Thread by @NotBrunoAgain

For the 12 Days of Christmas I am going to post some of my favorite Fallen London things from 2021 that I am proud of – either my own work, or something from the team that I really admire.

January: Moulin Station shipped, which was the first large piece of content I worked on. A lovely thing about FL was the ability to start experimenting mechanically off the bat. Some things about Moulin filtered down into future things we did later in the year.

February. I make no apologies and have no regrets.

March: @JamesStAnthony's Parabolan War launches. Enormous, baroque, stuffed to the gills with beautiful writing. The kind of thing that can only exist in Fallen London.

April: The next-to-last Railway station, the Hurlers. Chandler Groover entirely knocked it out of the park, implementing a huge station and a deeper, denser mystery than we had done in some time.

May: Whitsun! We added some new beasties written by @babelfishwars. I love them very much.

Whitsun was also the first piece of live content that relied on the new world quality feature – though that was invisible to players, it was used to enable and disable all Whitsun content at once.

A week later, we launched a Bone Market update. I'm not sure how many players were already seeing the implications of the new tech...

June: A really big month for us; we concluded the Railway storyline with the release of Marigold station, and we started the new series of expanded and new zee ports. (Poster by @tghcook)

The new zailing experience with Zeefaring is the largest piece of content I've implemented for Fallen London thus far, a huge replacement for an older system featuring over twice as much content and the use of some entirely new engine features.

July: Biggest Fallen London month of the year for me, as Mr Chimes' Grand Clearing Out launched. The product of a lot of work from the entire team. I am very fond of @babelfishwars' spiders and @JamesStAnthony' bees.

I really feel like we changed Fallen London in a major way this year and Mr Chimes' is, for me, the central point of that change. It was also a one-off – I'm looking forward to figuring out what its successor looks like.

plus look at that poster! jesus christ

August was an 'uneventful' month by which I mean we released an Exceptional Story, refreshed the Fruits of the Zee festival, and added Hellworms as a buyable item.

But what I am most proud of, from the things we did in August, is this blog post. failbettergames.com/metempsychosis…

I'm happy that we were able to make this kind of decision instead of falling down a sunk cost fallacy hole.

And, importantly, I'm happy our community responded to it without vitriol. 🫀

September: Several small updates, but I really enjoyed that after so many years we finally released a conclusion to the Spirifer/Pianist storyline. @JamesStAnthony somehow managed to write a conclusion that wove everything together again.

October: I love Hallowmas! In 2021 year we deviated mechanically from what we've done in the past and I feel it also opened up some new narrative space, which @JamesStAnthony used to awesome effect.

November: Besides making a long-overdue change to how Social Acts work and the monthly Exceptional Story (@JamesStAnthony's The House of Silk and Flame), we didn't ship any major updates in November.

Which is, honestly, good. I'm glad we've built up the trust that going a month without news or updates isn't the start of a long content drought, and I'm glad we are able to take our time as necessary – the content schedule for a live game can be brutal otherwise.

December: I can't go without bringing up @JamesStAnthony's The Poisoner's Library again, one of my very favorite stories of the year.

And that poster! Dear lord.

There's a lot of stuff we did this year that I didn't mention - if I wanted to go over everything I'd be posting into February, not even going on all the behind-the-scenes work that we keep doing to prepare further content or make it easier to build new content.

And don't worry. We have big plans for 2022.