Platform: PC (Windows/OSX/Linux)

Build Versions:
Steam: 1.6.1031-win, 1.6.135-OSX, 1.6.1034-linux
GOG: 1.6.1032-win, 1.6.136-OSX, 1.6.1043-linux
Epic: 1.6.1033-win, 1.6.137-OSX

Release Date: 30/01/2024

Tech bug fixes

• When running the game through the Steam client achievements pop-ups will be seen at the time they are triggered, rather than when the game is relaunched.
  
• Setting preferences are now saved on closing the pause menu when using gamepads and keyboard controls as well as a mouse.
  

Hello all, and happy new year!

Were excited to be featured alongside many other fine narrative games in The Storytellers Festival!

The Storytellers Festival begins on January 29th 18:00pm (GMT)/10:00am (PST), and well be live streaming Mask of the Rose on the 30th at 10:00pm (GMT)/14:00pm (PST). Hope to see some of you there!

Update: Daffodil

We've also just released Daffodil: the latest update for Mask of the Rose, and one which will be the last for now.

[h3]Bugfixes Galore[/h3]

Daffodil is mostly about bugfixing: bringing Mask of the Rose to a nice, tidy state so we can commence work proper on the console ports for PlayStation and Xbox.

See the post for the full patch notes, but here's a sample of what's included:

• Taught Griz to use the correct pronouns for Mr Fires.
  
• Convinced David to stop playing gooseberry during other people's sentimental conversations at the Feast.
  
• Revised what it means when the player selects that they dislike a person, so that it now means "I don't like them" and also "I'm not attracted": an improvement to clarity, if perhaps a disappointment to enemies-to-lovers tropers.
  
• Discouraged Harjit from bolting immediately after the player's confession of feelings, no matter how overwhelmed Harjit might be.
  
• Stopped Horatia from thanking the player for fulfilling her request when she never made such a request in the first place; gratitude can be carried to excess.
  
• Prevented Reginald from teleporting into the player's bedchamber during a personal conversation with Moss.
  
• Stopped Harjit from growling too many times in a row, no matter how fetching he finds the player.
  
• Prevented Archie from initiating a second seduction immediately after the first, though it pained us to correct this.
  
• Many typos and grammatical errors have been fixed.
  

Platform: PC
Build Versions:

Steam:1.6.1021-win, 1.6.134-OSX, 1.6.1022-linux
GOG:1.6.1023-win, 1.6.132-OSX, 1.6.1024-linux
Epic: 1.6.1025-win, 1.6.133-OSX

• Extended Harjit's memory so he can no longer forget something immediately after sharing it with you.
  
• Taught Griz to use the correct pronouns for Mr Fires.
  
• Fixed an option that was misleading about which witness you wished to interrogate on a particular topic.
  
• Cleared up grammatical infelicities from the otherwise very literary self-insert fictions written for Rachel.
  
• Discouraged Harjit from visiting Ferret's shop twice in one afternoon.
  
• Convinced David to stop playing gooseberry during other people's sentimental conversations at the Feast.
  
• Revised what it means when the player selects that they dislike a person, so that it now means "I don't like them" and also "I'm not attracted": an improvement to clarity, if perhaps a disappointment to enemies-to-lovers tropers.
  
• Prevented the player from introducing themselves as a census-taker after Pages has already confiscated their badge.
  
• Allowed the player to tell Barqujin about Batachikhan's success in a particular quest.
  
• Discouraged Harjit from bolting immediately after the player's confession of feelings, no matter how overwhelmed Harjit might be.
  
• Stopped Horatia from thanking the player for fulfilling her request when she never made such a request in the first place; gratitude can be carried to excess.
  
• Prevented Griz from relenting and doing a favour she had already said she wasn't going to do.
  
• Cleared up a confusion whereby an appointment with Pages about one topic resulted in a scene about something quite different.
  
• Improved the text written concerning Virginia's history when the player selects certain motives for her.
  
• Deprived Virginia of the mindreading ability to know things about the player that she had never been told.
  
• Expanded the number of conversational gambits available to characters when speaking about themselves at the end of a scene.
  
• Clarified some text surrounding situations where the player is both Griz' lover and her best friend.
  
• Discouraged the murderer glossing over past misdeeds after they have in fact admitted to the murder.
  
• Removed misleading epilogue line about encountering David only occasionally after the feast.
  
• Removed spurious reference to Moss in situations where he should not be familiar to the player.
  
• Removed Rachel's ability to guess the player's name without being told.
  
• Prevented Archie from reacting to the player's banter about past cities as though the player were expressing deep fear.
  
• Fixed situation in which Hogslain Market did not become permanently available to the player when it arguably should do so.
  
• Corrected Archie's sense of personal space so that he will no longer stand right in front of Griz at the Feast in certain character groupings.
  
• Prevented Reginald from teleporting into the player's bedchamber during a personal conversation with Moss.
  
• Encouraged Harjit not to engage in displays of excessive affection in the courtyard.
  
• Stopped Harjit from growling too many times in a row, no matter how fetching he finds the player.
  
• Made Virginia (very) slightly more patient with the player, rather than expecting a certain quest to be performed instantly.
  
• Adjusted farewells on departing from Pages' chambers to avoid certain faux pas.
  
• Discouraged Griz from asking the player for the same favour twice in one afternoon.
  
• Adjusted order of events around providing Archie with certain supplies, in order to make it less likely that the player might accidentally waste a visit.
  
• Prevented the interface from speaking of a lover as though they were only a friend in circumstances where the romantic relationship has reached its full development but some friendly conversation scenes remain to explore.
  
• Corrected missing information about what has happened to the player's badge when it has been taken away by someone other than Mr Pages.
  
• Prevented Archie from initiating a second seduction immediately after the first, though it pained us to correct this.
  
• Removed case where the term PlayerStandin could appear in the codex; there was nothing to see here, no, definitely not.
  
• Prevented David reiterating some dialogue in response to certain love scene patterns.
  
• Corrected inaccurate reference to the player not having been to Parliament when in fact they have.
  
• Prevented Griz from insensitively asking why the player hasn't been to work lately after Mr Pages has fired them.
  
• Prevented Phoebe from popping up in the midst of a scene between David and Rachel when she had no good reason to be there.
  
• Made Phoebe drop the topic of the player's family if she has already asked once and been given no answer.
  
• Made it possible to interview Ivy for the census when Phoebe is also present at the market as a possible census-filler.
  
• Corrected repetition of intervening text when changing the subject from Milton to Virginia while taking the census with them both.
  
• Prevented Mr Pages from referring to relationship interference when none has really been clearly called out by the text.
  
• Improved codex instructions for a certain quest involving Harjit.
  
• Made it possible to confirm Ivy's intent to assist at the trial in advance.
  
• Prevented Harjit from interjecting into a private greeting with Archie merely to share his opinion of the news.
  
• Once unlocked the synagogue will always be available on the map.
  
• Many typos and grammatical errors have been fixed.
  

• Sigils are now unlocked correctly when playing offline on Epic builds, allowing players to access additional backgrounds after completing the game.
  
• When loading the game, cloud syncing will no longer stop sigil data from registering and prevent players accessing additional backgrounds during character creation.
  
• The intermittent crash experienced when closing the game on Epic has been resolved.
  
• The question mark icons on the stroycrafting interface will no longer obscure the token text when text size is set to the largest setting.
  
• The suited and booted achievement will now unlock when acquiring hats and torso items from NPCs as well as from shops.
  

Platform: PC (Windows/OSX/Linux)

Build Versions:

Steam: 1.5.940-win, 1.5.124-OSX, 1.5.941-linux
GOG: 1.5.942-win, 1.5.125-OSX, 1.5.943-linux

Release Date: 08/11/2023

• Ink commands will no longer be seen in dialogue when Phoebe's Storycrafting token is unlocked.
  

Hello everyone!

Welcome to Laburnum, also known as the wholesome-sounding murdercrafting update. (To see the changes youll need to start a new save game, so please dont worry if youre continuing a save and dont see anything different.)

Our overall aim with this update is to reduce the cognitive overhead involved in crafting murder-related stories. Were making changes to help clarify what murderboard choices actually matter, and you should feel like you have more understanding of and agency over the trial itself.

• We've made the initial Ministerial Expos assignment that Archie gives you after the tutorial more linear. The idea is that it guides you, step by step, through the process of first forming a question (a hypothesis) on the board and how this opens up new options to explore on the map, which lets you unlock new tokens before being able to form solutions (a theory) which can be handed in.
  
• Weve made the murderboard smaller (every slot on it now potentially really affects the trial outcome). This will only impact murder-related stories; stories about rats, revolution, romance, etc will have the same number of slots as they currently have.
  
• Weve also made both the generated text and Harjit's response much clearer about what you've generated, whether it's a hypothesis or a final theory, and what it's likely to achieve.
  
• Harjit will now expressly warn you if you've formed an "incorrect" murder theory, something that's plausible but hard to prove, and which will therefore mean the trial is likely to go sideways.
  
• You now can't invent explanations that are too fundamentally incoherent (like that Griz took the candles in to David, because everyone knows she didn't).
  
• It'll be harder to get into a bad situation in the trial unless you do it on purpose, but also easier to get out of said situation using One Weird Trick (cant wait for you to discover this one, hahahah).
  

Platform: PC (Windows/OSX/Linux)

Build Versions:
Steam:1.5.933-win, 1.5.121-OSX, 1.5.934-linux
GOG:1.5.935-win, 1.5.122-OSX, 1.5.936-linux
Release Date: 07/11/2023

Epic
Build versions: TBC
Release Date: To follow ASAP

Platform: Switch
Build version: 1.5.0
Release Date: Submitted to Nintendo. Coming soon


Updates

• Clear UI signalling for forming hypotheses (questions) and theories (solutions).
  
• The initial Ministerial Expos that Archie gives you is more linear to act as an extended tutorial.
  
• Weve made the Mystery Solutions murderboard smaller.
  
• Weve made both the generated text and Harjit's response much clearer about the hypothesis or final theory, and what it's likely to achieve.
  
• Weve added more save points (including immediately after character creation and each evening before supper)
  
• The new game intro message can now be dismissed.
  

• Ivy's name will not be revealed before she has introduced herself.
  
• Weve prevented David from making an appearance when visiting Rachel to discuss motives for murder.
  
• The option to visit the thing in the basement will no longer lock out after performing the Hallowmas ritual with Horatia.
  
• It will no longer be snowing when recalling the past.
  
• Misalliance novel plots can now be handed into Rachel if the heroine is a non-Neath character.
  
• Milton will no longer mention potential murder methods that the player has not yet discovered.
  
• The academic gown is now removed immediately if caught stealing a forbidden text from the Masters.
  
• Ferret will no longer mention the use of firearms as a form of pest control after they have befriended Algernon.
  
• We've fixed a rare circumstance where you could solve the murder during Confessions, skipping the season of Yule entirely.
  
• You will no longer lie to Ferret about having met the Rat Prophet-King if you have not done so.
  
• Rat Hagiographies are now removed from the Storycrafting interface once they've been handed in to Theo or Ferret.
  
• The correct murder method is now referred to in the generated text at all times.
  
• References to eating mushrooms have been removed during supper scenes when you are eating suspicious fish stews.
  
• All tokens for the Haunted novel plot can now be unlocked.
  
• Batachikhan's name now appears correctly in the journal.
  
• During Hallowmas the fox mask is now correctly linked to desire rather than fear.
  
• Griz will now refer to Theo by name if you are acquainted.
  
• Griz will no longer ask you to take her to Parliament after you've already shown her the way.
  
• Horatia will no longer mention Moss at the Feast if you turned him away from Chapman's.
  
• When talking to Horatia during supper the player will no longer mention tentacles in the basement if they have not yet discovered them.
  
• Moss will no longer be confused as to whether or not he has met May.
  
• Ivy will now refer correctly to the people you have implicated as a culprit when interviewing her about the murder.
  
• After confessing to a crime, inhabitants of the Neath will no longer supply you with clues to implicate other people.
  
• You will no longer respond bluntly to Ferret when you have chosen to be polite to them.
  
• Milton no longer confuses Rachel and Phoebe when interviewing him about possible murder methods.
  
• We've tweaked the sub-goals for the 'higher power' quest to make it clear when you are able to speak to Virginia about the dept she owes you.
  
• When kissing Ferret you will no longer hear cheering rats before it has been revealed that they now have the power of speech.
  
• When speaking to Milton, soul acquisition will no longer presented as a mystery if the player has already learned about it.
  
• Ferret's dialogue at the Feast has been fixed to correctly reference their baptism.
  
• Dialogue will no longer be repeated when saying goodbye to Mr Pages.
  
• As always, a few more typos have been fixed.

• The pause menu can once again be accessed on the character creation summary screen via the HUD.
  
• All sound effects can now be muted.
  
• NPC expressions once again change on the Storycrafting interface.
  
• The placement of the mouse cursor will no longer interfere with keyboard controls on the summary screen of character creation.
  
• It is once again possible to navigate the wardrobe with a gamepad or Joy-Con following the removal of the academic gown when stealing a forbidden text from the Masters.
  

Hello everyone!

Hope you had a lovely summer. We're back with a preview of the next Mask of the Rose update, just for you.

Laburnum is going to focus on the Storycrafting element of Mask of the Rose. It will also introduce more autosave points, and all the bugfixes we can squeeze in.

Our overall aim with this update is to reduce the cognitive overhead involved in crafting murder-related stories. Were making changes to help clarify what murderboard choices actually matter, and you should feel like you have more understanding of and agency over the trial itself.

• We've made the initial Ministerial Expos assignment that Archie gives you after the tutorial more linear. The idea is that it guides you, step by step, through the process of first forming a question (a hypothesis) on the board and how this opens up new options to explore on the map, which lets you unlock new tokens before being able to form solutions (a theory) which can be handed in.
  
• Weve made the murderboard smaller (every slot on it now potentially really affects the trial outcome). This will only impact murder-related stories; stories about rats, revolution, romance, etc will have the same number of slots as they currently have.
  
• Weve also made both the generated text and Harjit's response much clearer about what you've generated, whether it's a hypothesis or a final theory, and what it's likely to achieve.
  
• Harjit will now expressly warn you if you've formed an "incorrect" murder theory, something that's plausible but hard to prove, and which will therefore mean the trial is likely to go sideways.
  
• You now can't invent explanations that are too fundamentally incoherent (like that Griz took the candles in to David, because everyone knows she didn't).
  
• It'll be harder to get into a bad situation in the trial unless you do it on purpose, but also easier to get out of said situation using One Weird Trick (cant wait for you to discover this one, hahahah).
  

• Do you feel like you understand what to do and where to go next?
  
• Do you feel concepts like the difference between hypotheticals (questions) and conclusions (solutions) are clear?
  

• Is it easier to form questions and theories?
  
• Do you feel like you know what to do and where to go for answers?
  
• Do you feel able to form solutions and present them to Harjit?
  

Hope youre all faring well and have been enjoying plumbing the depths of Mask of the Rose since the Constance update! Weve been busy planning and putting together this update, as well as looking ahead to the next.

Foxglove largely focuses on bug fixes for many of the issues youve sent through so far. Among other things, we have:

• Increased Rachel's repertoire so that she no longer runs out of things to say on being seduced more than twice.
  
• Calmed Ferret's fear of spiders so that they will no longer drag the conversation back to that subject rather than letting the player get on with the business of their visit.
  
• Removed a crack in your wardrobe through which falling snow could occasionally be seen.
  
• Stopped Ferret from recommending rodent-based cuisine once they are on speaking terms with rats.
  
• Discouraged Griz from acts of ventriloquism whereby she spoke at the supper table despite not being visibly present.
  
• Corrected several instances in which the code sigils that control the working of the universe inadvertently became visible to the mortal eye.
  
• Improved David's understanding of graveyard etiquette so that he will no longer pay calls on Horatia whilst deceased.
  
• Given Mr Pages the moral courage to meet the player at the Feast even after it has done something quite regrettable to London. Previously unseen emotional confrontations may ensue.
  

Platform: PC (Windows/OSX/Linux)
Build Versions:
Steam: 1.4.832-win, 1.4.113-OSX, 1.4.833-linux
GOG: 1.4.834-win, 1.4.111-OSX, 1.4.835-linux
Epic: 1.4.835-win, 1.4.112-OSX
Release Date: 31/07/2023

Platform: Switch
Build version: 1.4.0
Release Date: TBC

Narrative bug fixes

• Increased Rachel's repertoire so that she no longer runs out of things to say on being seduced more than twice.
  
• Formerly, the whole world could screech to a halt when the player asked Griz certain pointed questions about her relationship with Rachel Landau. Now her discomfiture takes a less dramatic form.
  
• Clarified a conversation with Batachikhan to make more evident that the player is suggesting they look for Barqujin instead of going directly to Mr Pages.
  
• Prevented Ferret from holding grudges: previously they could become uncooperative in circumstances where they asked the player's help with a baptismal matter; the player refused; and the player later chose to take up the task after all.
  
• Calmed Ferret's fear of spiders so that they will no longer drag the conversation back to that subject rather than letting the player get on with the business of their visit.
  
• Gave Mr Pages the moral courage to meet the player at the Feast even after it has done something quite regrettable to London. Previously unseen emotional confrontations may ensue.
  
• Made Harjit more observant in his constabulary duties, such that if one visits him with books to hand over in evidence, he will now receive them from the player.
  
• Made Harjit more receptive to certain trial arrangements involving the intervention of May; previously it was possible for him to refuse to cooperate under seemingly arbitrary circumstances.
  
• Eliminated a temporal distortion whereby a particular visit to Rachel would consume a full day rather than only the morning.
  
• Further diminished David's precognitive abilities by preventing him from talking about culprits in his murder before he has died.
  
• Corrected a misunderstanding of Phoebe's, whereby she could misinterpret what the player said about commitment levels in their relationship.
  
• Removed Rachel's arbitrary distaste for storylines about characters becoming infamous; it is no longer impossible to turn such stories in.
  
• Disallowed the player from asking Theophilus the same trial-related favour more than once: he will remember his commitments, even without nagging.
  
• Improved the behaviour of the storycrafting board in several contexts where a story is generated about the player character.
  
• Corrected David's deja vu so that he no longer treats his first seductive encounter with the player as though it were his second.
  
• Taught Griz not to narrate her own actions in the third person, as it puts people off.
  
• Made an option to kiss Reginald respect the player's preferences about romantic involvement.
  
• Stopped Ferret from recommending rodent-based cuisine once they are on speaking terms with rats.
  
• Discouraged Griz from acts of ventriloquism whereby she spoke at the supper table despite not being visibly present.
  
• Made the player's memory more accurate about the number of encounters they have had with Milton.
  
• Discouraged Rachel Landau from referring to certain persons as murderers as a point in the story where no one has even died.
  
• Made Ivy finish her thought in a context where she previously broke off mid-sentence.
  
• Corrected several instances in which the code sigils that control the working of the universe inadvertently became visible to the mortal eye.
  
• Taught the player not to feign misunderstanding at inappropriate moments.
  
• Prevented Phoebe from acquiring false traumatic memories, as in one case she could refer to a very bad experience that had not befallen her in this timeline.
  
• Prevented the player from asking May the same question twice, so he will not be put to the trouble of repeating himself.
  
• Cured case of mistaken identity whereby option text could refer to Ivy as "Rachel".
  
• Revoked David's precognition so that he can no longer refer to his own death before it happens.
  
• Improved David's understanding of graveyard etiquette so that he will no longer pay calls on Horatia whilst deceased.
  
• Reduced Harjit's expressions of grief so that he now only shows the player a certain photograph once.
  
• Repaired the storycrafting board so that crafted novels are no longer so prone to confusing the protagonist and side character when generating stories.
  
• Many typos and grammatical errors have been fixed.
  

• Addressed an issue such that holding the ESC key too long could open and then rapidly close the pause menu again on some systems, making it difficult to operate.
  
• Removed a crack in the player's wardrobe through which falling snow could occasionally be seen.
  
• Icons on the journal's status page are now aligned correctly.
  
• The Go Back button on the setting menu no longer appears greyed out.
  
• Inputs on the bug reporter should no longer affect interfaces open underneath it.
  

• The game will no longer crash when spamming the X button as the Storycrafting tutorial closes.
  
• The game will no longer crash when spamming X as the character background interface loads.
  

Platform: PC (Windows/OSX/Linux)
Build Versions:
Steam: 1.3.762-win, 1.3.105-OSX, 1.3.763-Linux
GOG: 1.3.764-win, 1.3.106-OSX, 1.3.765-Linux
Epic 1.3.766-win, 1.3.107-OSX
Release Date: 21/06/2023

Narrative bug fixes

• Improved Ferret's haggling skills when bargaining down a high price on medicinal goods.
  
• Prevented Mr Pages from becoming completely speechless on receiving an overwhelming number of romantic declarations.
  
• Corrected a case where in rare circumstances it could become impossible to ask Harjit for guidance to Parliament.
  
• Corrected a situation where Harjit could be ignorant of cooperation from a man in a bright-buttoned coat.
  
• Several typos and grammatical issues have been fixed.
  

• The HUD is now present on screen when recalling the Fall.
  
• Spam clicking the Journal icon on the HUD will no longer cause:
  
  
  
  • the dialogue to freeze
    
  • choices to become unselectable
    
  • the map icons to disappear
    
  • an inability to close the destination choice interface on the map
    
  • a perpetual loading icon on the attic hub interface
    
  
  

Platform: PC (Windows/OSX/Linux/
Build Versions:
Steam: 1.3.741-win, 1.3.98-OSX, 1.3.742-Linux
GOG: 1.3.743-win, 1.3.99-OSX, 1.3.744-Linux
Epic: 1.3.745-win, Epic 1.3.100-OSX
Release Date: 15/06/2023

Tokens now unlock correctly when skipping Archies Storycrafting tutorial.

Hello everyone!

First of all, thank you to everyone who has picked up Mask of the Rose. We had a bit of a rough start, with a lot of feedback about the difficulty of adequately completing goals in the time available in particular, but were hopeful that we can make some changes that will improve the play experience significantly for you straight away, and follow those up with some that will require a bit more time to get right.

We really appreciate the show of faith in your comments and reviews, and hope with a little time we can bring Mask of the Rose to a delightful state for your enjoyment.

Whats new?

Extended Seasons

In the Constance update, the seasons of Confessions and Yule are both twice as long: fourteen days instead of seven. This is in response to hearing that you felt that you couldnt get your teeth into enough of the stories in the game. Weve now let you loose, as it were, and look forward to hearing about everything you get up to with your newfound freedom!

Hand in hand with this, there are pacing changes to the opening of the game which will help new players focus on the elements that its essential to take on board before proceeding with the second act: census taking and storycrafting.

Lastly, as you now have more time, you will no longer be invited to dismiss what you might call economy quests at the end of the season of Confessions (for example, closing yourself off to census taking, which is one of the income sources that you might want to keep hold of).

We don't expect the update to cause any mischief with your save games, but you might want to consider starting a fresh run to best enjoy the longer play time.

Detective Signposting

We have also had much heart-rending feedback around being unable to save Archie, so were making some tweaks to Investigation:

• Talking to characters about murder theories which include unknown elements is useful for progressing your investigation, but weve heard people were finding it counterintuitive. Now, during the storycrafting tutorial, Archie will ask you to demonstrate using unknowns in your stories in order to highlight that its the right thing to try.
  
• After Archies arrest, it is now much clearer that there are multiple ways to save him, and that some are more challenging to achieve than others.
  
• All characters will now be up for helping you with the investigation as a matter of course, but with slightly different dialogue about why.
  
• You can also now take your murder theories to Harjit as a free action, and hell remind you to try using unknowns if relevant.
  

• People feel the first autosave is too late in the game; well look into this!
  
• There are some points in the game where it goes some while without an autosave; we will investigate where we can add a natural break to include additional saves.
  

Platform: PC (Windows/OSX/Linux/)
Build Versions:
Steam: 1.0.735-win, 1.0.97-OSX, 1.0.736-Linux
GOG: 1.0.737-win, 1.0.95-OSX, 1.0.738-Linux
Epic: 1.0.739-win, 1.0.96-OSX
Release Date: 15/06/2023

Narrative bug fixes

• In the event you have arranged multiple back-up plans for rescuing Archie, the likeliest rescue will now take precedence over the contenders.
  
• Archie is no longer allowed conjugal visits in your attic after he has been arrested.
  
• It is no longer possible to attempt a certain Rubbery conjoining more than once.
  
• Several typos and grammatical errors have been fixed.
  

• Resolutions settings now update correctly when launching the game in windowed mode, and prevent a sporadic crash experienced when loading new scenes.
  
• On Steam and GOG sigils are now unlocked correctly when playing offline, allowing players to access additional backgrounds after completing the game. This change will follow on Epic in a future patch.
  

Thank you everyone who has already picked up Mask of the Rose!

We've received lots of feedback about the game's pacing and the way the murder mystery investigation plays out, and we're working on the first post-launch update for you as we speak!

We're proposing changes that will afford you more time in the Seasons of Confessions and Yule, and that will give you free rein to check your murder theories in with Harjit without it costing you any in-game time.

Once we've had a chance to implement and test everything, we expect to make an update next week. Thank you for bearing with us while we work on this. :)

We're also sifting through everything that's come in via the in-game bug reporter! If you find a bug, you can either press F8 or access the reporter from the pause menu. This is ideal, because it automatically collects all of the information we'd ask you for and sends it to us in a lovely little parcel. Thank you if you've spotted something and sent a report, it's hugely helpful.

Oh, and I don't know if you saw this.

Until next week!

Hello from team Mask of the Rose and from our friends, the crochet Masters:



(Did you miss the free crochet pattern we put out with The Pigeons Nest? You can download it to occupy your hands until we put Mask of the Rose in them!)

Its really not long at all until Mask is released; 15 days at time of posting. Thank you to everyone who has wishlisted it so far, whether youve been along for the journey since before the Kickstarter or discovered us in the recent LudoNarraCon. Youre all very welcome in our parlour!

Wed like to ask you a favour that will really help boost our launch and make a big difference to the success of the game! If you know a streamer who should really have a look at Mask, wed be delighted for you to point them at our creator list signup form so they can receive a key in advance: https://forms.gle/bwvzkLEMSdaJbPGr9

Release will be on the 8th of June and, barring any shenanigans, the game will be available everywhere (here, GOG and Switch) by 1800 BST (thats UTC +1).

You can join our Discord if youd like to party with us on launch day!

See you on the 8th, delicious friend.

Mask of the Rose is coming out on the 8th of June and we're doing all sorts of fun things between now and then to celebrate!

LudoNarraCon is an incredible showcase of narrative games which we've had the pleasure of being involved with for a few years now. Just take a look at the list of exhibitors, many of whom will have new demos to share during the event (4th - 8th May).



Hannah will be streaming Mask of the Rose for a couple of hours on Friday the 5th (from 1315 until about 1530, BST), so come along and help her decide who to romance, and whether she should investigate that tentacle in the basement (this is not innuendo) (or is it).

Greetings! The 8th of June is fast approaching, and the team are all heads-down getting the game over the line. All we're doing now is fixing bugs and preparing all the launch platforms to get the game in your hands. We've stolen just a few minutes of their time to ask: "what are you most looking forward to players experiencing and why?"



[h2]Stuart Young, Producer[/h2]

I can't wait for players to visit the places we haven't shown yet. There aren't a huge number, but they tend to be on the weirder and more esoteric side of what the Fallen London setting has to offer, and the atmosphere of these locations is great. We have a Rubbery character, so it's only fair to give him somewhere appropriately squelchy and mysterious to live!

[h2]Paul Arendt, Art Director[/h2]

I'm looking forward to players experiencing the big visual setpieces we haven't revealed yet, in particular the bit where the and with no warning to everyone's great consternation.

[h2]Liz Hall, Quality Analysis Intern[/h2]

I can't wait for the players to spend more time up close with some Fallen London faves! Getting to know these characters in a far more personal manner (some would argue an insensibly personal manner) is a treat and I can't wait to hear what people think.

[h2]Lesleyann White, Principal QA Tester[/h2]

Naturally I'm looking forward to people's reaction to a certain charming and dapper hat, and the storylines surrounding said hat. And I'm not talking about the crow.

(Stuart's note: To put this in context, the Murder Crow DLC available to many tiers of our Kickstarter backers actually takes the form of an equipable hat, which will chime in with apropos comments on morbid occasions. The Murder Crow isn't the only anthropomorphic headgear in the game, though!)

[h2]Hannah Flynn, Communications Director[/h2]

I'm mostly looking forward to camping in the Mask of the Rose channels in our Discord to watch the "OMG! WHAT?!" moments happen in real time. This game really takes you places, and I don't think anyone has predicted anything like the kinds of journeys and outcomes the characters will experience. I also have a few more promotional surprises coming which I hope people will enjoy!

[h2]Emily Short, Creative Director[/h2]

There are quite a few different ways the game can end, and I'm looking forward to seeing which outcomes players prefer -- for themselves and for the characters.

Mask of the Rose will release on the 8th of June.

Being a perspicacious kind of person, youll notice that the 8th of June is very much not in April. We hope youll forgive us one last delay; lets talk about why weve made the decision to do so.

We always knew Mask of the Rose would be more responsive to player choice than is usual for visual novels, and that we wanted to make more space for interconnections and small surprises, but we expected it would still work well with visual novel interface conventions. So for example, players would be able to indicate who theyd like to spend time with through map movement, but we wouldnt need a quest log.

As we worked on it, though, we kept finding fun, exciting, or emotionally powerful opportunities to connect parts of the story together, and the narrative is now far more responsive and dynamic than we initially anticipated. Now the game is nearing completion, weve been able to do more playtesting, and weve found that we need to do more to help the player navigate this vast web of choices.

In particular:

• When the player uses the map, they now no longer just select where and who theyd like to spend time with; we also ask what objective theyd like to work towards, because there are often several reasons a player might have for seeking out a particular character. We often need to know this in advance, because it might influence, for example, whether you want to speak to Horatia when shes alone or with company.
  
• The wardrobe is one of the games key mechanics, but we found it wasnt always easy to figure out how exactly it was affecting conversations, and so put together the ideal outfit for an occasion. So we now give much clearer feedback when your current outfit enables dialogue options.
  
• It could be hard to keep track of how much time you had remaining during a conversation, so weve made it easier to tell which choices will advance time, too.
  
• As it turns out, theres so much to do that its easy to lose track of your available objectives, so weve added a new interface to track this for you.

Mask of the Rose is coming out this April for PC/Mac/Linux and Nintendo Switch, and we are beginning the celebrations now!

As a Feast of the Rose gift for you all, weve commissioned fibre artist and games enthusiast The Pigeons Nest to create a crochet pattern for your favourite verbacient Master of the Bazaar, Mr Pages!



The Mr Pages crochet pattern is available from The Pigeons Nest, for free, as a downloadable pdf. You can work up your own cuddly Master and tell it all of your love stories while you wait to get close to the real thing in Mask of the Rose...

Down the years weve often been asked for plushies of our characters, and we have finally found this lovely solution to offer people which doesnt have the same kind of negative environmental impact as your average plush toy. The Pigeons Nest (aka Bex) is an independent crochet artist who creates patterns, crochet kits and crocheted items, as well as courses for learning to crochet and all manner else besides. Were so delighted with her design for Mr Pages!

In addition to the free pattern, Bex has made 30 Mr Pages kits, containing all of the yarn and fixings youll need to make a little Master of your own. Bex is also offering to create 10 complete Mr Pages, who will be made to order. The kits are priced at 25 each and the complete Mr Pages are 65, available through The Pigeon's Nest.

If you make a little Mr Pages, please do share it with us! Wed love to see where they end up.

WIN a crochet Mr Pages

As if thats not enough, we have a complete Mr Pages for one lucky competition winner to claim!

Simply respond to this thread and let us know which Mask of the Rose character youre most looking forward to spending time with.

The competition runs from today, the 9th of February, until Friday the 24th at 1400 GMT, and the winner will be drawn by random number generator the following week.

Best of luck, delicious friends!

Read the full competition terms and conditions if thats your thing.

The Mask of the Rose Soundtrack is out now!

Were also delighted to unleash the full Mask of the Rose official soundtrack, composed by Laurence Chapman!



Its available to purchase now on Steam, or from Laurences Bandcamp. Theres even a special edition CD version! Kickstarter backers who are due to receive a digital copy will find one in their email inbox shortly.

We hope you enjoy both Mr Pages and the soundtrack! Happy Feast of the Rose!

Happy new year! We hope you had a restful midwinter and have returned refreshed and, hopefully, excited to see Mask of the Rose launch THIS YEAR! Cor, blimey, etc!

Mask is on track for an April release, and we can't wait to get it into your hands.



Were going to the indie game event WASD in East London from 30 March until 1 April. Therell be more to announce about everything were bringing to the event, and Im really excited about it; we havent felt ready to show a game on a showfloor since our last outing to PAX West in 2019 so this feels very special. I hope some of you will consider coming by and saying hi!

This month for your development blog we have an interview with our composer, Laurence Chapman. You may know Laurences work from 80 Days and Heavens Vault by Inkle! The Mask of the Rose soundtrack will be available next month on Steam.



How do you usually find games to compose for? Do studios approach you?

Id been working with Inkle for all of their projects from about 2014 when we did 80 Days, and that came about because I had a list of games companies that I was emailing, on and off, and I got to I in that list before getting a response! They were working with another composer at the time and couldnt quite get the sound that they wanted, so they switched to me instead. And a partnership was born!

Whats different between composing for a game and for a TV show or a film?

Im enjoying the game stuff because you get a lot more freedom and time. So for example, the wardrobe music in Mask of the Rose has ended up being three minutes long, and it could have been two. You have a lot more musical freedom to just say, well, this theme is really working so Im going to make it longer, and youre not restricted by the length of a scene.

And the second thing is, the development process is that much longer. So I can see the artwork that youre producing right at the beginning. Paul sent me ideas over a year ago about what it was going to look like, so your musical imagination is already going, ideas are already going through your head. Whereas on a film, you can be told who the actors are, and maybe get a script, but its not the same until the film has been put together. In a film or a TV show, its not really until post production that a composer can effectively do anything, and then of course youre stuck to the picture. Which can be a good thing! Because its a nice challenge. Maybe youve got to go from one mood to another quite quickly and then quickly back to another scene. But Im really enjoying the artistic freedom of doing games.

They say that films are made in the edit, right?

And if youre the composer youre right in the middle of that. In fact John Williams was doing one of the JJ Abrams Star Wars, and there were some scenes that the orchestra had already recorded and JJ Abrams would say, weve edited that scene out now. That no longer exists and we need to do something different. Which for many composers is the worst nightmare because you think, right, we can tick that off the list now, thats done! And then the director comes to you and says, we need something new! But John Williams being who he is just says, oh fine, Ill just write you something new. Not bothered!

It would be fine with me, because your job is to write music for the film. If they edit something out, then thats what you do. If I really wanted to keep a piece of music, Id find somewhere to put it in. Its a job, a service youre providing for other people. And its nice to feel useful, thats the thing. I spent years practising the piano and doing all kinds of musical study, and its nice to actually feel useful!

What struck you about Mask of the Rose which set off your musical imagination?

The nature of the artwork somehow made it look somehow dark, but not aggressively so. It clearly wasnt like an 18 certificate film, that kind of thing. It was a kind of nice, gothic atmosphere which I thought I could write quite well for. So when you see that kind of material to work with then its encouraging because you think, Im on to something; I can get the sound world match the visual world.

Its not bleak, grimdark stuff.

Yes, not scraping cellos and screaming monks!

Is there anything you want to highlight from the soundtrack that you think is particularly successful for the game?

Im really happy with the main theme and the market tune. The nice thing about that market tune is Tom, the clarinettist, said I love this tune. I could play this all day. I think at that point the sound engineer said, Well, we still need to get it right!

[previewyoutube=-28XXB2yBd0;full][/previewyoutube]

Is there anything in the soundtrack that might surprise people, or which people should listen out for?

You could play a game called spot the sixth, if youre very musical! Theres a major sixth (E flat down to F sharp) which turns up in the main theme and comes out in various points around the game. It doesnt mean anything per se but its just a way of combining everything, if you like, so everything has a sound world.

Thats one difference between the game and the film world, is that the themes dont necessarily develop. They will do in other games where theres a more definite storyline, where its less interactive. Its not the same way that in a film a character definitely goes from A to B and thats not in the control of the viewer. So you know that your theme for a certain person has to be able to do something else, whereas with a game you dont know which route the player is going to take to get to the end of the story.

Yeah, in Mask of the Rose theres more of a defined order than were used to! But usually our players go off and spend 200 hours doing whatever they like, which we dont know about!

The last Mask of the Rose devlog of the year comes from our creative director, Emily Short.

Mask of the Rose doesnt try to be true to the realities of Victorian London, and thats not just because of the supernatural elements in the mix. The characters dont speak in true Victorian diction: instead, they use language that sometimes suggests their setting, but is hopefully still familiar enough to players to feel comfortable. We didnt want accuracy to come between players and a sense of connection.

And there are lots of things we left out of our world because they werent what the story is about. What happens if you move a city already suffering from severe sewage management issues into a dank, enclosed space? We probably dont want to know.

How much food would you have to warehouse in order to feed this many people? We could come closer to answering that one, thanks to the monumental (and monumentally titled) contemporary volume The Food of London: A Sketch of the Chief Varieties, Sources of Supply, Probable Quantities, Modes of Arrival, Processes of Manufacture, Suspected Adulteration, and Machinery of Distribution, of the Food for a Community of Two Millions and a Half. Despite its helpful hint that London ate 80,000 tons of cabbage a year, we didnt draw so much from the numbers in The Food of London, and took more of an interest in the suspected adulteration passages which give fascinating anecdotal snippets about historical methods of culinary fraud.

Very often, what we were looking for was not rigorous accuracy or even plausibility. (This is a world full of Rubbery Men and talking crows. Plausibility departed long ago.)

Instead, we were looking for fitness and specificity. All these research materials, we used the way John McPhee is said to have used a Websters 1913 dictionary: as a treasury of images, incidents, and character observations more perfectly suited to the story we were telling than any we could think of on our own.

Here are a few of the more entertaining or surprising resources we found along the way.

[h2]Neathy Animals[/h2]

We knew that bats of several kinds were going to have a starring presence in Mask of the Rose. After all, they did steal London. It was fascinating to learn more about how bats smell; how they hunt; what they eat; and how they mate (often upside down). The Secret Lives of Bats, by Merlin Tuttle is loaded with stories, images, and pro-bat advocacy.



Meanwhile, when we wanted to know how a rat population might react to a sudden change in the circumstances of the city, we listened to this podcast on Urban Rodentology with Allie Ward and Bobby Corrigan. The discussion that covers how rats in New York City reacted to Covid lockdown fed straight into Ferrets dialogue. Or, from the same podcast, we also recommend this piece on Corvid Thanatology, which is to say, crow funerals.

[h2]London Subcultures and Daily Life[/h2]

There are reference materials weve used to establish Fallen London for many years: Henry Mayhews London Labour and the London Poor is a classic. For Mask, we wanted some fresh inspiration and, especially, to look for cues that would set London of the 1860s apart from London of 1890-1900. London and Londoners in the 1850s and 1860s is a memoir by Alfred Rosling Bennett, made up of scattered memories from his childhood. It is full of details from exactly the era we want, and often evocative in a way that other histories might not be:

The coffins were covered with black cloth a very familiar street sound in those days was the tack tack tack of the undertakers hammer as he nailed on the cloth in his shop. He did it with a kind of rhythm that rendered the process unmistakable.

Novels have been an important source as well. One of our favourites was Amy Levys Reuben Sachs, a beautifully observed story of life in a reasonably well-off Jewish family. Its the sort of book thats well worth reading whether or not youre writing a game on related subjects.

[h2]Murder and Criminal Justice[/h2]

Facts, Failures and Frauds: Revelations, Financial, Mercantile, Criminal, by David Morier Evans, offers some contemporary descriptions of inquests and investigations.

We also spent quite a bit of time with the records of criminal trials at the Old Bailey. This was often a depressing read: stories about real people committing murder are rarely as fun as a fictional mystery, and they often exposed poverty and desperation more than anything else.

But there are other surprises to be found in the recorded case testimony. One constable discovered a death in his neighbourhood because he habitually provided wake-up calls, knocking on the door at a time requested by the inhabitant and he noticed when the person who lived in a house stopped putting a mark on his door indicating when he wanted to be woken. This sort of detail about how early constables interacted with the neighbourhood helped shape our concept of Harjit.

Of course, one cant write a poisoning murder without some information on the relevant substances. There were a number of books that came in handy here, but especially The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain Was Poisoned At Home, Work, and Play. Read this, and youll wonder how any Londoners survived to become Edwardian.



[h2]Immigrants in London[/h2]

Lady Logins memoirs describe multiple places and situations with a bearing on Mask, from the voyage to India to details of childhood in early 19th century Scotland. Theyre very much a product of their time, and the attitudes of their author come through in ways that dont always flatter her but the acute and specific observations were useful.

For Phoebe, the Irish housemaid, we drew quite a bit from Fin Dwyers Irish history podcast, which covers the great famine, the surrounding politics and culture, and the aftermath in detail.

This one isnt a book or even a podcast, but Equiano Centers map of Black Londoners shows the variety of Black stories in 19th century London. Horatia draws strands from several different historical figures, without being an exact match to any of them.

And though it isnt a primary source or a piece of serious historical writing, Amitav Ghoshs extensively-researched Sea of Poppies gave us a better sense of how the lascars of Londons docklands might act and speak.

[h2]How Characters Might Interpret the Neath[/h2]



Liliths Cave: Jewish Tales of the Supernatural, by Howard Schwartz. We came to this book through the question how would people steeped in Jewish traditions interpret the strange things they find in the Neath? Fallen London for the most part labels things in the Neath based on a Christian cultural context. But would people with a different background see devils the same way? Understand death or ghosts in the same terms? Liliths Cave is a great book for dipping into, with stories that run just a few pages.

Meanwhile, our consultancy on Jewish Londoners suggested that we might want to learn more about Jewish messianic movements in order to understand how his contemporaries might have read Davids death and return. That led us to the Sabbatai Zevi series on the Seforimchatter podcast. Seforimchatter hosts long, academic discussions of books on Jewish thought and history, designed for a Jewish audience. There was far more here than we needed to know for Mask, but the conversations were so interesting that we found ourselves listening to further episodes in our spare time.

[h2]Models for Spoken Language[/h2]

Not all research is setting research. When writing dialogue for a lot of characters, it can be helpful to look for speech models, just as an artist might use models and anatomical references even to draw an imaginary character.

For the different cadences of different speakers in Mask, we listened to samples from the BBC Voices project, a large collection of spoken dialects from around the British isles. And episodes of Rumpole of the Bailey helped us flesh out how characters would speak in a courtroom.

[h2]Writing Romance and Sex in Games[/h2]

Writing for Mask also meant we needed to write a number of romantic and sexy scenes with our characters. This wasnt new territory, but insight from other developers remains very useful.

Michelle Cloughs Passion and Play suggests a number of handy comparisons and examples from other games, and lays out a triad of approaches sacred, mundane, profane to describing physical intimacy as part of a relationship and character arc.

[h2]And quite a bit else.[/h2]

Writing the characters and situations of Mask of the Rose took us through topics as varied as symptoms of agoraphobia; Anglican evensong liturgy, with particular attention to the assigned readings for early October of 1862; Sikh teachings on gender and sexuality; Parliamentary record-keeping; real-life personal accounts from people who had had family and loved ones go missing; Victorian Valentines; Georgian-era abolitionist movements; the identity and location of the oldest tree in London

Today, I'd like to introduce another supporting player in Mask's cast - the Clay Lodger. Or, perhaps we should use his real name: Moss-on-Limestone.



The Clay Lodger was introduced as a stretch goal back in our Kickstarter campaign. For those familiar with our other titles, his introduction was intended to signal our inclusion of other Neathy characters in Mask, diversifying the range of characters within the cast.

For those unfamiliar with our wider setting, Moss is a Clay Man - which is very much what it sounds like. The Clay Men hail from the living city of Polythreme, an ancient power across the sea from London. In that city, all manner of things are said to be alive and speak with their own voices - including its statues.

Clay Men have appeared in several of our titles as recurring characters, ship officers, romance options, both as stalwart companions and bitter enemies. Clay Men have a particularly prominent role in Fallen London, where they've developed a long and complicated relationship with London following the Fall.

Mask, being set some thirty years before Fallen London, offered a space to explore the development of that relationship from its outset - to investigate what that initial encounter might have looked like, both in how Londoners might have reacted to the Clay Men, but also how the Clay Men adjusted to life in London.

All that said, we wanted Moss to have a unique perspective and a personal history specific to him, rather than to act as a stand-in for the entire body of Clay Men as a whole. We also knew from the Kickstarter that Moss carried with him a mystery of his own.

We took the opportunity to work out some of the more unexplored elements of Polythreme's relationship with London - and the cities that came before it. In doing so we were able to establish a timeline for Moss' involvement with the fallen cities - and to chart areas of pre-Fall history involving the Clay Men that we've not had a chance to explore before. There are, we hope, some fun connections with our established lore too, grounded in a new perspective; that of a Clay Man beginning to establish his identity outside of the familiar structures - and strictures - of his homeland.

Developing Moss' voice took some work - we wanted him to have a unique cadence, contrasting that of other characters. This has manifested in a number of ways. Chiefly, in his affect - his personality operates in a different register to many of the other characters. He is not perturbed by the events of the Fall, but like most of London, he is a fish out of water and struggles to keep up with the brave new world in which he finds himself.

The other way Moss presents differently from the rest of the cast is his use of 'Loamsprach,' the language of the Clay Men. We were, alas, unable to establish a complete and accurate English-to-Loamsprach dictionary, and instead have resorted to including a variety of phrases in the original language, which punctuate Moss' speech. Close observers may even be able to discern their meaning here and there.

Moss will appear around Yuletide to take up a room as a lodger in the boarding house. To say more about the circumstances surrounding his arrival at Horatia's would be to invite spoilers. Suffice to say he is likely to experience some turbulence fitting in - unless, of course, the player chooses to take an interest in this taciturn Clay Man and help him find his feet as he establishes himself in this new London.

As we get closer to the end of a project like Mask of the Rose, we shift our focus from making new things to improving the quality of whats already present. Some of that takes the form of subjective polish; for example, tweaking a characters art a little to make them more expressive (or dreamy ). On the writing side, we might make changes such as altering the pacing of the game in response to a playtest.

However, a large (perhaps larger, by time spent) aspect of quality is less subjective; bugs! QA is particularly important when it comes to getting to grips with this latter category. During a project we test work continuously, typically performing testing of each new feature or chunk of writing, along with periodic regression testing (playing through the game to check if anything has broken). Normally some of the issues detected during development can be deferred (i.e. dont have to be solved immediately) because they are dependent on other features that will be done later or because some functionality is intended as a placeholder. We still record everything, because we dont want bugs to slip through the net; but later on in the project is when programmers tend to focus more and more on eliminating bugs, and spend less time on new features.

In Mask of the Rose, for example, all of our planned feature programming is complete. For example; all the UIs are in place; the game save system is implemented; and an audio system manages sounds and music.

That does not mean the work is over! For the last couple of months our core Mask programmer, Samus has been working closely with Lesleyann, our Principal QA Tester, to tackle bugs and improve performance. In fact, their work has been centred on a very specific purpose; Mask is the first Failbetter game that will launch simultaneously on PC/Mac and console (Switch).

Its been important for us from early on in this project to always maintain a working build of the game for the Switch. There are a few reasons for this.



The Switch, being effectively a mobile platform, acts as a hardware baseline; even the more modestly specced PCs and Macs that Mask targets have more usable memory, hard drive capacity and CPU power than the Switch. This next point is oversimplified, but in essence; if we can get Mask running well on Switch, Mask will also run well on lower-end desktops and laptops. Therefore it keeps us honest about how complex features like graphical elements can be.

It also keeps us honest with regard to gamepad support. Historically, Failbetter titles have been primarily developed for mouse and keyboard control, with gamepad support either added later or not given the same level of focus. In Sunless Skies, we werent happy with how gamepad support turned out in the initial PC release, so when we set out to publish our own console ports (also a first for us) we were keen to take the improvements from console and make sure they made it back to PC and Mac in the Sovereign Edition. However, because we hadnt given gamepads equal weighting from the start of Sunless Skies, there were technical compromises we did have to make to give gamepad and console players a better experience. In Mask, maintaining a build on Switch forces us to focus on the quality of both the gamepad and the M+KB experience.

A final reason to build on Switch early is because shipping a game on console is a unique challenge. Platform holders have extensive lists of technical requirements that games must fulfil. For example, most consoles limit the frequency to which we can write to the storage memory, to prevent physical wear to the drives. Another requirement might be to only use specific, authorised terminology to refer to the consoles controllers.

Before we can release the game we must check that it is compliant with these requirements, fix any issues, test everything, and then submit builds to the platform holder to perform their own testing. That means the release process on console must start earlier than on PC, and this is what Les and Samus have been focusing on recently; getting to the point we can submit a build to Nintendo that gets the famous Seal of Quality from them!

Our other area of increased QA focus is writing. Here, also, Mask presents new challenges. In previous Failbetter titles, writing was very modular. In Sunless Skies, for example, a story can be tested as a stand-alone unit. This is because the player has lots of discrete, self-contained experiences as they visit different ports across the High-Wilderness. Stories tend to only act on each other indirectly; such as via the resource economy, or the completion state of an earlier story. It is also quite unlikely for a writer to accidentally trap the player in a dead end. Because of these properties, we know that bugs introduced by adding a new story will normally be confined to that one story, and the states of the playthrough that could affect the story are less numerous, making testing simpler.

But if Sunless Skies is like a short story collection, then Mask of the Rose is closer to a novel; every character and storyline is interwoven. Mask is also the first time we have used the Ink scripting language instead of our in-house content management system. The Ink script in Mask is fiendishly complex, reactive and programmatic; this is the most player-responsive title weve ever made.

Furthermore, with no way to escape faulty content (think about how you can simply leave a port in Skies if a desired option is unavailable), we have to work hard to spot the type of critical writing bug that can cause the game to dead end.

This has meant that weve had to rethink how we perform narrative testing, and are deploying automated narrative testing for the first time. Samus has developed a tool that allows the writer to run a piece of content thousands of times outside the game engine before its integrated. This acts as a first line of defence against the dreaded dead ends, because we can tell if one of our randomised, automated runs gets stuck on a particular version of the script.


A graph illustrating the players routes through Mask of the Rose (simplified)

This approach isnt bulletproof, because there can be differences between how the testing tool behaves and how the game engine behaves; there are often serious bugs at the interface between tech and writing. A purely stochastic tool will also make arbitrary decisions, which result in many runs that represent an atypical player experience. To bolster our approach were also performing extensive manual, in-game testing, and are working on a few ways to extend the capabilities of our autotest tool; for example, to allow writers to specify different player profiles that make the computer player focus on certain human-like behaviours such as pursuing a particular romance option.

Every game comes with its own set of challenges for the developers, not least in QA. However its easy to overlook this discipline from the outside, because QA work is invisible until something goes wrong. I hope this blog gave you a little peek under the mask! Thank you for coming on this journey with us as we extend the capabilities of our studio to tell a very different tale to the stories weve told before.

We've been loving the Steam Next Fest, so we're coming back for another live stream!

Join Hannah from 2000 BST (1900 UTC) on the 8th of October.

The chat were pretty feral for flirting last time - this time, should the real treasure be the friends we make along the way?

Join us to find out!

Join us as part of Steam Next Fest for a live stream featuring as yet unseen nooks and crannies of Mask of the Rose!

Hannah will be on hand to show you around, including a first peek at storycrafting in action.

Join us from 10am BST on the 4th of October and watch Hannah attempt to pronounce everything Mr Pages says without tripping over herself.

See you then!

This month its me, Hannah, here to shout and jump up and down and wave my arms in the air because we have a new trailer for Mask of the Rose and I love it like I love - I was going to say my children, but today one of them punched me on the leg and told me I was bad, so. What Im saying is Im fond of the trailer. Here it is:

[previewyoutube=Wamhz5iLRAE;full][trailer][/previewyoutube]

This trailer was made by Derek Lieu, game trailer maestro. His YouTube and are masterclasses in what makes a good game trailer, fascinating even if it isnt your job!

Here'd Derek talking about how the Mask of the Rose gameplay trailer came together.

Which parts of Mask of the Rose made you go, oh, that bit has to go in the trailer?

The line from Mr. Pages wanting to know about the taste of the hearts was one which immediately stood out. It made me laugh and inspired so many questions. The line permanent murder is also utterly fantastic. When searching for good trailer dialogue I look for something which says a lot about the world and the characters, in as few words as possible. Permanent murder is probably the shortest and most evocative two words Ive ever had in a trailer. This is why I used both of these moments in the opening of the trailer to hopefully hook the audience.

I think Mask of the Rose is full of this sort of dialogue which feels like it could only belong to this world. I typically go for games with either spoken dialogue or action, but the writing drew me to the game despite the difficulty of making visual novel trailers.

When you're making a trailer for a narrative game, is there anything you approach differently than for eg a platformer?

For narrative games I always start with dialogue. I play as much of the game as I can and then I ask for either the voice files, screenplay, or more typically, a MASSIVE spreadsheet of dialogue. In this case it was the Ink files with their mix of code and text.

Then I delve into the dialogue, find the parts I think could work best, and try to create a story which illustrates a mix of the world, the characters situations, and the game mechanics. The dialogue I select and edit together is the backbone of the trailer which creates the dramatic structure.

I liken making a story trailer to being given a several thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, which I then have to select maybe a couple dozen pieces and make a picture which feels representative of the complete image. Or at the very least, representative of one section.

Aside from starting with dialogue there are still fundamentals of trailer structure which I always follow for every trailer I make. This is based on the information necessary to answer basic questions, and subsequent questions that come after. For example: What is this? What is happening? Why is that interesting? What makes this unique? How big is the scope?

What are the challenges of making a visual novel trailer?

The main challenge with visual novels is that text is the primary content, but using a video to deliver text can be terribly dull. Even though social media video and apps like TikTok show people are ok with reading a lot of text in videos, its still hard to make text engaging in a trailer.

Some visual novels strategy is to make trailers which use flashy motion graphics to add motion and visual flare to the game art. I understand this approach, but I feel like this focus on the visuals is to the detriment of the novel portion.

When relying on the words, the challenge of making a trailer is saying and showing a lot as quickly as possible. Thankfully, I had the Failbetter writers available to take my selections and tighten them up where necessary. It makes a huge difference if I can make a line shorter by even one word, while retaining the core message.

Something that I think would surprise people is the extent to which we've had to reconstitute bits of the game in different configurations to make them make sense in a trailer. Is this typical to your work across genres?

Yes, absolutely! Im always looking for ways to make ideas and visuals clearer and easier to digest for the trailer audience. Whether this means removing HUD/UI elements in shots where they dont contribute to the idea currently being shown or removing text which distracts from what I want the audience to read.

Im always doing the squint test where you squint your eyes to blur your vision, and check whether or not the thing you want people to look at is the first thing you see. For example, if youre in a room with a light source, with blurry vision, the light will be the first thing you see, the second thing will either be the next brightest, biggest, or most colorful thing, and so forth.

This means some of the shots have less text in them than you'll see in the finished game, but you're more likely to have finished reading any text I did show in the trailer.

For narratives I often have to put dialogue out of order to tell the story, because sometimes a line later in the story provides exposition which helps explain things at the beginning.

Is there a bit of the Mask trailer that you're particularly pleased with?

I love how the backgrounds blur out in the shots Paul [Arendt, art director for Mask of the Rose] created for the sexy montage. Combined with the music and the dialogue, I think that section creates a great feeling. If we did our job well, people should be reaching for those GIFs of sweaty people fanning themselves when they see it, haha.

I was especially satisfied when my wife laughed at the funny parts of the trailer. Seeing someone react with the emotions I intended to elicit is always very gratifying.

This was a fun one to work on! Most of my work is usually in capture and editing, so it was nice to play in such a richly realized world where the images are created mostly through text. I hope it pleases fans of the Fallen London games who might not play visual novels, and intrigues visual novel fans who aren't familiar with the series.

This month we have an update about Mask of the Roses user interface, but first, we have some news about the release date. Unfortunately, weve decided to delay release until April 2023.

Lately, weve been seeing signs of an over-tight schedule: mounting stress levels, team members becoming reluctant to take time off.

In this situation, there are three things we could do in principle. We could ask our team to put in significant overtime to meet the current schedule, but its important to us to provide a good workplace where everyone has time for personal and family life. We could cut features and parts of the story, releasing a game that didnt fully meet our intentions and ambitions. Our sense, though, is that our players and backers would rather get the game later in its best state, rather than sooner in a worse form. So that leaves us with the third option, moving back the schedule.

We don't expect to move the release again, and we'll have a specific date for you in the next few months. We hope you'll bear with us for a little longer.

Now, heres artist Tobias Cook with a look at Mask of the Roses improved UI.

UI is vitally important for a game like Mask of the Rose, where the player spends most of their time reading and any actions they take are via an interface. Its important that the UI also has a character of its own that enhances the atmosphere of the wider game, as well as providing a pleasurable and effortless reading experience.

So, after the Kickstarter campaign was complete, we sat down and took a hard look at every part of the Mask UI. Was it doing everything it needed to do to support and enhance the rest of the game? How could we make it better?

The public demo released in February featured a work-in-progress version of the resulting UI revamp, and it has continued to improve since then.



Our first objective was to improve the way we present text. We consulted with Joseph Humfrey of Inkle as part of this process, and found his help invaluable when redesigning our narrative interface. This system delivers text in an intuitive and digestible manner even with multiple cast members present. It also has enough space to accommodate our many font options, as well as supporting the whole range of actions the player can take, such as making a choice unlocked by a clothing option or opening their notebook in order to interview a subject.


We also remade key interfaces such as the Wardrobe, Map and Character Creation, with the aim of aligning them with the games new look and promoting readability and atmosphere at every opportunity.




About that look: Mask of the Rose is a romance at its core. However, the world in which it takes place is in a state of upheaval. Much of London is still fractured by the Fall, with opulence and ruin sharing the stage. We wanted the UI to support and echo these themes. For us, this meant departing from Visual Novel staples like text boxes and bubbles; breaking text out of both containers and vertical alignment, giving a sense of both the risque and the grit in the decoration and colours, all whilst maintaining readability. Sort of like a high-contrast, post-apocalyptic boudoir.

Mask of the Rose features a broad range of font configuration options, from adjustable text speed to sans-serif and non-cursive text variants. We have three separate font sizes (including one large enough to make viewing on a Switch screen comfortable) and multiple font style options. This can be challenging: we have to leave enough space for everything that isnt text, while making sure that any combination of font and size options (of which there are lots) still looks good. Still, with reading at the centre of the game its vital that players can tailor text appearance to their needs and tastes, so its well worth the effort.

Ultimately, we feel that Mask of the Rose presents the most fully featured and mature UI presentation in any of our games to date. We look forward to you getting your hands on the finished version upon the full games release in April 2023.

This month's devlog is from Mask of the Rose developer Samus Buadhachin.

Griz hoped for Archie's attention. She gave him a diamond stick-pin, one of her few possessions of value left from home. Archie, embarrassed by this largesse, disposed of the gift by dropping it off the side of London Bridge.

At the behest of one of the mysterious hooded figures that run London these days, I'm trying to write a love story. It isn't going entirely to plan.

The value of stories in creating or collecting them crops up time and again in Failbetter games: from a side activity in the Fallen London early game to the career-spanning Ambitions in Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies. In Mask of the Rose, we've finally made it possible to read the stories that you write. As you play through Mask, other characters will come to you looking for help with stories of one sort or another: Harjit, the local constable, has crimes to solve; Rachel, a novelist, is struggling with a case of post-diluvian writer's block; other, stranger characters have other, stranger concerns. Taking on and fulfilling these commissions brings you into contact with storycrafting, Mask's innovative storytelling sandbox.

Storycrafting is a fairly simple idea (like many simple ideas, it conceals a great deal of complexity). Given a prompt say, "Tell a story of a Londoner attracted to a denizen of the Neath" and a set of empty slots arranged in a stylised version of the classic cork-and-red-string murderboard, your task is to fill those slots with characters, motivations, and actions that form the outline of a story that satisfies the prompt. The twist (of course there's a twist) is that, as you do so, your choices are fed into a vast expansion-grammar engine similar in principle to the outfit-description system we blogged about back in March, but on a significantly grander scale that takes your choices and weaves the story itself around them. As you make changes to the board on the left-hand side of the screen, the story you're creating updates itself on the right, in sometimes surprising ways.



The arrangement of slots on the board is constant between commissions: each story has a protagonist and a deuteragonist; each follows a kind of three-act structure. The people and ideas you can fit into these slots, though, vary both with the particular commission and your progress through Mask's storyline. You'll start with some available you already know the residents of Horatia's boarding house, for example, and your chosen background may give you other insights and learn others through gameplay. Discover a plausible motivation for a character and that motivation becomes available for use on the board.



Of course, not all motives and actions are plausible for every character. Anyone (almost) can fall in love, but not every character can scheme to steal your soul at the same time. Part of the challenge of storycrafting is finding a set of ideas that make internally consistent sense, and the game enforces this. Pick a motive that's inconsistent with a character you've already chosen, and the game will require you to choose another character (or another motive).

In this respect, storycrafting shares a lot of its DNA with solving a sudoku puzzle. Just as a sudoku solution is constrained by certain rules ("digits must not be repeated in a column"), so is a storycrafting commission ("Virginia cannot plausibly be motivated by a sense of simple decency"). At a sufficiently abstract remove, the task is the same: fill empty spaces in a way that satisfies a set of rules.



But where a (well-formed) sudoku has a single solution, storycrafting commissions are designed quite differently. We've gone to some lengths to ensure first that a given commission can be completed with a very large number of possible ideas, and then that the story generator can handle whatever combinations of character and motive you throw at it. A large part of the fun of storycrafting, we've found in internal testing, is throwing together unlikely combinations of ideas, and seeing how the story warps itself to accommodate them. A closer antecedent than sudoku in fact, one of the reference points when we were designing the storycrafting systems is something like Oskar Stlberg's wonderful Townscaper, where each block of the city you construct subtly changes its shape to respond to changes in neighbouring blocks.

[This isn't a technical blog, so I'll note in a very brief sidebar that all three of these things are still fundamentally the same thing: constraint networks at different points on a continuum of solution-space size. If you have a certain kind of computer-science background in which case, my condolences then this will likely have already jumped out at you as obvious.]

The fictional rewards for fulfilling a storycrafting commission vary. You (usually) get paid to do so, of course: always a strong motivation for writers in the Neath and otherwise. Helping other characters here can benefit you in other, less obvious ways, though: you may end up owed a favour in high places, or be able to use a particularly compelling story to influence events down the line. So it's not just an engaging mechanic in its own right; it's integrated into the broader story in a way that gives it some real stakes.

Storycrafting is quite a hefty feature in Mask about a sixth of the codebase by weight, the last time we checked because, in a way, it's doing two things at once. If yours is a puzzle-oriented kind of brain, you'll hopefully enjoy the process of teasing out the underlying rules that determine what makes a valid storycrafting commission. On the other hand, if what you've been looking for is a kind of interactive fanfic generator, we may have what you've been looking for. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!

This month's devlog comes from our Creative Director, Emily Short

There are a handful of characters in Mask of the Rose that weve not introduced, and who dont appear in the demo. Today, let me introduce Ivy.

Most of our characters were defined before we ran the Kickstarter, but we left ourselves room to develop a few more, to address any requirements as we wrote the game.

By the time we came to developing Ivy, we had a few pieces of critical information about the role she plays in the story, which I wont spoil here. Aside from those, we knew we needed to add a character who was:

A Wardrobe Source. We wanted to let the player purchase outfit items from multiple characters, both for variety and for narrative plausibility. Ferret might peddle questionable and used outfits, but its less likely that theyd be in a position to sell new or upscale garments.

Connected with Hallowmas. Mask touches on several nascent London festivals. Hallowmas is the first in the calendar, though we dont see much about it in the truncated scope of the demo. Hallowmas is a feast of confessions and personal change and while it hasnt reached anything like its final form by the time of Mask of the Rose, there are plenty of people newly arrived in the Neath who have things they need to get off their consciences.

We also wanted to introduce a character to our roster who was female, and working class. The Kickstarter left some of our character list open to backer choice, and as it turned out, the selections were male or masculine-presenting so we wanted to add some more femme to the mix.

Griz, Rachel, and Horatia have different histories and relationships to wealth, but none of them grew up in true poverty, and Horatia inherited the house where she now keeps lodgers. And while Phoebe is a servant, shes still living in a comfortable household.

That combination of features suggested the idea of a bohemian seamstress someone talented and crafty, but who had really had to scrabble up from the bottom, and who might not have done it in the most respectable way.

We also saw her as someone inspired by the Neaths strangeness and terror, rather than overwhelmed. As I told Paul, our art director: of all the characters in the game, shes the most likely other than the player to be wearing a mushroom in her hat.

Thats still a lot less information than we can usually offer in an art brief. When briefing characters who are already written into the story, the writers can often provide reference photos for people we think look similar; sample dialogue; suggestions about the characters posture and physicality; and guidance about their most common moods.

For this character, we didnt even have a name but thats where art stepped in. Heres what Paul brought back:



I immediately fell for this character. Her saucy smirk suggests someone who knows more than she says and someone at home in the place London has become. Not everyone enjoys the Neath. Ivy sees its possibilities, and they give her life.

When it came to deciding our cast for Mask of the Rose, we knew we wanted to include a range of characters both old and new from our long-running browser game, Fallen London.

We wanted our cast to offer a variety of perspectives and experiences on the events of Mask of the Rose, while keeping to our goal of a tightly focused and scoped game. Returning characters had to both add something unique to our cast while offering room for exploration and mysteries unfamiliar to players both familiar and unfamiliar with Fallen London. We therefore had to be parsimonious with our roster of characters and strict with ourselves when it came to including too many iconic characters from Fallen London, which features a cast of hundreds.

We offered a range of characters we were excited to explore further, in their pre Fallen London days, as offerings at our highest backer tier. The character selection answered our above criteria, and we were delighted thinking of the possibilities each could add to the game. In the end, two were chosen by our generous backers at the Minister Tier: the Tentacled Entrepreneur, and the subject of this blog, the Bishop of Southwark.



The Bishop has long been a favourite of ours at Failbetter and we were extremely pleased to learn he was going to be joining our roster of characters in Mask of the Rose. The thunderous, rambunctious Bishop of Southwark is a fiery, complicated character, both humorous and tragic. The Bishop, or Reginald, as he's known in Mask, is a long-time fan favourite in Fallen London. He blusters, he shouts, he's a champion pugilist and he plans to make war on Hell. The Bishop of Southwark is a pillar of the community and a force to be reckoned with, a shouting stentorian subversion of what we imagine a Victorian vicar to be. Over the years we've enjoyed exploring the story of this fan-favourite and complicating the narrative of this seemingly severe churchman.

We've delved into his backstory in Fallen London before, but we realised we didn't know much about Reginald's origins: where did he come from? Why did he join the Church to begin with? What motivated him to undergo such a drastic journey to reach the position he's in by the time Fallen London rolls around? We quickly realised we had a lot of story we wanted to tell with Reginald and many questions we'd yet to answer.

From there it was a case of working out where he fits into the narrative as a whole - we wanted to fit him seamlessly into the world when he appears in the second act. This meant understanding which characters he was likely to meet and which events he was likely to be present for. This also involved imagining his reactions to everything that has happened prior to his first appearance and everything that occurs from there in the game. Ultimately we wanted to ensure players who wished to spend time with our good friend Reggie would be rewarded for their investment in him.



We also wanted to use him as a point of contrast with our other, more established churchman, Theophilus. Theophilus is, initially, a steadier figure ensconced in St Alban's, where Reginald finds himself seconded as a young canon. The two quickly establish the dynamic of their relationship, grounded in their contrasting views on just about everything. The player will have plenty of opportunities to get involved in the conflict, as both men are invariably tangled up in each other's plots. We wanted to use this contrast to explore differing perspectives within the Church on the events of the Fall, and subsequent approaches to life in the Neath. Reginald's inclusion add another lens on our exploration of characters of various faiths responding to the calamity and opportunity of the Fall, to go alongside Theophilus, Harjit and the events at the Tentergrounds Synagogue.

Reginald is our vehicle to both delve into the origins of an iconic Fallen London character and show him in a whole new light while also providing a fresh angle on the people and circumstances of Mask of the Rose - including, of course, the player character. While we can't promise a fully fledged romance with Reginald (if nothing else he's not really at a stage in his life where such a thing would be anything other than disastrous), we can certainly say this hotblooded priest is full of surprises. And, of course, we can finally reveal the origin of Reginald's love of resolving disputes with wrestling

We're joining LudoNarraCon with Mask of the Rose this year!

Come by our store page this weekend and you'll find a repeating stream of various videos designed to excite and intrigue:

• A guided tour of the demo with Hannah (aka me, Communications Director at Failbetter Games)
  
• An interview with Samus (programming lead), looking at how Mask of the Rose remembers your choices
  
• An interview with Paul (art director), talking about character design and sharing the process of developing an as-yet-unseen game location!
  
• A new view on something rather exciting which Fallen London players will certainly recognise...
  

This month's update is from producer and sound designer Stuart

Greetings, Delicious Friends! This month, Id like to update you with a general overview of the state of progress on Mask and let you in on some of the challenges we still face in the last few months of production.

[h2]Artwork[/h2]

Weve now finished artwork for all the characters in the game. Youll have met most of the major players if youve played the Mask of the Rose Demo, but we have almost as many secondary characters to introduce in the full game, including some familiar faces included thanks to our backers.



Our other primary type of art in Mask is location art. Our pipeline for backgrounds uses three steps: render the basic geometry of the scene in 3D; add colour and detail with digital painting; then light and animate.

We now have all the backgrounds present in the game, but many still need bringing to life with this final stage; adding in animated elements such as fog and swarms of bats, and the character lighting that makes London appropriately atmospheric. This kind of work sounds minor, but its the difference between the game looking just okay (and a bit flat), or looking polished and inviting.

[h2]Writing[/h2]

Mask is split into three seasons; Confessions, Yule, and Love. In the demo, you experience a (much truncated) version of the Season of Confessions (youll have more time to look around and introduce yourself to the cast in the full game). This is followed by the Season of Yule, which introduces the murder investigation and is the longest season in the game. The Season of Love is shorter, but arguably the most important; this is when the murder mystery concludes and tender feelings blossom amongst the characters.

Currently, writing has been done up to the end of the Season of Confessions and the end of the Season of Yule, although were still weaving some additional characters into the Season of Confessions. Weve introduced a second writer to the project, James, to help Emily by writing the plotlines for specific characters. Those who enjoyed his work on the Church in Fallen London will appreciate what hes done with the not-yet-Bishop-of-Southwark!

The remaining goals are to reach end-end playability and bring all the threads to satisfying conclusions in the Season of Love. This is what Emily and James will focus on finishing in the next few months.

[h2]Tech and Gameplay[/h2]

All of the major user interfaces are now in the game. Samus and Toby recently finished work on a nifty codex menu that stores all the players information, such as relationship events, murder clues, and a conversation log.



The biggest gameplay feature still in progress is Storycrafting, the player-driven storytelling mechanic we use in different ways to represent the player character taking commissioned work for NPCs and theorising about the murder. Storycrafting involves activities like crafting love stories for Pages, generating page-turning plots for Rachel, as well as a few tails you might not expect. Alongside tech and UI work, this feature also requires writer work to populate the features with story possibilities.

[h2]Sound[/h2]

Composer Laurence Chapman has delivered versions of most of the pieces in the game, and weve signed off on them ready for recording. We still have a few left to hear and approve, which hell be delivering to us between now and May, with a final recording session organised in June.

As well as new tunes you didnt hear in the demo, youll hear fresh versions of familiar themes in the full game. The music is being re-recorded with live instruments (the demo mainly used solo piano performances and sampled instruments). Were very excited to share the soundtrack with the world and think backers who nabbed it will be happy with the final product. The soundtrack has become a work music mainstay for some of us at Failbetter already.

For my part, Ive finished up on the ambient sound design which complements each unique location you visit.

[h2]Just Ship It![/h2]

All that sounds like were pretty close to done, right? Well, yes and no.

We normally prioritise the biggest and riskiest chunks of work first, to allow us to produce an end-end playable build as soon as possible. That leaves us with a long list of smaller tasks to mop up. Some examples:

• Art: Icons for use in storycrafting and wardrobe choices for the player.
  
• Writing: Content for achievements and backer rewards.
  
• Tech and Gameplay: Audio and graphical options, such as support for letterboxing on ultra-wide screens.
  
• Sound: Special sound effects to punctuate particularly dramatic moments.
  

This month's development blog is from Failbetter programmer and principal developer on Mask of the Rose, Samus Buadhachin

As our Creative Director Emily Short has written, Mask is deterministic in places where our previous games have used randomness: success in a given challenge depends not on a die roll but a combination of variables affected by the choices you've made. But your outfit certainly still matters: present yourself as an avatar of the law, for example, and prepare for difficulty ingratiating yourself with people on the other side of it.

Communicating this kind of effect to players is, of course, a pretty crucial part of any outfit system, and there are some fairly standard ways of doing so. We've presented the effect of your wardrobe in our previous games in traditional RPG fashion: if carrying around an unexploded mine helps you win arguments, or having an incognito princess aboard your locomotive makes it easier to get along with space-faring bohemians, this is explained to the player with visible changes to the underlying variables that are being modified: the relevant number goes up or down. It's a tried and true system and it's especially well suited to games with random challenges and a lot of stats to track.



Mask is designed as a chattier, intimate experience, and quite early on in development we decided that the wardrobe view should work towards this design goal too. There are still a dizzying number of variables at work driving any interaction, but baldly describing a given hat as +1 Coquettish didn't seem to fit the theme quite so well this time. So, as you'll have seen if you've played the demo, when you put on a set of outfit items, the wardrobe view talks back to you instead: your own player character telling you, in English, how you're likely to come across when you leave the attic room you call home.

This is something we could really only pull off with Mask's comparatively tight scope. (It would certainly be entirely out of the question in Fallen London, for example, where some back-of-the-envelope maths suggests there are around 120 billion outfit combinations.) Even in Mask, though, the number of potential outfit combinations is comfortably in the thousands, far beyond what's reasonable to ask a team of writers to describe one by one. Handling combinatorial explosions like this requires a certain amount of algorithmic deftness. Or, to put it another way, we have to cheat a bit.

Our particular style of cheating borrows from formal language theory. The underlying model for outfit descriptions is a grammar: a set of x y rules for replacing something on the left-hand side of the rule (x) with something on the right-hand side (y). Suppose we just want to let the player pick a choice of hat, and to describe it. The rules for describing hats might look like this, with the hat in question on the left-hand side and its description on the right:

• ordinary hat "a perfectly fine hat"
  
• fancy hat "a fabulous choice of headwear"
  
• hideous hat "quite a novel and fascinating hat"
  
• no hat "a very brave choice, not to wear a hat"
  

with the right-hand side of the rule for describing an ordinary hat:

"That's a perfectly fine hat! You're sure to make a splash."



This is a pretty basic system, certainly, but we're off to a decent start. If we now let the player change shoes, and add some rules for describing shoes

• fancy shoes "What lovely shoes!"
  
• ugly shoes "Your shoes are quite remarkable!"
  
• no shoes "I do hear bare feet are quite en vogue."
  

we can update our top-level outfit description to embed a shoes-description rule as well:

"That's ! "

Let's say the player is wearing a hideous hat, and no shoes. Expanding this new outfit rule step by step hat, then shoes produces first (by finding a matching hat rule)

"That's quite a novel and fascinating hat! "

and then (by finding a matching shoes rule)

"That's quite a novel and fascinating hat! I do hear bare feet are quite en vogue."

We might not be being terribly candid, but we've managed to produce a coherent opinion. (The Mask PC's internal monologue is more honest.) Any combination of hat and shoes should work: find a matching hat-description; find a matching shoes-description; fill out the template. The results will tend to look suspiciously similar, tipping our hand to the algorithmic work going on behind the scenes, but we can do something about that later.

You may have already noticed a quietly important property of this approach: by writing 4 + 3 = 7 rules (plus a top-level outfit-description rule), we're able to describe 4 3 = 12 different outfit combinations. Another pair of shoes would increase this to 16, but we'd only need to write one more rule. This will continue to scale as we add more outfit items: strictly speaking, we only need a linearly-increasing number of rules to describe a geometrically-increasing set of combinations. This becomes especially handy when we go beyond just hats and shoes to describe, say, the player's coat or gloves, and the extra multiplicative terms cause the number of potential combinations to grow even more quickly.



This efficiency gives us some breathing room to finesse the system. One thing we can do to make our system fancier is add some rules for special cases: noteworthy combinations of particular items, for example. Let's add some shoe-description rules to apply when the player is wearing a particular kind of hat as well:

• (ugly shoes, hideous hat) "And the shoes match perfectly!"
  
• (ugly shoes, fancy hat) "And the shoes make a delightful contrast!"
  

If we agree, when looking for a rule, to always pick the rule that matches the largest number of items in the player's outfit, then we'll pick these if (and only if) the player is wearing both items, and our outfit description for (ugly shoes, hideous hat) will expand, step by step:

"That's ! "

"That's quite a novel and fascinating hat! "

"That's quite a novel and fascinating hat! And the shoes match perfectly!"

We can write some more specific hat-description rules, too; and, in fact, we can write some extremely specific top-level outfit rules, for outfit combinations that are so outr that the entire structure of the description template ought to change. It's a very effective way to start getting that sameness we observed earlier out of the system; with a few dozen such rules, we can produce good descriptions for thousands of combinations. (A number of unusual special cases are handled like this in the Mask demo, and it might be rewarding to revisit the wardrobe with this in mind.)



We're still not done in terms of what's possible, either: we can add multiple rules of equal specificity and choose randomly between them, to provide even more variation. And, while so far we've restricted ourselves to just using what the player is currently wearing, we don't strictly need to: we can also consider things that have previously happened. Any aspect of the game state that can be expressed in a similar way can be fed into our system, if we want. So there's really nothing stopping us from writing rules like this:

(hideous hat, player-has-met-the-aliens) "a novel and fascinating hat, quite improved by the scorch marks from the aliens' death rays"

(Well, nothing but considerations of taste in narrative design, perhaps.)

In fact, this last idea that you can take arbitrary bits of a game's state, pass it through a set of grammar rules, and produce coherent, meaningful textual content is extremely powerful in the right hands. Once the technical pipework for describing outfits is in place, it's easy to generalise it and apply it wherever it's useful.

This has enabled us to give Mask's text some real dynamism. We've used it for a number of other gameplay systems in Mask, some of which are already at work in the demo and some of which are under development for launch. It's been extremely rewarding to work on and test internally; I hope you enjoy the finished product!

Today its been exactly a year since Mask of the Rose was funded on Kickstarter. We have a surprise for you, and some news about the release date.

First, the surprise. We have a demo of Mask of the Rose, available right now from the store page!



And look at the shiny new user interface!

Offering a condensed version of Act I of Mask of the Rose, youll be able to explore select locations across the city, introduce yourself to some key characters and encounter Mr Pages in its office at the Bazaar.

At the opening of Mask of the Rose, Mr Pages has employed your housemate, Griz, who has in turn found a few pennies work for you as census taker. The census goes some way beyond the expected (Surface census forms never did ask if anyone in the residence was in love), so youll need to approach conversations with care to find out all you need to know.

Demo Feedback

We are absolutely champing at the bit to see your reactions to the demo! Other than our Steam forums, the very best places to talk about it will be on Discord, our forums, and the Fallen London subreddit.

There are a few things itll be useful to know before you send feedback:

• In the final game there will be a text log, so you can scroll back through conversations
  
• There will also be audio sliders under Settings
  
• And of course, there will be saving in the finished game (the final version of Act I will be fleshed out from this version, so carrying choices over wouldnt be possible).
  

Merry Christmas; Yule; or the holiday you hold most dear! It seemed particularly advent-appropriate to talk a little more about the importance of seasons and festivities in Mask of the Rose.

The Mask of the Rose story is set in the earliest days of post-fall London. Many of you are Fallen London players, and youll be familiar with the typical festivals in the established calendar some thirty or forty years after London fell: the Feast of the Rose in February, Whitsun in June, The Fruits of the Zee festival in August, Hallowmas in October, and your typical Neathy Yule in December (HO. HO. HO.). But the freshly fallen city is still experiencing some cultural confusion, and their diaries are rather unpopulated while they figure out what this new world means for them.

This gave us the opportunity to explore Londons new traditions from their inception. Youll experience some of these tentative festivals in Mask of the Rose.

We begin Mask of the Rose with the Season of Confessions. This is before Hallowmas has been established; we dont want to hit the player up-front with more weirdness than what is around them already! We hope that, while veterans from Fallen London and the Sunless games will be more attuned to the mysteries of the world, newcomers wont be confused or overwhelmed by our more outr details. The player character, and most people they meet, are also relative newcomers to the Neath. This helps us tell the player about the world naturally, as the cast deal with their new reality together.

The Season of Confessions is presented visually and in the narrative as straightforward(ish) Fallen London: there wont be spooky decorations on peoples mantlepieces as you might expect with Hallowmas. Mask of the Roses story will take a turn to the confessional, after David is murdered and the investigation begins.



Then the snow begins to fall. It would be unthinkable for the Victorians not to celebrate Christmas of some variety, even if the snow is more suspicious than a piping hot cone of Rubbery Lumps. Youll notice a few art flourishes in the environments in the Season of Yule - even in a crisis, the odd decoration might appear inside peoples homes and of course, lacre is falling.

In Mask of the Rose, we wanted to zoom in on Fallen London and tell a more intimate tale; and this dictates how we use our time. Were going close and detailed on a smaller roster of locations and characters, rather than, for example, depicting lots of locations but with lower detail art. With a smaller range of locations, a great way of keeping the game visually fresh throughout is to make fairly simple to execute but impactful visual changes that occur with the passing of time. Small environmental changes give the world of the game a feeling of being alive and lived-in. From a production perspective, its using every part of the animal, which is a real win when you are trying to use time effectively.



Its not the happiest yuletide for some of our characters, but there is still warmth and companionship. This atmosphere is fully realised in The Season of Love. Love is obviously resonant for a romance game. By this time, routine and tradition is becoming established in the Neath, and the player has an opportunity to experience the very first Feast of the Rose, from which the game draws its name. Our cast of characters will of course be enjoying the festivities, so expect their appearance and their storylines to reflect that.

As for us, were looking to 2022 and whats next for Mask of the Rose. We are delighted that Mask of the Rose is already starting to find its audience on Steam, with more than 17,000 people wishlisting it so far. There are some exciting developments in the air, including the possibility of taking the game to some events (some of which might even be in-person, Covid-depending! Imagine!).

For your support and faith, we thank you, and we wish you the best possible wintery celebrations. Well see you next year.

Mask of the Rose is set in the universe of our long-running browser game, Fallen London. One of the questions Fallen London fans have been putting to us most is how Mask of the Rose differs from its progenitor. Wed like to shed some light on that today. Its important to note that it is an entirely new genre for us, so apart from the lore and tone similarities, expect a very different experience overall. Bearing that in mind, here are some of the key areas where Mask is an entirely different story to Fallen London

[h2]Enduring or Replayable?[/h2]

Fallen London is a huge, and ever growing game where player characters evolve and develop over many years. A few parts of Fallen London can only be experienced in multiple playthroughs; for example, you can create a character with a different Ambition but to progress far enough to complete these epic storylines is a big time investment. Mask of the Rose is a short game, but its designed so that curious players can play through multiple times, and there are meta-features which acknowledge the different outcomes you can achieve in your playthrough. Its built for replayability.


Character creation, along with the rest of the Mask interface, is being given an evocative makeover

[h2]Analytical or Intuitive?[/h2]

Part of the fun for seasoned Fallen London players is the meta game; using statistics to work out how they can play the game as efficiently as possible. High-level players write complex analyses to optimise play. For example, many are constantly searching for the best Echo-Per-Action (EPA) activities (how they can earn the most in-game currency for every real-time limited action).

The economy side of Mask is much simpler and less granular. If players want to earn some money, then they choose to devote a period of their in-game time to it, pick a professional topic, and play the storycrafting mini-game. The reward for each completed tale is similar; normally a shiny new penny that can be spent elsewhere. Youll also find less repetition in Mask; the idea that a player might play the same snippet of story dozens of times to earn a particular resource is entirely absent.

Similarly, interacting with characters is less abstract. There is logic behind the scenes, but if you want to get Theophilus, the vicar, to trust you, then you could take straightforward steps: dress as a churchgoer, avoid lying to him, and maybe do him a favour. You wont have to work out the best way to earn 550 Foxfire Candles and increase an Establishment quality by working at a bank to have a shot at convincing him youre on the level. (Theres a bit more detail on character interactions in this blog.)



Many players play through Fallen London with one eye on the wiki to find out what their next step should be. Mask of the Rose is more immediately intuitive, and wed expect most players to want to make their first run unspoilt. If you are aiming to unlock all the different permutations of characters fates, its also quite possible to do that without assistance. There are multiple, flexible ways to reach all of the key endings, and we dont want to punish players for imperfect play; youll normally be able to get back on track if, for example, you offend someone. That said, we anticipate many players will check out a walkthrough on repeat visits to ensure particular outcomes.

[h2]Deterministic or Random?[/h2]

In Fallen London and our other games, pursuing a course with a random chance at success is central. However, the Random Number Generator can be a real erm bustard. Weve spent many hours looking into reports by players that a particular card wont draw or that they failed a quality test many times in a row. We promise you that it really is fair and random; but of course, that also means it is possible to be extremely unlucky, which can be very frustrating. Many games use hidden mechanisms so that the chance of success increases with each failure; Fallen London doesnt do this, although you might see the same idea used explicitly.

Mask of the Rose is deterministic; if you make exactly the same choices in a playthrough, you will always get the same results. Of course, there are a lot of big and small choices to make, so its not too predictable for the first-time player, but you can be sure that if you make the right choices for your desired outcome, theyll be effective.

[h2]Formidable Fashions[/h2]



In Fallen London, the character can change their outfit in most areas and often does so to pass particular skill checks. The outfit effects in Mask are just as powerful, but the approach is also less granular (and a little more naturalistic). Players have the opportunity to change their outfits when they are at home in their attic room. When they then pick a location to visit using their map, they are committed to what they are wearing for that particular time block. Generally, we expect players to think about what they want to achieve by visiting a particular character or characters, and dress accordingly!


[h2]An Intimate Tale[/h2]

Mask of the Rose has a smaller cast of characters, and fewer of them use the Fallen London naming convention of Adjective Profession, for example, the Punctilious Dentist (who will not be appearing in an exciting Exceptional Story any time soon).

The Tentacled Entrepreneur will guest in Mask of the Rose, but our main characters tend to have more conventional names; Horatia Chapman, for example. Unlike Fallen London and the Sunless games, we are telling an intimate title with a smaller cast, so its easier to keep track of the actors, and we want the player to soon be on first name terms with them.

This is the root of all the differences between Fallen London and Mask of the Rose. Fallen London has a grand, picaresque scope in which the player character is something of a super-heroic (or villainous) cipher, conquering every aspect of the neath. Mask of the Rose is a mystery, a story about social upheaval and if you want it to be a romance. Fallen London is the story of a city; Mask of the Rose is the story of a citizen you!

Hello everyone!

So lovely to see you. Please, come in, and take a look around!

Mask of the Rose is our latest game, and takes place in the same universe as Fallen London, Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies. If you've played one of those, well, thank you. And welcome back!

We'll return with development updates as we progress towards launch. But for now, please enjoy our brand new store page, and perhaps wishlist Mask of the Rose so we can all keep in touch.

With our fondest wishes,
Your friends,
Failbetter Games