between code that can change state, and code that can only reference it.

But lyre's event model, which is obviously heavily influenced by StoryNexus, has a lot of utility for certain types of stories. It makes changes to state easier to see and reason about, which is beneficial for heavily stateful stories. It makes both the compiler and the runtime significantly simpler; a lot of the operations that the lyre runtime does are "pure" in the functional-programming sense, ie they can't mutate state. It enforces the idea that every state change is a visible thing that can be looked at and surfaced to the player.

Lyre is very unabashedly designed around my own preferences about workflows. It's meant to be written in a regular-ass text editor—I actually already wrote a tree-sitter parser for it—with no hard requirement for a specialized tool or IDE. A language server with some basic completion would be nice to have down the line, but it's hardly required. The syntax is meant to make large volumes of prose comfortable to write while also being relatively simple to parse. Lyre's parser is built by ANTLR, the same parser-generator^[5] tool used by Yarn Spinner. ANTLR is unusually smart in various ways that lyre makes use of, though some aspects of the syntax are still in flux.^[6]

Lyre is obviously heavily influenced by StoryNexus; it's in a lot of ways an attempt at building something more flexible and usable than SN while preserving its specific model of narrative state and player interaction, which I am very fond of. Lyre, in particular, is designed explicitly around the idea that it can work equally well as narrative middleware similar to Yarn, as the core of a full-fat "authoring system" like Inform, or as the narrative engine of a server-based game like StoryNexus.

But it's not quite a "clone" of StoryNexus. It doesn't have any of the SN features that are purely tied to its live-game nature, like living stories or world qualities (though those are something you could very easily implement around the language). It doesn't, and isn't intended to, have a CMS-style author interface. As a language with a compiler, lyre probably doesn't scale to several million words of content straightforwardly.^[7]

The language tries to regularize various things about storynexus. In lyre, the player is always inside a storylet; there's no concept of a "location"—the anchor feature is intended to fulfill the role that locations have. Lyre is generally designed around the idea that the only state that exists, that the runtime cares about, is the player's current storylet and their qualities.

But lyre also takes some significant inspiration from Inform, Yarn, Ink, and a whole pack of real programming languages. Lyre's compiler and the first implementation of the runtime are both written in Typescript,^[8] and some syntactic conventions (like using backticks for interpolated strings and the "fat arrow" to signify functions) seep in from that. Lyre currently has only one collection type, which are sets—largely inspired by Ink's lists but named something other than lists because lists, in Ink, are not meaningfully lists in any normal sense (why are they called lists?).

But lyre is also weirdly influenced by pure functional languages, particularly Haskell. The fact that Lyre puts stateful operations (ie, anything that creates a quality change) in a little box where they can't hurt anyone is very analogous to Haskell's treatment of IO. Quality effects are not currently implemented as a monad, but they conceptually are one.

Implementation-wise, lyre superficially resembles Ink and Yarn in that lyre stories compile down to a JSON bundle that the runtime uses. But lyre doesn't have the same kind of "engine"; it doesn't have anything inside it that really resembles a virtual machine. Most of the lyre runtime is a narrative engine dedicated to lyre's specific semantics around branching, determining what the player sees, and so on. Lyre does compile and evaluate arbitrary expressions, but for the sake of compiler and runtime simplicity those are compiled down just to s-expressions in a specified JSON-compatible format. The runtime is more like an old-school lisp reader or scripting language interpreter.

This is not efficient, but it's extremely easy to implement—lyre's expression evaluator is only about 100 lines of typescript code, not including the definitions of the language's builtin function primitives. I think making it as dead-easy as possible to port the runtime to other environments is a very significant goal for something like lyre; the reality of game dev right now is that you generally can't run code written in any arbitrary language in any given game, because most engines really don't want you to. And while there's a few things about the runtime that I want to revise, refactor, and ideally simplify even more... it is also true that I ported the lyre runtime to GDScript already and it wasn't all that painful to get it working and passing the same test suite the reference implementation passes.

Some More Examples

These come from the project I'm currently working on with lyre, and show off some other language features.

// Functions in lyre are always pure; they're a way of reusing chunks of
// expressions rather than a way of "doing" things.
fn desc_movement (f, t, n, v) => (
    if f && f == location then `{ n } { v } away to the { loc_name(t) }.`
    else if t == location then `{ n } { v } in from the { loc_name(f) }.`
    else "")

quality harriett_location : string "Harriet's Location"
    describe_change: (f, t) => desc_movement(f, t, "Harriett", "glides")

quality dean_location : string "The Dean's Location"
    describe_change: (f, t) => desc_movement(f, t, "The Dean", "squirms")

/* ... */


// A `table` in lyre is just a way of writing a bunch of variable text; these
// are a generalization of the main variable-text feature in StoryNexus.
table dean_next_location
    with dean_location
    == "living_room": "dining_room"
    == "dining_room": "downstairs_landing"
    default: "living_room"

// Like functions are reusable chunks of expressions, procedures are reusable
// quality effects. Like Ruby and some other languages, lyre adopts the
// convention that effectful actions have a ! on them; this is actually
// enforced (mostly because it greatly simplifies parsing).
proc move_dean! ()
    dean_location = dean_next_location()

/* ... */

storylet anchor kitchen "Icebox Temple"
    """
    The kitchen is small and modest relative to the rest of the house.
    Notably, you see not one actual cooking implement other than a well-loved
    coffee percolator. 
    """
    { room } // This is a tag, marking this storylet as a room.
    { location = "kitchen" } // This is an alternate syntax for a single effect
    // This is an arbitrary key/value pair attached to this storylet, which
    // the surrounding game can use to decide how to display the storylet.
    // For example, this is how you'd implement giving a storylet an
    // illustration.
    loc_name: "Kitchen"

    branch "Dining Room"
        """
        Back to where the bar is.
        """
        direction: "n"
        -> dining_room

/* ... */

storylet conversation_dean "Dean Liam Harcourt, Holding Court"
    """
    ( actual text excised to avoid spoilers )
    """
    // This is how lyre actually implements stories that can grow organically
    // and "true" storylet narrative. A `from` block creates a branch, but
    // the branch leads to the surrounding storylet, and it has a reference
    // to where it's available. In this case, it's available from every
    // storylet that has the `room` tag, so the dean can wander around and
    // you can talk to him wherever he is.
    from { room } "Talk to Dean Harcourt"
        """
        ( snip )
        """
        show ( location == dean_location )

Lyre will be available to people who are not-me... eventually. Look forward to the currently-untitled game at the end of October.

Image credit: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos via Wikimedia. Used under the GFDL.

Like all maps in the Neath, it doesn't reliably take you to where you're trying to go. Unlike other maps in the Neath, it sometimes – just sometimes – takes you where you're supposed to be.

— Unusually Loyal Map of London, Mr Chimes' Grand Clearing-Out

Over on PC Gamer, Jeremy Peel wrote an article about Fallen London's Exceptional Stories, and the rotating cast of freelance writers who write them.

It's a lovely piece; reading it made me a little emotional. One of my favorite (small) parts of my old job at Failbetter was getting to email random great writers in my network asking them if they wanted to write something for us. There are definitely things about that job that I miss today.

It's been a little more than a year and a half since I left Failbetter—I resigned my role as Lead Designer in February of 2025. When I made that decision I knew I was leaving the company into an absolute wilderness of an industry that was being actively destroyed, though I didn't know the full extent of just how bad it was going to get.

I was very aware that it was going to be a difficult road to hoe from there on, for a number of reasons—I have a very unusual work history and skillset that isn't necessarily attractive to most big studios, and the fact that I don't reside in either the US or Europe limits options even more. It's consequently a decision that I felt pretty bad about even at the time, because it felt absurdly indulgent to quit a job (especially, as was the case, without a clear landing spot elsewhere) in the middle of industry-wide contraction.

You are the negative space drawn by all your roads not travelled.

— Memory of a Much-Stranger Self, Firmament

It is very possible even now that I'll end up leaving the industry entirely, thought to do what I still have no real clue. If that were to happen, the identity I've carried around for about ten years—"Bruno Dias" the writer, the game designer—will kind of evaporate, right? It'll be shed, and I'll probably find myself in a life where I have different social circumstances, think about different things. Before that happens, I'm compelled to leave a kind of record of what happened.

Partly this is because, frankly, I'm more than a little tired of not publicly acknowledging it. This isn't an attempt at "clearing the air", and it's certainly not a callout—I'm not interested in assignment of blame here, and I'm not seeking redress for any particular thing. I just want to acknowledge and talk about something that happened to me, in a way that enables me to be honest about it when it comes up in the future.

This has also been on my mind because Failbetter are presently hiring for a writing role similar to the one I was hired for originally. In the games industry at least it's fairly common to probe people you know about job openings at their current or past employers—to get a sense, with eyes open, of what a role really entails and what the insides of a given company really are. At least one person reached out to me for this reason, at the time of writing this, so I had to sit down and go over my own feelings to give them a useful response. This post isn't that response; it's not attempting to advise anyone on whether or not to apply or whether Failbetter would be right for them—something that I'm not dissuading people from in general; it can be a great place to work, depending on your goals and circumstances.

You open the mouth you do not have. A law is enacted: No thing shall be.

— The Tower, Irem

This post is really a very long answer to the question "why in god's name would you quit that job." And the answer to that is very simple: I made the decision to resign from Failbetter because the job was killing me.

In the decade that I've worked in video games I don't know that I had a period in my life where I felt more depressed, anxious, and stressed than towards the end of my tenure at Failbetter. I wasn't sleeping. I had some physical symptoms I won't get into. I felt like my concentration and my general ability to be productive were shot, and like the quality of my production was slipping.

The thing that really made me sad is that all of this was making me irritable, and I could recognize that this was happening. I found normal, completely reasonable interactions with coworkers increasingly frustrating. Failbetter conducts most of its everyday communication through Slack; I found myself all too often having to take a moment to collect my thoughts and write a reasonable reply to a question or a request, because my immediate reaction was unreasonable frustration. I don't like being that person; the experience of that really compounded on everything else that was going on.

What was happening really wasn't one thing. I was experiencing a toxic mix of sleep deprivation, burnout, and creative exhaustion.

The trigger to all of it really was sleep. Failbetter's schedule was always challenging for me; I live in UTC-3, while the company operates on London time. I have generally nocturnal habits, some significant sleep disorders, and my natural circadian rhythm trends later, so this was already a stretch—one that I agreed to, because working at Failbetter was a genuinely great opportunity. But over the four years I spent at the company, I found that the cumulative effect of dealing with the time difference took a significant toll, especially during daylight saving time, which made it a four-hour difference for half of the year.

I won't go into the internecine details of Failbetter's management structure or decisionmaking process, other than to say that while I sought out mitigations or acommodations for this issue, I never really got them; and the process of trying to negotiate this with management over the course of my last year with the company left me feeling profoundly disrespected. Towards the end I had no confidence that the company cared about retaining me, which was a very strange thing to be thinking given my role at the time.

Plenty of people, of course, get up at 5AM every day and deal with it. But my body just does not adapt to doing this without mounting detrimental effects on my well-being. And I had, by that point, become (not so accidentally) important at work. I was Fallen London's lead designer, and so me missing a meeting or generally not being on top of things was significantly disruptive.

What's the worst that could happen? Well, you could die.

— "Perform an unsafe experiment," University Laboratory

This contributed to what was increasingly the dominant feeling I had towards my work, which was being perpetually behind. I never engaged, at Failbetter, in what we'd traditionally describe a "crunch" (which doesn't mean no one else did). The company has a fairly strong anti-crunch policy, which is that overtime gets paid out as "time off in lieu"—which in theory makes it impossible for crunch to make a late project less late. This is not a perfect policy, but it is better than several alternatives.

I increasingly felt both like I was letting people down and like I didn't have control over why. I missed quite a lot of time in '23 with a fairly unlucky run of various illnesses, and then again in '24 wrestling with sleep issues and mounting depression. I don't know how much of this was just reflective of stress; it is true that since I quit, I have not really been sick at the same rate at all.

Fallen London, being a live game, has a particular capacity for generating overwork that needs to be managed very carefully. Live games come with hard deadlines, some of which would be catastrophic to miss. Economically, the game is built on the premise that a new Exceptional Story will be delivered every month, come hell or high water. During my time at Failbetter, I wrote two of them; this was needed to essentially plug holes in the schedule, but it was really an extremely undesirable outcome (and neither ES was particularly popular).

Ultimately, me writing an ES was a failure mode, and it implied an ES written under less-than-ideal conditions. I had other responsibilities that meant I was never able to dedicate more than 20% of my time on a given week to writing these stories, nor was I able to justify spending more time on them than was strictly necessary to meet the quality bar—doing anything structurally challenging or that involved a lot of reactivity was out of the question, basically.

This was compounded by a growing sense of creative exhaustion. I feel like once we shipped Irem I had more or less done everything I really wanted to do in the setting, and finding new space or writing new things was increasingly difficult. I was in a position where I was Fallen London's creative leadership—the game's de facto director—but it really wasn't my baby, and I was beholden by creative decisions of the past that were increasingly constraining.

It's hard to separate this feeling from the other compounding issues of burnout and exhaustion; feeling constantly behind, feeling like you're pushing through a haze of exhaustion to get work done, doesn't leave space for the kind of exploration needed to maintain some creative balances. The pressure to deliver, and the need to prioritize the health of the game and the team over my own creative interest, meant that it was very difficult to escape that feeling of ennui once it set in.

I think if I had had a viable path to stick with it, I might have found my way to feeling excited about the setting again, probably through Firmament. That story is still something I'm extremely proud of; my contribution to that was mostly directorial, and I wasn't there to see it through to the end, but I'm very happy with what I did write for it (which is mostly the initially-released versions of the Stacks activity, and Starved Man with a Moving Camera).

"A good zailor should have exactly one scar." — M. Demeaux, Advice for Captains

— Zeazoned Zailors

But Fallen London was in a strange situation, like a lot of things, in 2020-2025. The game's commercial peak (during the span of time I was at Failbetter) was the 2021 summer event (ie the fist such summer event, Mr Chimes' Grand Clearing-Out). I'm very proud of that event, but I don't think that reflects just its quality; it reflects that it was the horrible Q2 of 2021, and a substantial portion of our audience were locked indoors with nothing to spend money on.

In subsequent years, the game was completely healthy, but revenue did meaningfully decline, and I was the person whose job it was to give the presentation to the company that had that graph in it.

A generally-recognized risk factor for burnout is a sense that demands are being placed on oneself that one has little opportunity to influence, and even at the best of times any kind of commercial creative work can really produce that sensation. Ultimately things either land with an audience or they don't, and while you can certainly influence the odds everyone who's done this kind of work for a long time knows what it feels like to have something flop.

All Devils are beautiful, in their own ways; even the ones that don't remotely resemble people.

— A Devil's Due

On a live game like Fallen London though, you are shipping things often and you can see how every single one is landing with the audience. On Fallen London, the longest we would go without shipping something was a month, typically more like two weeks. The distance between thinking of something and it being in front of players can be so short on something like Fallen London; there's not a lot of jobs in the games industry that give you an opportunity to see a real audience reaction to something that's still fresh enough in your mind that you're still carrying that excitement you had for it when you made it. Even other live games typically have much longer development cycles.

But on the other hand, these interactions with the community always are a bit of a third rail. You will see people who don't get your work at all; you'll see people whose preoccupations are totally outside of what you were trying to do, who are consequently disappointed that you didn't make something that meets their interest; you'll see things you put a lot of attention into get reduced down to one single thing—a complaint, an interpretation, a beat—that is everything anyone talks about.

All of those are things that come naturally (and in much greater volume) when you ship a full-sized game, but with a live game you get this drip feed that's never fully out of your awareness. This loop of constant feedback can be both intoxicating and toxic.

To Failbetter's credit, I never felt pressured to engage with the game's fanbase more than I wanted to, but I also felt like once I was leading the game I was obligated to keep an eye on player reactions. Maybe this is a failure to maintain boundaries on my part. But it's so, so easy to start worrying about being out of touch with the playerbase, on a game like this.

I am fairly thick-skinned about audience criticism of my work and this was never as significant a source of distress for me as it was at times for other team members; in truth I was often more frustrated by (what felt to me like) bad-faith criticism of other writers' work.

But it is also true that I felt the stakes of these audience reactions become higher over my time at Failbetter. Obviously I went from being just one contributing writer to the game's lead designer, which changes my relationship to all of this feedback—I was no longer responsible for just the things I personally touched. But I also felt less and less internal validation of my work from Failbetter, because ultimately the business results were not as positive as I would have liked. While I did attribute a significant effect to broader market conditions, this explanation was never really accepted by management. Blame for underperformance was never explicitly put on my shoulders but I still felt it.

I ultimately spent a significant chunk of those last two years concerned that I was personally failing in significant ways, which is not generally a healthy place to be in, especially because my ability to affect outcomes was so limited. Limited, obviously, because it's so hard to affect outcomes in general in this business.

But also limited by Fallen London often being under-resourced. For much of my time at Failbetter, the game operated with functionally fewer writers than it had when I joined the team, sometimes due to people leaving the company entirely, sometimes due to demands from other projects like Mask of the Rose and Mandrake. For a little while, I was spending a significant amount of my time assisting in the production of the Fallen London tabletop roleplaying game. I actually have no idea how that went down or whether people liked it.

Failbetter also had some significant struggles finding and retaining freelance writers, which (as Peel's article shows) are in a lot of ways the lifeblood of the game. Writing for FL is extremely, extremely challenging; it's both very different from most video game writing, and still video game writing enough that someone with no prior games experience wouldn't be able to do it. Most writers, even very talented writers, have a pretty rocky experience doing their first ES; this is why, really, the game was in finding people who could deliver their second, ES and ideally more.

At the same time, again, any in-house writer writing one of those ESs is a failure mode. It took time away from irreplaceable work that only those in-house writers could do, and also they were actively in a worse position to make a great ES than a freelancer; part of the point of ESs is exactly that they can bring in those perspectives and voices you don't get from the small core writing team!

One of the things I'm most proud of in my time at Failbetter had nothing to do with anything I wrote or designed, it was simply (successfully) making the case to management that we needed to start paying freelancers more for the incredibly specialized work they were doing.

All of this kind of assembled into a general sensation that my goals and what I cared about were not really aligned with how management viewed the business. For me, Fallen London was the whole game; I cared primarily about that game's long-term health and success, and I believed (with no small amount of evidence) that Fallen London could grow and be a sustainable long-term success iff given adequate care and feeding. Even while I was struggling with mounting creative difficulties around my own writing for the game, I cared about the game intensely.

I love Fallen London terribly, for so many reasons, not least of which is just that the game is responsible for many of my fondest memories. No other commercial game I've worked on had as clean a connection between my own creative intention and what players ultimately experienced; no other commercial project I've been involved in gave me as much creative control. I'm intensely proud of many things I did for the game, and I got a lot of fulfillment of having agency over the game's direction. So many of the best things I ever wrote, I wrote for that game—some of those are the quotes you see in this essay.

Of all the things I regret about how things ended with Failbetter, the worst is the fact that I will never really be able to look at this writing without some ambivalence, or enjoy the writing others have done in the setting in the same way. A reason to acknowledge what happened is so that I can feel like I can celebrate the work that I did, and the work that others continue to do, without such a remove from it.

Even when you are simply asleep, you often find each other in dreams: you are questing knights with a shared vow; you are a tall ship and her captain; you are two worlds, tidally locked, eternally facing each other like dancers in the night.

— The Lovers, Irem

I would never claim that Failbetter's management did not care about the game, but it is true that for them it was a game out of several, and ultimately Fallen London was viewed as a key component of the company's financial backing, but not the company's end goal; the end goal was to continue shipping games like Mandrake. Much of my tenure on Fallen London was spent calculating the possibility of some drastic contraction on the amount of new content we were doing, of returning to the quasi-maintenance mode the game had been in before late 2019. This never really came to pass, but there were real periods where Fallen London's content team was functionally just me and two other people. That I was often feeling like I wasn't pulling my weight did not help with this at all.

I really did not want to quit. I knew that it would be professionally really difficult, I knew that it would be financially devastating. I didn't want to abandon something that I cared about intensely. But eventually, around January of 2025, I made the decision that my position was untenable. I put in my notice on February 20th. Failbetter disabled my work accounts within hours, and put me on immediate garden leave. And that was it. I felt fairly bad that I wasn't able to work out a transition plan, but I was also not asked to.

I spent most of the subsequent year dealing with the long-term consequences of burnout, which really I am still to some extent recovering from.

There's less of you than there used to be.

— Unravelling, Irem

When I quit my previous job to join Failbetter in 2020, I ended up with a 45-day gap between the end of that employment and my start at the new job. Around two weeks into that I had become so bored that I proceeded to make a game, which became Cnidarian Solitaire.

In contrast, after leaving Failbetter, it took me months before I felt compelled to engage in any kind of creative work again. It wasn't until October of last year that I really sat down and made something serious (Kinophobia). I still feel like my relationship to writing isn't quite what it was before; it's something I'm still working on reconstructing, a mangled limb I'm rehabbing. In a way, writing nonfiction again is almost a way of "retracing my steps" to do that; professionally, I was a critic before I was a writer.

"It's a hard city to love. I learned that much during the Fall."

— The Efficient Commissioner, Mr Chimes' Grand Clearing-Out

It is very possible that this was always coming, that my role at Failbetter was just not something that I should ever have seen as long-term or stable. But it was hard thinking that way because Fallen London is such a one-of-a-kind island of stability; a game that, if you're not careful, you could imagine working on for the rest of your life. Very few things like it exist in indie game development. When I joined Failbetter, the game had recently turned ten; I fully believe it will make it to twenty. My mistake was not asking, more pointedly, whether I really thought I'd be happy in that situation.

One of the ironies is that the stress and burnout actively made me less capable of not letting myself get comfortable, of looking for the next thing. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered; the games job market was a little better in 2024 than it is today, but it still wasn't spectacular, and while I did seek out other work at the time, nothing really panned out.

For a while I idly thought about a version of this essay that was much more oriented around the question of how do you make a live game without inducing burnout. I don't know, honestly, that I am equipped to write that; I'm not sure that that's possible. Much as I have substantive disagreements with Failbetter's upper management, the company isn't run by people who are malicious or insane—unlike some indie studios I could name. It is, overall, run by generally well-intentioned people who mostly exercise good judgment. Working there still completely incinerated my brain. What does that say about this industry? What does that say about the world?

I... wish I had better answers to that question—of how to do it without becoming cinders—still. Frankly I wish someone would pay me to work on the problem. The truth of it is that for all of the misery, I still think there is something fundamentally special about live games as a medium, and it's therefore very sad that the reality of those games has mostly become a parade of exploitative business models and lowest-common-denominator dreck. My misgivings notwithstanding, I would jump at the opportunity to work on something like Fallen London again—something similarly strange and alive, something that exists in conversation with its players. The highs of that are really high.

For now, of course, I don't know that I'll ever lead any narrative team again, or get another comparable role in the industry at all. I'm focusing on survival in a time when everything that I care about is being actively destroyed, and I really don't know what the future looks like. Publishing this is unlikely to help on that front; it is distinctly unprofessional to talk about these things, although I think I am clear of breaching an NDA or creating real grief for my former colleagues.

But I can't help feeling like things that happen to me are only really real if I put them to words; if I give an accounting of them to others. And the last year and a half has, therefore, felt distinctly unreal. I hope this one thing, of all the other things that are broken, can be remedied.

At the end of the universe there will always be a version of you, a speck that remains after every possible skin has been shed, a creature of gant shadows and negative space.

— The Hanged Man, Irem

So I just got the email that Bluesky suspended me for three days for the following post:

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg deserve to die more than any two men have ever deserved to die. Any sane society would hang them and then hang everyone who ever associated with them.

So you know, if you follow me on that failing social network, expect to see me returned in three days unless they decide they want to perma me instead out of dumb spite.

I wanna be clear: I knew I was going to catch account strikes (god, what a dumb moderation system) for this post because I know exactly how stupid Bluesky's moderation is. And I also fully stand by this statement.

Facebook is responsible abetting an actual genocide. Elon Musk's dismantlement of USAID has led to a death toll that's likely to be in the hundreds of thousands, of which there is no real full accounting yet. If those two men don't deserve a scaffold at the Hague I don't know who does.