We’re Failbetter Games, an award-winning game development studio and makers of Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies, Mask of the Rose and Fallen London. We’re known for inventive narrative design, hand-crafted worlds and rich, atmospheric storytelling.

We’re looking for a Writer and Narrative Designer to join our small in-house team at either a senior or non-senior level, working specifically on Fallen London. This position is permanent, remote, and full time, which for us means 35 hours a week.

We’re based in the United Kingdom, but as long as you can be available between our core hours of 11:00 and 16:00 UK time, you don’t have to be.

Also, if you are based elsewhere, it’s likely we’ll have to structure this as a contract position: we’ve found the administrative requirements for direct employment can be impractical for a studio our size in many jurisdictions.

About the Role

You’ll be working on Fallen London, a somewhat unusual narrative browser game. It’s 15 years old this year, with over four and a half million words when we last counted. It’s a live service RPG with ongoing updates, and very politely free-to-play: development is funded mostly by monthly subscriptions and premium stories. A tabletop roleplaying game in the same setting is currently 1500% funded on Kickstarter.

A few things you can do in Fallen London:

• Debate philosophy with a senate of spiders.
• Murder yourself to get enemies off your trail.
• Pause hostilities to play a civilised game of cricket.
• Build a great many statues of yourself under different pretexts.
• Herd giant bugs across the ceiling.
• Advertise soap.

Because we’re a small team, your duties will be varied. You can expect to do all of the following:

• Pitch story arcs to other writers, and take part in high-level planning for the next several months of work.
• Write stories of varying length, complexity, and tone, with a wider range of subject matter than video games usually explore.
• Design quality-based narrative structures that support story and theme while also giving rise to enjoyable gameplay.
• Update and extend existing content (for example, for seasonal events).
• Offer feedback on work by other writers.
• Provide short pieces of marketing copy to explain released or upcoming stories to players – the equivalent of a book’s blurb.
• Draft visual briefs for artists.

Requirements

You don’t need a particular degree nor some arbitrary number of shipped titles or years’ experience to work for us. As long as you’re able to do the job well and can demonstrate that in your application, we’d love to hear from you.

Because Fallen London is primarily a narrative game and more oriented towards prose than dialogue, we find it benefits from conventional writing skills, of the kind that would be helpful for writing a short story.

Our writing is also denser in choice and consequence than is usual in video games. In Fallen London, we call the approach we use for this quality-based narrative. Qualities might represent any of the following (among other things):

• Capabilities of a character that may be tested when the player attempts challenges, such as Watchful or Shapeling Arts.
• Complications and menaces, like how scandalised polite society is by their character’s behaviour, or the mounting peril of an underground ocean.
• Their available currencies and resources (terrible secrets, or souls in bottles).
• Aspects of world state that reflect the progress of their current activities, like a complex theft or archaeological expedition.

For this role, we don’t require you to have done previous work with quality-based narrative, but you will need to be comfortable translating your story ideas into this framework. We anticipate that this will usually require you to have experience with some form of interactive writing that goes beyond branching narrative.

Optional Extras

Any of the following would be helpful and worth telling us about in your application, but they’re very much secondary and not required for you to apply:

• Familiarity with Fallen London or other games in the setting.
• System design skills, such as balancing costs and rewards or defining progression curves. (Because all of Fallen London’s game mechanics are also narrative mechanics, these skills are useful to our writing team.)
• Experience writing functional specs or otherwise clearly explaining desired tooling or game features to programmers.

Remote Work

The entire team is remote, and we expect to remain that way.

As mentioned above, you don’t have to live in the UK to apply, but it’s likely we’d have to offer you a contract position rather than direct employment. And because our work benefits a lot from being able to communicate in real time, we will need you to be available between 11:00 to 16:00 UTC/BST.

We typically find that these hours work best for people who live no more than three time zones away from the UK. If you think your personal circumstances might make you an exception, please explain why in your cover letter.

You will need to do your work from a location where we’re able to pay you: the main exception we’re aware of is Russia, due to sanctions. We’re open to sponsoring a UK work visa for this role, which may help if this would otherwise apply to you. If you would like us to sponsor a visa, please let us know in your application.

We pay UK salaries; whether that works in your favour will depend on your location. In particular, this means that our positions are usually not a good fit for people working from the United States, due to the differences in cost of living and health care.

What We Can Offer

Failbetter is committed to offering employees a safe, respectful environment, a healthy work-life balance, and transparent decision-making. We strive to avoid crunch and enthusiastically eliminate systemic sources of overtime. We don’t talk over one another in meetings, and we don’t expect all our employees to share the same hobbies and cultural references.

We’ve won a GamesIndustry.biz Best Places to Work award four years out of the last six, as well as their Diversity Award in 2022.

Further benefits of working here include:

• Flexible start times, and strong support for other forms of flexible working, like compressed hours.
• Twenty-five days of leave in addition to UK public holidays.
• Additional leave in every fifth year, as a long service bonus.
• Excellent provisions for parental leave.
• Employer pension contributions.
• Private health insurance.
• Private dental care.
• Reimbursement for annual Covid and flu vaccines.
• Opportunities for expenses-paid attendance at industry events.
• An annual, expenses-paid trip to a scenic part of the UK, for our company gathering.
• One silent day a week, to work free of meetings or Slack interruptions.
• Periodic consultations in which we invite subject matter experts to teach us about topics relevant to our work.

If you’re outside the UK and we offer you a contract position, unfortunately we won’t be able to provide all of these, but we’ll pay you at a higher rate to compensate for it.

How to Apply

If you’d like to be considered for the role, you can write to us by 9:00 UTC on Monday 17 March. Please include the following:

• The role you’re applying for, in the subject line.
• A cover letter in the body of your email, rather than as an attachment.
  • Use this to share what you think may make you a good fit for the position and why it interests you.
  • If your timezone is more than three hours away from the UK’s, please tell us about any circumstances that would nonetheless make our core hours practical for you.
• One to three short writing samples, either as a single attachment or as links within your cover letter.
  • Prose or anything which shows how you’ve used interactivity in your writing would be particularly helpful.
  • That said, please use something you’ve already written – there’s no need to tailor your samples to this specific vacancy.
• A CV.

If you’re unsure whether to apply, we’re happy to answer questions, which you can send to the above email address.

What to Expect After Applying

You should hear from us within two weeks of the deadline; often, we’re able to reply considerably sooner. We’ll let you know whether or not you make it to the next stage of applications.

We generally invite 5-15% of candidates to that second stage, which involves answering a few short written questions. The third and final stage is a remote interview that usually lasts between 60 and 90 minutes.