Mask of the Rose
Constance hotfix
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 Archie’s Storycrafting tutorial.
Update: Constance
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 we’re 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.
What’s 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 couldn’t get your teeth into enough of the stories in the game. We’ve 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 it’s 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 we’re making some tweaks to Investigation:
- Talking to characters about murder theories which include unknown elements is useful for progressing your investigation, but we’ve 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 it’s the right thing to try.
- After Archie’s 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 he’ll remind you to try using unknowns if relevant.
Full patch notes are also available, though there isn’t too much more to add; by necessity most of this week has been focused on the above and less on bug fixes.
Forthcoming Patch Possibilities
We’d like to see how you get to grips with the longer playtime before making more adjustments, but these are some of the things that we’ve heard this week which we’re thinking about.
We’re hearing that initial flirtations are happening too early, and you’re being asked to form an impression about someone romantically before you know them well enough. We’d like to address this in tandem with potential changes to how much you can change your wardrobe/presentation to give the impression you want in a scene. Now there’s less time pressure on going shopping for outfit items, you might be able to put yourself across in more precise ways from the get go, and we want to see how all of that interacts before we decide whether to make changes to any of it.
The last piece of significant feedback we’ve had has been around saving. At the moment the game autosaves whenever you return to your attic activities.
- People feel the first autosave is too late in the game; we’ll 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.
However, we aren't likely to introduce manual saving at this juncture. This is because we need to maintain some amount of predictability of save files to ensure that the updates we release are compatible with playthroughs in progress. Perhaps in the future, when other substantive changes that would risk save compatibility are complete, we may be able to consider this.
A note on fast forwarding and replays
Some players have asked if there could be a "skip scene" option, or if the fast forward mode could automatically stop when you get to text you have read before in another playthrough. Unfortunately, this isn't really possible for Mask of the Rose. The way Mask generates text is a bit too complex for this to work; rather than set speeches, it uses a combination of pre-written lines and lines that are generated programmatically from written components. Many lines will appear in different orders, or only trigger if your current character has a certain background, costume, personality type, knowledge in the game, relationship with NPCs and so-on. Aside from the technical complexity of achieving this, it wouldn't be a great play experience; imagine the fast forward stopping every couple of lines because you'd never encountered a particular aside or reflection in that conversation before.
We’re cognisant that, once your pacing concerns are addressed, other new reflections will bubble up as you experience the game in a new light! So all of the roadmap plans above are subject to influence from incoming feedback.
You’ve been fantastically honest and supportive thus far and I hope that you’ll continue to send in your thoughts and bug reports.
Stay tuned for news of further updates, which we’ll of course announce here and on Discord, twitter, etc.
This Friday at 8pm BST (UTC +1) we’ll be live streaming the new update! Perhaps to coincide with something else very exciting that’s also happening on Friday, who knows. I hope to see you there!
Constance update: patch notes
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.
Tech bug fixes
- 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.
Mask of the Rose is out now!
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!
It’s two weeks until Mask of the Rose launches!
(Did you miss the free crochet pattern we put out with The Pigeon’s Nest? You can download it to occupy your hands until we put Mask of the Rose in them!)
It’s 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 you’ve been along for the journey since before the Kickstarter or discovered us in the recent LudoNarraCon. You’re all very welcome in our parlour!
We’d 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, we’d 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 (that’s UTC +1).
You can join our Discord if you’d like to party with us on launch day!
See you on the 8th, delicious friend.
Mask of the Rose LudoNarraCon 2023 Live Stream!
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).
We're excited for you to see the finished game!
Stuart Young, Producer
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!
Paul Arendt, Art Director
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.
Liz Hall, Quality Analysis Intern
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.
Lesleyann White, Principal QA Tester
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!)
Hannah Flynn, Communications Director
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!
Emily Short, Creative Director
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 8th June 2023
Being a perspicacious kind of person, you’ll notice that the 8th of June is very much not in April. We hope you’ll forgive us one last delay; let’s talk about why we’ve 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 they’d like to spend time with through map movement, but we wouldn’t 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, we’ve been able to do more playtesting, and we’ve 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 they’d like to spend time with; we also ask what objective they’d 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 she’s alone or with company.
- The wardrobe is one of the game’s key mechanics, but we found it wasn’t 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 we’ve made it easier to tell which choices will advance time, too.
- As it turns out, there’s so much to do that it’s easy to lose track of your available objectives, so we’ve added a new interface to track this for you.
These changes are already in the game, and in fact we’re still entering content lock as planned. The trouble is that in a game where the narrative is this flexible and procedural, these features open up a tremendous space for bugs.
You can meet characters in different orders, important information can be conveyed in multiple different conversations, and the story can vary a lot in how the parts are connected together. Our testing therefore has to account for a huge number of variables and ensure the combinations are functional and satisfying.
Our submission date for Switch is staying the same as when we were aiming for an April release (27th April was the proposed date), but we plan on taking six more weeks to ensure a) the game is in excellent shape when you come to play it, and b) the team are able to get there while maintaining a healthy work schedule.
We look forward to giving you Mask of the Rose in all its fully tested glory on the 8th of June, and to bringing you some fun surprises along the way. Here's the release date trailer to whet your appetite, which is mostly the same as the previous trailer with a couple of juicy new bits.
WASD Live
If you’re in the UK, and you can get to London, you have the opportunity to play an almost-finished version of Mask of the Rose at WASD (getcher WASD tickets here). We’ll have competitions and giveaways too, and it’d be lovely to see any of you who can make it along. It’s been yonks since we’ve done a live event and this one is in a particularly good location for some Fallen London cosplay photography (it’s right by Spitalfields market, which is the real-world basis for Spite).
A gift: crochet Mr Pages!
As a Feast of the Rose gift for you all, we’ve commissioned fibre artist and games enthusiast The Pigeon’s 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 Pigeon’s 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 we’ve often been asked for plushies of our characters, and we have finally found this lovely solution to offer people which doesn’t have the same kind of negative environmental impact as your average plush toy. The Pigeon’s 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. We’re 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 you’ll 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! We’d love to see where they end up.
WIN a crochet Mr Pages
As if that’s 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 you’re 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 that’s your thing.
The Mask of the Rose Soundtrack is out now!
We’re also delighted to unleash the full Mask of the Rose official soundtrack, composed by Laurence Chapman!
It’s available to purchase now on Steam, or from Laurence’s Bandcamp. There’s 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!
Coming soon: the Mask of the Rose soundtrack
Mask is on track for an April release, and we can't wait to get it into your hands.
We’re going to the indie game event WASD in East London from 30 March until 1 April. There’ll be more to announce about everything we’re bringing to the event, and I’m really excited about it; we haven’t 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 Laurence’s work from 80 Days and Heaven’s 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?
I’d 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 couldn’t quite get the sound that they wanted, so they switched to me instead. And a partnership was born!
What’s different between composing for a game and for a TV show or a film?
I’m 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 I’m going to make it longer, and you’re 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 you’re 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 it’s not the same until the film has been put together. In a film or a TV show, it’s not really until post production that a composer can effectively do anything, and then of course you’re stuck to the picture. Which can be a good thing! Because it’s a nice challenge. Maybe you’ve got to go from one mood to another quite quickly and then quickly back to another scene. But I’m really enjoying the artistic freedom of doing games.
They say that films are made in the edit, right?
And if you’re the composer you’re 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, we’ve 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, that’s 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, I’ll 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 that’s what you do. If I really wanted to keep a piece of music, I’d find somewhere to put it in. It’s a job, a service you’re providing for other people. And it’s nice to feel useful, that’s the thing. I spent years practising the piano and doing all kinds of musical study, and it’s 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 wasn’t 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 it’s encouraging because you think, I’m on to something; I can get the sound world match the visual world.
It’s 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?
I’m 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!”
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 you’re very musical! There’s 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 doesn’t mean anything per se but it’s just a way of combining everything, if you like, so everything has a sound world.
That’s one difference between the game and the film world, is that the themes don’t necessarily develop. They will do in other games where there’s a more definite storyline, where it’s less interactive. It’s not the same way that in a film a character definitely goes from A to B and that’s 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 don’t know which route the player is going to take to get to the end of the story.
Yeah, in Mask of the Rose there’s more of a defined order than we’re used to! But usually our players go off and spend 200 hours doing whatever they like, which we don’t know about!