Fallen London Redesign - Now Live

[color=#cc0099]Delicious friends! We’re absolutely delighted to let you know that the Fallen London website redesign is now officially live!

Our Aims
After much tinkering, two betas and lots of darkdrop coffee for our steadfast developers, Fallen London has received its well overdue update. Our main aims of the redesign were to:

  • Bring Fallen London up to HTTPS for additional security, as well as making a few tweaks to the backend so that it’s easier for both our writers and programmers to continue adding delicious content[/li][li]Update the visual design of the site to bring it from 2009 to 2018[/li][li]Improve the overall mobile play experience and responsiveness of the site

We appreciate this is a big change, especially with players that have been visiting Fallen London each day, year on year, but we hope that we’ve done just the right amount to make it look modern and appealing to new audiences while also solving some of the issues that players have long held, especially when playing on mobile.

These updates will in turn allow us to bring in new people into our Fallen London community and – crucially – mean we’re only maintaining one product (we recently retired our mobile apps to this end).

What’s Next?
We’ll be monitoring the site over the coming months to ensure everything is working as intended and that the user-experience is smooth.

If you notice any bugs or features that are confusing, please email us directly at support@failbettergames.com so we can get our programmers’ eyes on it at the earliest convenience. These are thing things we’ll be looking into first.

If you have general feedback, then please direct it to feedback@failbettergames.com. As a small team that handles all our support in-house, it’s incredibly helpful for us to receive input through these filters—and allows us to help everyone faster, too.
There’s also a handy Website Redesign FAQ if you have further questions.

We’re so excited to finally share the redesign and believe it’s going to help our Neathy community thrive![/color]

Congratulations for finally making the redesign work (and for having the nerve to pull it back when it wasn’t working earlier this year!). I love Fallen London, and I want everyone at FBG to know that I appreciate the results of their hard work even when I don’t agree with parts of a design. Thanks again.

Playing around with it, here are my three biggest takeaways.

  1. The new map is very pretty and a lot better than the old one.

  2. Having a searchable menu for story markers and possessions feels nicer than the previous system.

  3. The text size and font seem wrong. The words don’t feel cosey and they don’t invite you to read them. This seems the one part that could use some improvement.
    .
    edited by Anne Auclair on 10/2/2018

I think autofire storylets may be buggy - when I hit 8 scandal, I teleported to the Tomb-Colonies without the usual storylet that plays when you arrive there.

As an update, I learned you can zoom in at 125% to 150%, and that makes the text function somewhat better. But the font still seems a bit of a weak point to me and it makes zooming out undesirable.

The webpage though changes seamlessly to take into account your zooming and that is very neat.

Hi Fallen London Admins:

Truly excellent work on the redesign! The searchable boxes in Possessions and Myself are massively helpful, as is separating them out into separate categories.

The banner-art is next level. I love it. The color shading. The Shuttered Palace, Side-Streets of the Bazaar, Labyrinth of Tigers and Spite are standouts, but they’re all great.

The only thing I miss is “Who Else Is Here?” It was a great way to find and compliment other players (like when I saw someone a few days ago had picked up a Seven-Fold Knock.) This is my vote to bring it back, if it’s still possible with the new backend.

I also want to thank Failbetter Games for a great new updated website. It’s certainly a change from the old website, and the differences in gameplay and aesthetics can be taken positively or negatively. For me, the positives far outweigh the negatives, and the quality of life changes such as search and separate Myself and Possessions tabs, are excellent. Well done!

A few comments…

I have to say that the aesthetic (colour scheme, banner art), while attractive and easy on the eyes, does make a big difference to the atmosphere of FL. The blackness, high-contrast colours, and more silhouette-y banner art of the old site lends it a certain starkness; whereas the new site seems to be a dark shade of grey instead of wholly black, the banners are more pleasing to the eye, and overall everything looks more polished. Different aesthetic, subtly different atmosphere. I like the new site and the superb banners, but also think that the mood has changed and something has been lost in the process. --Which is normal when there’s a change of aesthetic. I suppose it goes to show how art and design influence setting and atmosphere so much!

I second GregM’s request to bring back &quotWho Else is Here?&quot I would also like the Airs qualities to return and remain visible, although it seems like an executive decision to remove those. I’ve also noticed that some choices in storylets have been thrown out of order – eg. the choices in &quotPreparing for a big score&quot in the Flit are no longer ordered by increasing difficulty; likewise, the choices on the Relicker cards are no longer in order of increasing Scraps required. Perhaps those can be brought back in order? (I will submit a bug report later, as this is a QoL issue that probably can wait until the more immediate upheavals have settled.)

Well done to FBG for launching the new site – it’s definitely a big milestone reached!

Ι second the return of Who Else is There. If you are not on the forums, and I imagine the majority of the players and every newcomer isn’t, it’s the only way to meet people for social actions, isn’t it? I remember receiving gifts and encouragement when I first arrived, and it was very encouraging.

As for the atmosphere, the new site is more beautiful but also less threatening and less Victorian, leaning towards art deco. I wonder if that was the intention, given the release of Sunless Skies.
edited by Jolanda Swan on 10/4/2018

[quote=Jolanda Swan]Ι second the return of Who Else is There. If you are not on the forums, and I imagine the majority of the players and every newcomer isn’t, it’s the only way to meet people for social actions, isn’t it? I remember receiving gifts and encouragement when I first arrived, and it was very encouraging.

As for the atmosphere, the new site is more beautiful but also less threatening and less Victorian, leaning towards art deco. I wonder if that was the intention, given the release of Sunless Skies.
edited by Jolanda Swan on 10/4/2018[/quote]
…I was gonna say there’s also the ‘suggest a player to invite’ button but it looks like the new redesign is missing that as well

My plant just won (and lost) the tournament against itself.

Is that something new and has to do with the redsign or did such a hiccup sometimes occur also earlier?

[color=rgb(0, 0, 0)][quote][/color](17 minutes ago)

Your plant sings a lament that brings the shrub belonging to Ysrthgrathe to silence. You are victorious! You’ve lost 1 x Aeolian Scream (new total 105). You’ve gained 1 x Storm-Threnody (new total 44). An occurrence! Your ‘Competing in a Tournament of Lilies’ Quality is now 6 - Seeking a Contest of Beauty! Making Waves is increasing…[color=rgb(0, 0, 0)][/quote][/color]

[color=rgb(0, 0, 0)][quote][/color]
(17 minutes ago)
Oh no! Your plant could barely manage a hissing gurgle. It is silenced to shame by the plant belonging to Ysrthgrathe. You’ve lost 1 x Aeolian Scream (new total 104). Competing in a Tournament of Lilies has not changed from 6 because it’s higher than 5. Attending to the Needs of a Singular Plant has dropped to 18 - Heavy with Fruit![color=rgb(0, 0, 0)][/quote][/color]

[color=rgb(0, 0, 0)][/color]
edited by Ysrthgrathe on 10/5/2018

The plant thing happened to me as well. I made progress in the tournament but lost some Hints.

Since a lot of feedback on any big change is invariably negative, let me just highlight here how much I’m delighted with the new design! It’s better than the old one in almost every respect. (It would be perfect if it had a larger, prettier font.)

I love being able to play FL in full-screen mode, it’s so much more immersive. I love the new, huge location banners. The Myself, Possessions, and Bazaar tabs are much better organized, easier to navigate and searchable to boot. And I haven’t run into any bugs at all yet.

I’d say, good work! :)

I love the new design. I have been using it pretty much since it became available. I think it is lovely and I am very happy to have it. I will note I, too, would like to request a return of “Who Else is Here?”

I didn’t understand this at first, but I think I’m seeing the same thing. I used to be able to boost my Scandal to as high as 10 with gear for maximizing Making Waves from a Rather Decadent Evening and then unequip back down to 7 before returning to the regular story. But now when I return to the story I am in the Tomb Colonies.

Can we get the links to profiles fixed? It’s getting a a tad annoying.

Please make the game accesible from windows phone browsers. I’ve already sent a request a week ago.

The searchable inventory is something I never knew I needed, but my oh my am I thrilled to have it.

The color scheme is a little different, I grant, but as I used the mobile app for a while it isn’t too unfamiliar. The cool tones are oddly relaxing. I do sort of miss the red being around since it drew my eye more - I find myself paying less attention to stat increases - but it makes sense it’s only for menaces now. Habits being what they are I’ll retrain myself eventually.

The other thing I quite like is how much more readable hovertext is. Thank you from my eyes!

The only bug I’ve encountered is the inability to view profiles. Hopefully that will be fixed soon- I’m a very smart person and managed to close my browser as I loaded a piece of story and now need to find someone else’s echo of it.

“Memory fades; pain departs; rewards arrive!”
I huffed and puffed about the changes and now I genuinely can’t remember what I was bothered about. I remember huffing and puffing the last time there was an art change (2012ish?). I imagine that in a few years screenshots of the just-departed site will seem similarly dated.

I want a skin of the old version at least.

Is there an option to disable mobile, and display the desktop site on phones? If it isn’t already in existence somewhere I can’t find it, it would be a much appreciated addition!