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Eat your crew to stay afloat in Sunless Sea, now on Steam
Failbetter Games' dark, top-down nautical exploration and survival game Sunless Sea is now available on Steam Early Access. To celebrate its arrival, the developer is discounting the game by 10 percent ($17.09) until Tuesday, July 8. Sunless Sea, which first arrived in alpha form in mid-June on the Humble store, has players exploring an underground ocean in which every decision made impacts a "non-linear, choice-heavy, personalized experience." In order to survive, captains will need to fight large creatures and make tough decisions, such as eating their dead. The game is set in the same universe as one of the developer's previous game, Fallen London, and draws influences from games like FTL: Faster Than Light, Sid Meier's Pirates and Don't Starve. Sunless Sea earned £100,803 ($161,769) on Kickstarter in October 2013, and uses Failbetter's own narrative-focused StoryNexus engine (which it also used for Fallen London). Random House put the engine to use in April 2013 with the free-to-play Black Crown. [Image: Failbetter Games]
BioWare partners with Fallen London dev for upcoming project
Interactive fiction developer and Fallen London creator Failbetter Games broke an extended period of radio silence this week, announcing that it is working with Mass Effect and Dragon Age creator BioWare on an upcoming project. "For the last year, on and off, we've been working in absolute secrecy on a project for a much larger company," Failbetter co-founder Alexis Kennedy explains. "When we've gone quiet for no obvious reason, it's because we've been heads-down on this. When I've mentioned that we don't take client work any more, with rare exceptions, this is the rare exception." Publisher Random House previously tapped Failbetter's StoryNexus platform for the browser-based interactive story Black Crown. Failbetter also recently Kickstarted Sunless Sea, which features an "underground ocean" and customized steamships. No further details regarding the team's BioWare project have been announced. [Image: Failbetter Games]
Random House gets interactive with StoryNexus tech and 'Black Crown'
Book publisher Random House is putting Failbetter Games' StoryNexus platform to good use with a free-to-play browser-based narrative project dubbed Black Crown. So far Black Crown has a website, which features a gas mask icon and describes the endeavor as "an infectious new kind of narrative experience." A phrase in latin on the top of the page translates roughly to "now comes truth, God, truth comes now."Whatever it is, Black Crown is scheduled to go live in May, and Random House plans to run it for a full year, first hoping to generate "thousands rather than hundreds" of registered users before launch. The author behind the project remains a mystery until May, and this whole thing might result in a physical book and ebook down the line, Digital Publisher Dan Franklin tells The Bookseller.Failbetter Games is behind such narrative games as Fallen London, and its StoryNexus platform is available in public beta for anyone who wants to create browser-based, interactive stories, right here.
