Skeleton Songs

'You're a miniature Herod, wading in the blood of the innocents every morning...'

We launch Travelling At Night's first public demo! Along the way, we talk about the game's 'Black Museum', AK's tussel with Django Reinhardt, how Tom Stoppard influenced the Incorporates' song on the soundtrack, and what cozy gamers really think of Weather Factory games. Impressions of The Nameless One from Planescape: Torment may, also, appear.

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Travelling At Night reaches an important milestone: the minimum length of a novel! We talk I/O Interactive, 'Harrison violations' and phatic speech, balancing rich personalities with empty roleplaying vessels and how to make difficult characters likeable - here's looking at you, Hokobald of Pocsind...

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"It's never lupus."

Take a turn with us through some of the kookier parts of the Second World War (dropping unmeltable ice into Winston Churchill's bath; how French fashion defeated the Nazis; the British Army's self-mythologising stage musician; etc). We also talk about the importance of art being bold, an infamous bug in Hush House, and why we're aiming for Jason Bourne over James Bond in Travelling At Night.

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What is the true 'artist's reward'? When are you pushing usefully out of your comfort zone, and when are you banging your head against a rock? Alexis and Lottie discuss developing your own creative talents alongside game design issues like the 'murderhobo' RPG outfit problem, medicine in Fallout: New Vegas and why John Constantine is a pillar of our crafting system.

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Who are the 'old gods' of gamebooks? Why can we mess with rules in Travelling At Night but not in Cultist Simulator? What's 'combinatorial explosion', and why is it ruining your life?

Join Alexis and Lottie for these questions alongside a potted history of text-based games, the perils of voiceovers in CRPGs and Lottie's most important rule for marketing.

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What's the 'double or half' rule? Why is game design like Khazad-dûm? What the hell is a quaternion? No, really, we don't know. Join AK and Lottie for another jaunt through game dev, via narrative modifiers, infinite nuns and 'entering the Mansus', for the first time ever...

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"There are games where the player is having fun and games where the designer is having fun." - Sid Meier

Maps! Music! British pre-decimal currency! We discuss planning game narratives around major player choices, Mike Rosewater's 'complexity budget' and why putting little stamps on bank notes is not a good idea.

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"What we want is a sort of semi-glutide octi-frenetic image that is kinda made of lighting and also is a baby..."

This week AK and Lottie discuss how art direction works, how to balance being weird with being commercially viable, how we're building Travelling At Night's entirely 2D visual world, and how to paint a tree. All while accidentally revealing what we suspect might be our next Weather Factory game and answering our first batch of mail bag entries.

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'My fingers are worn to bleeding nubs. I am typing this with my tongue. my keyboard is sticky with game dev drool. Do you not understand...'

Thus did 2026 begin. Welcome back to the world of game dev, this time about 'murdering darlings', the Curst curse and why Newt will always trump Aliens' M577 Armored Personnel Carrier.

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Our final episode of 2025! Talking Travelling At Night's alpha, the sine wave of game dev, where Fallen London's Overgoat came from and how we're attempting to solve the 'layer of plastic' in AAA RPGs.

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