We’ve been a bit quiet recently, but we haven’t been idle! Today is a long-awaited LAUNCH DAY, but it’s also a good time to update everyone on what we’ve been up to. First up:

✨ The Lucid Tarot is out now! ✨

The first 500 decks of the Lucid Tarot are now available on the Etsy shop. They’re unique collectors’ decks because they come with a signed certificate of authenticity along with their embroidered velvet tarot bag and quick start guide to reading the cards. If you’d like one, get in quick! We expect them to go pretty fast.

To remind you, these cards are a reimagining of Secret Histories lore (you’ll see Hours represented in new ways to highlight parts of them we didn’t foreground in the Tarot of the Hours, e.g.) and inspired by the otherworldly beauty of stained-glass windows. The Major Arcana features all Hours from the Moth to the enigmatic twenty-first Hour sometimes called ‘Giribrago’, but with traditional Rider-Waite names (‘The Fool’; ‘The World’) rather than their Secret Histories counterparts.

I’ve also tried to reflect the Rider-Waite symbology more clearly in the Minor Arcana, but with familiar skills and companions from BOOK OF HOURS. You’ll find Arun Peel the Knight of Pentacles, for instance, or Wolf Stories the Seven of Swords. I hope this adds new meaning on top of the gorgeously rich Rider-Waite deck, as well as giving you a good game of Hey, I Recognise That Thing From Somewhere Else! Anyway, I’m very happy where it’s all ended up, especially considering how derpy some of the original drawings are:

Forgive me, Elegiast.

If anyone misses out on a deck, don’t worry. We’ll be relisting another batch of ~400+ tarots this year, as soon as we can facilitate it. Christmas is coming, after all. I just need time to manage the backlog of orders. I don’t think I could ship 1,000 decks without turning into A Poor Lunatic.

Thank you extremely much for being patient with me while this project went on and on and on. If I make another deck for Game Three, maybe I won’t try to engineer an entirely new way to make cards before I can distribute them? Just a thought, Lottie. Just a thought.

A voice from the other side

AK here. It still tickles me how few people realise Weather Factory is literally just two people (plus, ofc, trusted freelancers). I answer support emails every week addressed to ‘Dear Support Team’. We get speculative applications from people who want to intern with us and don’t realise we work out of a flat. Microstudios composed of couples are more common than they used to be, but it’s still mildly unusual. We like it, but it does make it harder to take holidays, and it does mean we don’t hire.

I mentioned recently that we’ve been working on BOOK OF HOURS, on and off, for five years now. Some of that was pre-production, some of that was the HOUSE OF LIGHT expansion, but it’s a long old time. A undergraduate degree and a master’s degree. A newborn infant grown enough to go to school. If you planted an apple pip five years ago, you could be eating its fruit today.

Or to put it another way, I was 47 when we started making BH and I’m 52 now. And it occurred to me that I’ve made about four games over fifteen years, and in another fifteen years I’ll be 67. So Lottie and I had a chat about whether and how we want to spend the next fifteen years doing this – both making games, and making games as a microstudio with just the two of us.

If you like our games, you’ll be glad to hear that the answer is, broadly speaking, yes. Maybe we’ll do more physical goods, maybe I’ll take a couple of years out for that MA I keep threatening, but we like working together and we like the artisanal nature of the whole thing. I don’t actually get up on a Monday and think, yay, support mails, Lottie doesn’t get excited about answering Etsy merch queries, but we do like handling this stuff personally: the people who own the company and make the games are the same people you’re talking to. It also stops us from getting too up ourselves.

We’ve talked about Weather Factory being a bit like a band or an artistic partnership but most days it feels more like a family-run cafe that happens to sell coffee through Steam.

And we like making things for you lot – for our audience, I mean. I said as long ago as Fallen London that there is something to be said for making games that work like reading comprehension tests. It brings in a calmer class of customer.

We’ve got ideas, then, for at least another couple of games before we turn in our Dev Guild hat feathers and go off to roast coffee in the hills. Over to Lottie to talk about the next one.

What now? 

We’re still working on BOOK OF HOURS localisation (in case you missed it, HOUSE OF LIGHT’s now fully playable in Simplified Chinese) and various important but not terribly scintillating tech and bug support issues. But as AK says above, we took some time to take stock of where the studio is and what we want to do next. We’ve decided that, while we might come back to BOOK OF HOURS later, we’ve said what we wanted to say with it through HOUSE OF LIGHT. We’d like to leave it there – for now.

Currently, we’re Fascinated by an idea for Game Three. We’ve spent some of the past couple of months prototyping the underlying tech system and art direction so we can share something that’s reasonably likely to look like the final game. We need to do a bit more work before we can announce, but here are some tidbits we can share:

• • • The game is set in the Secret Histories… but another decade on. The world has changed and keeps on changing.

    • It may appeal to AK’s older audiences – from Fallen London and Sunless Sea – as well as Weather Factory fans.

    • It’s a new genre we haven’t developed before. It’s a natural fit for the kind of stuff we do, though.

    • It’s ambitious. And…

    • …who’s this?

For no particular reason, I’ve been reading about the punk and post-punk scene in Leeds in the late 70s. The nascent legends and the stillborn ones; the rumours, the quibbles, the descendant anecdote (did one of the members of goth band YOU really work in the mortuary of Leeds General Infirmary? Or did he, as Mark Andrews reports in Paint My Name In Black And Gold, actually work in the haematology department? which one would be goth-er?); the sense that one had to have been there and in many cases the relief that one wasn’t – it reminds me of the ceremonial magic scene in London in the late nineteenth century, with Mathers and Waite and Crowley et al. There are differences. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its splinter satellites favoured hashish over amphetamines. The F Club in Leeds had much stickier carpets than the Horus Temple in Bradford. But there is the same sense of giant egos and flawed but considerable talents clashing like stags (funnily enough, it’s mostly men) over projects that most of the world has no interest in.

And of course the turn-of-the-century occult context in Britain was part of the inspiration for Cultist Simulator. You can see it in the way Coseley and Hersault fell out over creative differences, in Galmier’s origin story working a day job in Camden Lock, and of course with My Deeds, My Powers, My Achievements and the Injustices Perpetrated Against Me. (You know Crowley got so petty about Arthur Waite, as in the Rider-Waite deck, so much that the antagonist in Moonchild was called ‘Arthwaite’?)

It’s less of an inspiration for BOOK OF HOURS. Partly this is because it’s just a nicer game, and most of the people who turn up at Hush House are people you might want to spend time with, so the feuds are less vicious. Partly it’s because mythology naturally extends upwards and outwards, and that tends to mean characters get more powerful and deeds get grander. But most of it still happens off-stage; which is the whole point about the Brancrug and the Librarian, that you’re the hermit in the forest and not the adventurer. Some of it is (in the HOUSE OF LIGHT Further Visitor Stories) pretty significant offstage events. The sabotage of a synthetic Name; the seduction of St Lucia the Eyeless; the dread, epic, Mansus-rocking scheme that Douglas calls the ‘Wangle’; these still manifest mostly through people coming to your house and asking you politely if they can borrow a book. Although sometimes deciding who you’ll lend the book to can determine what gets blowed up, in at least one case which book you lend might determine who betrays what, and now and then your decisions might haunt the House. Like maybe if you let magic bees move in under your stairs.

Lottie interjecting at this point. Did someone mention Further Visitor Stories? We’re trying something new in the upcoming expansion, incorporating a more ‘direct’ way of reading and advancing Advanced Visitor Stories (new UI!) and a visual representation of where each story is on your Wisdom Tree. People who buy HOUSE OF LIGHT – or the lucky so-and-sos who have Perpetual Edition and get it automatically for free – will notice some dark, delicious additions to their Wisdom Tree. Each one represents a different visitor story, and is placed somewhere appropriate on this occult map: the Affair of the Friar’s Tapestry, for instance, sits between Bosk and Skolekosophy, whereas you’ll find the Unfinished Lark between Horomachistry and Ithastry. Once you’ve finished a story from the base game, you’ll unlock a starry constellation which you can interact with to take that story further through HOUSE OF LIGHT, turning your Wisdom Tree over the course of the expansion into an arcane narrative star-chart.

Here’s a mock-up of the effect, along with some of the transitional states:

The inspiration is all very beautiful here – zodiac and astrology come to mind – but then of course HOUSE OF LIGHT also introduces you to this guy:

His name is POOR WISP and he will absolutely steal your hearts. Especially when you hear what sound he makes in-game… OK, so he might be a bit Worm-y. Nothing a good vet can’t fix! Probably! If any of you take him to the Foundry (AK has inexplicably made this an option) I will know and so will the gods. “The wisp begins to wriggle, pulling away from the heat, mewing like a broken-winged gull…”

I’m sorry. There must be something in my eye. Next week we should have new stock of the Tarot of the Hours in the shop, a second Weather Forecast, and if it so pleases the Flowermaker, I might even receive my final test deck of the Lucid Tarot. More intel as we receive it. Now go hug a Wisp.

If a videogame is a wall, what do you think – is writing more like the bricks, or more like the mortar? My answer would be usually the mortar… though it depends which game. They’re ‘video games’ not ‘letter games’, after all. The writing serves mostly to locate and direct the gameplay or to explain and contextualise the visuals. One of the reasons that writing in games is not always good is that writers in games sometimes forget this and stuff words into a scene like an panicked upholsterer frantically stuffing goose-feathers into a cushion. Or an overenthusiastic bricklayer adding so much mortar that it squelches out of the sides and leaves the bricks awry. Arrive late, leave early and all that.

Of course some games use the writing as a central feature. In these, the writing is more like the bricks. And of course this is so in Weather Factory games – and in most of my work as far back as Fallen London (née Echo Bazaar). But this isn’t a licence to write long! Even in a writing-centric game, you never want the writing to outstay its welcome. As soon as the player stops reading, it becomes pointless. The bigger the bricks in a wall, the crookeder the courses.

The very first design of Fallen London, from way back in 2009

This brings us to salons. I mentioned last time that the Salon feature in HOUSE OF LIGHT needed a lot of lines. The game benefit of Salons is that they generate Lessons – and you have some limited control over what Lessons they generate. (This is why you can only have one Salon a season, cos otherwise it would be tempting to turn Hush House into Party House so you can rush the Tree of Wisdoms.) But the actual reason that Salons are in the game at all is to extend the fantasy of having a huge occult mansion as your playground – here, by enlarging on the experience of running salons for this kaleidoscope of occult demi-monde types. I could have had the game print out “The conversation dwelt on Herbs & Infusions…” (in fact this remains the backup for when you’ve exhausted everything else) but that would have missed the whole point of the experience. Instead I spent a solid two weeks poring over and comparing tome text and the setting notes and the room descriptions, hammering out things like this:

“Stanislav and Arthur argue happily about which herbal tisane tastes the most disgusting, and hence is most useful to speed lingering guests on their way. [Lesson: Herbs & Infusions]”

“Al-Adim describes his memories of Thirza Blake, and her work, in his time as Secretary Nunciant of the House. He is clearly caught between affection and annoyance. Stanislav shakes his head: ‘I wish I had known her. I think we’d have got on.’ [Lesson: Herbs & Infusions]”

“Douglas has been looking into the six-centuries-past death of Abbess Nonna. He’s questioned sources he doesn’t share with Stanislav, and concludes that she was possessed by a Name of the Blackbone and ‘put down’ by her sistren – ‘nasty business, but best thing for it.’ He and Stanislav discuss the herb-mixtures that might have laid her open to that possession. [Lesson: Herbs & Infusions]”

Have you noticed how much longer the third is than the first? That doesn’t make it better. I mean it’s fine, and it’s a fun bit of backstory, but it’s also a bit of a lumpy brick. This is likely because I wrote it at the end of the day when I was tired (Mark Twain: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”) If you can get as much effect for 29 words as for 64, you’ll want to go for 29. The player will thank you. And I’m conscious that when the Salon actually runs, the player will see several of these in a row, like bricks in a wall.  And it’s no more effort to write that 64 words than the 29 words, if anything the reverse – I mean 64 words imply a little more wear on the old distal phalanges, but the effortful bit is reviewing all the details, keeping the lore straight, and then coming up with ten to fifteen decent ideas an hour, for seven hours a day, for five days a week. (Lottie still chortles at me angrily pouring myself a glass of whisky towards the end of a rough writing day and grumbling ‘how many interesting things can you even say about pumpkin pie?’)

No pumpkin pie anywhere in this salon.

Any writer talking about their job eventually ends up complains about how tough writing is, boo hoo, get a real job then, so let’s bring down a merciful curtain and say: about four hundred Salon lines are written, and I’ll need another couple of hundred at least but how many there are depends on the old triage, deadline, cutting-room biz. And now that the essential work is done, I’m enjoying seating Coquille next to Morgen and having Yvette argue Jung with al-Adim. Some of these characters have been knocking around my head for the a good few years now, but they don’t often get to talk to each other, and you see more and different angles on them when that happens. Even Hokobald has a bit more light and shade now. Not to mention poor Zachary.

Lottie here, just rounding out the end of this post. I’ll leave you with two things: first, a round of Guess That Aspect. Can you work out what they represent in HOUSE OF LIGHT? Obviously my favourite is the SUDDEN FISH, becuase I am yin to AK’s yang, and where he drinks whisky while morosely contemplating the nature of pie, I am trying to sneak anarchic Pokémon into his very srs game.

More significantly, we’re finally ready to tell you when all this food, fraternity and occult demimondering will come out. HOUSE OF LIGHT will release on Steam and GOG on…

Thursday 26th September 2024

Wishlist it and mark your calendars! We’ll be running a closed beta for it ahead of time – more on that in the next few weeks, for those interested in helping test it out – and we’ll announce price points and more info as we get closer to launch. It’ll be free to anyone with Perpetual Edition (thanks again, early adopters!), and we can’t wait for you to get stuck in, like Hokobald into aglaophotis soufflé.

While you’re waiting, we’ll also be releasing full translations of BOOK OF HOURS into Simplified Chinese and Russian on Thursday 29th August (Japanese TBC), and we’ll even have some smol Cultist Simulator news this year for you all too. Dream furiously, friend. The Lighthouse awaits…

HOUSE OF LIGHT is a good-sized expansion with an unusual congeries of different features, which I’ve been assiduously altering from a congeries into a constellation, and I’ll talk about that, but UP FRONT let me say that absolutely nothing here is 100% confirmed or promised, everything may change up until release day, and if I get any grouchy emails complaining there are ‘only’ seventy cooking recipes then I’ll… well I’ll sigh, mark them spam and get on with my day. It’s not much of a threat. [edit: there were just under a hundred in the end]

The foot bone’s connected to the leg bone…

I really wanted cooking in the launch version of BOOK OF HOURS, but it was one of the half-dozen things that didn’t make the cut (a very casual way of describing the late-development triage process, which fails to evoke all the weeping forlornly at spreadsheets and bank statements). This makes it hard to connect meaningfully to the skill system. The risk with ancillary systems added later is that they can be disconnected from anything meaningful, so they just roll around under the surface of the game like one of those horrible oil globules under a steroid user’s skin.

Fortunately we have a natural use for them: salons! Which is to say, picnics, elevenses, supper, etc, where you invite visitors to chat about the invisible arts. Of course that basic outline immediately poses half a dozen questions, each of which has a couple of misleading answers before you get to a workable one, and then where the workable ones create further questions.

The leg bone’s connected to the knee bone…

For example: how  many slots do you need in a Salon verb? Ooh probably about ten, we need to revamp the verb window no that becomes wildly impractical, so instead let’s allow the Salon to respond to food placed in the room. This feels much more immersive for the Librarian, but also means reworking (a) some quite central code and (b) some of the room art – all those neatly placed chairs on the viewer side of the table made it impossible to arrange food on the table. (When I was testing the refectory I had to stack food on the mantelpiece.)

Okay then, how do food Aspects tie into the Salon process? Obviously if you want a good conversation about Resurgences & Emergences you stack the salon with as many Grail and Moth dishes this doesn’t work because much of the reason for the slot system back as far as Cultist was to make it impossible just to stack up twenty identical objects to power through an Aspect requirement. And we don’t want people maxing out Grail numbers by filling the room with cake:

So currently, instead, individual guests have some basic dietary requirements – usually based on their traditional interests (Arthur wants a meal with at least one Lantern-aspected dish) but with some variations (al-Adim doesn’t drink, Yvette isn’t fussy). This immediately throws up some silly preferences (Dagmar won’t eat much besides Aglaophotis Soufflé, Agdistis will eat basically anything because most foods contain Heart) which will entail a final brow-furrowed tuning session and probably some post-beta tweaks, but much of which will stand because it’s basically a game and because the alternative – hand-assigning a hundred-plus food preferences to twenty-plus guests with no particular mnemonic structure – is no fun for anyone, least of all me.

So you set up your Salon in one of the five or six rooms where you can hold it (it’s nice to make more use of the Hall of Voices), you invite your guests and.. wait invite guests? Visitors show up once a season. We need to do something about that, too. So in HOUSE OF LIGHT (and this feature may migrate back to the vanilla game) you can get someone’s address once you’ve helped them out at least once (though Hokobald, paranoid as ever, will basically only give you the general location of a manhole behind a pub where he might sometimes check for correspondence). You can then write ’em an invite, send it via the Postmistress, and they turn up. If you like you can write a number of invitations in advance for your big do. Or you can actually summon them so you can push through the Visitor stories to get to the new late-game Visitor Further Stories (all the systems connect! more on this anon).

And this brings us to the winnowing phase of design, after answering a lot of these questions:

al-Adim travels a lot, do we worry about him turning up after sixty seconds while Yvette who lives in London also turns up after sixty seconds? No. It adds nothing and it makes people think too hard about exactly where everyone is; anyway a lot of our visitors have Uncanny Means of travelling. (Travelling at Night, even.)

What if you keep spamming invitations? do people stop turning up? No. This would be hassle to code, hassle to signal, and would punish people who accidentally invite the wrong guests. There is a rationale (‘when the Librarian asks, the invisible world listens’) and there is a nod to the requirement to put some effort into invitations (there’s a low-ish Aspect requirement that you can satisfy with Soul cards and the right ink, and of course Hokobald will only turn up if he gets an invitation written in Orpiment Exultant). But as with the order forms there is a hazy line between making the invitations feel like some business, so you’re not just clicking buttons on a spreadsheet, and making players jump through hoops – a line that for some people we’re already on the wrong side of.

Do you get unique Salon responses from guests for relevant food and drink? Now we’re really in the meat of it (olol). I would like visitors to have unique lines because other visitors are present. I would like people to comment on the wine. I would like people to comment on paintings hanging in the room. I would like people to have conversations that reference ongoing stories. But that right there is a requirement for – well the maths depends on how you work it, but we can easily get up to ten or twenty thousand unique lines. Or a madlibs approach like the CK3 feast system – which is fine for what it is, I like CK3, but it’s a lot of work and it’s the opposite of the handcrafted Hush House feel. And we’re not even at the headline feature for HOUSE OF LIGHT story content – the Further Stories for Visitors / Lighthouse Institute stuff – and I’d quite like to get the expansion out this year. So the answer is ‘some much smaller subset of some of the above’.

I haven’t even talked about how the cooking system works. Or Thirza’s Knife. OK so briefly: making food is much more like a traditional crafting system, though you get a little bit of potential input from Spices & Savours. Milk plus flour with a mixing bowl (CAKE TIME) is dough, dough plus eggs is cake batter, cake batter plus honey is Cornish Honey Cake (never, never to be confused with Devonshire Honey Cake). Some of the recipes require knives. We don’t actually have a kitchen knife in the game, so if you want to chop onions you might need to bring down Sebastian’s swords from the Hall of Division. Or find Thirza’s Knife, which has probably never been used to cut up anything lamentable, probably.

The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone…

Wait AK what are salons for? apart from ‘deciding not to invite Hokobald’? And what’s the difference between elevenses and a picnic? and why can you only hold salons once a season? For that you’ll have to wait until my wife wrestles me back to the blog to write another update. Right now I have aspects to assign to cake.

Did somebody say cake? LB here, and I have been made very hungry over the last week as I drew all the delectably 1930s dainties that AK’s requested so far for HOUSE OF LIGHT. It requires quite a bit of research – what is the history of Pyrex? What the hell is fish ‘Monte Carlo’ style? – but I hope the consistency will really create an unusual, European historical sense of reality and you can all enjoy making prune whip for people you don’t like. The below isn’t exhaustive – I already have a host of new food to draw, from mushrooms on toast to something alarmingly called ‘Walls-of-Ys’ – but you can already pick a pretty nice meal for yourself from what we have!

You can see in the header image of this blog post how rich, joyful and tasty a full spread of food looks, and how much life it adds to Hush House. AK’s mentioned we had to adjust some rooms to facilitate soirées, but the end result can have surprisingly sweet outcomes. The Refectory looks warm and inviting, like a welcome-home banquet for a long-travelled friend – but how suitably melancholy and sweet is a tea-party in winter in the Physic Garden? I feel like Valentine Dewulf would have been much the better for one of these.

In other news of things that hopefully brighten your life, we have another MERCH LAUNCH to announce – our limited edition Hours notebooks, now available in the shop. I tried to make them classy and BOOK OF HOURS-y, and I’m delighted with how they’ve turned out. If you have need of a gently occult notebook in your life – to write your hopes, your dreams, reminders of BoH recipes, etc – these guys are for you.

Finally, we’re moving offices next month so are running a major 40% off sale off almost everything else in the shop (the one other exception is the newly-restocked Wisdom Tree pendants, which I’ve just relisted. People selfishly bought them all, but other people also wanted them and were sad, and we can’t have that). So along with the new notebooks, go nuts on our biggest ever merch sale, and help us save our ancient backs by not having to lug 10,000 Lady Afterwards up some stairs.

The real hot topic from this week, though, is what comes after vegetables. I’ll let AK explain:

“You probably know the George Bernard Shaw crack about the US and the UK being ‘two countries separated by a common language’ (GBS, like many Irish writers, did well out of snarking accurately at British English). BOOK OF HOURS evoked horror and disgust from our American readers with its unsparingly explicit depiction of pre-decimal British currency. But you might not know about pudding.

‘Pudding’, as all her late Majesty’s subjects know, is the correct word for ‘dessert’, at least in traditional English upper class dialect, just as ‘supper’ is the correct word for ‘dinner’. I was brought up middle-middle-class but my mother had upper-middle-class aspirations, so I learnt that we ate ‘pudding’ after ‘supper’ in the evening. If I’d been lower-middle-class or she’d hung around slightly less posh people, we’d have had ‘dessert’ and ‘tea’ (not to be confused with tea, the drink). As it was, if we ate early, say five rather than seven in the evening, the meal was was called ‘high tea’ (which didn’t include the drink ‘tea’, unlike ‘afternoon tea’ for which the drink ‘tea’ would be a central feature).

That was the 1980s, and ‘pudding’ has been largely been driven to the margins by ‘dessert’ now, partly cos America and France, partly cos it sounds stodgy, but you’ll still find it on the menu in very traditional restaurants. And that ‘very traditional’ vibe, heavily flavoured with ‘English country house’ is what we’re going for in the cooking update in HOUSE OF LIGHT. The 20s and the 30s were something of a lost era in English cooking, when we got a bit more experimental and informal. (Then of course the Second World War, and food rationing in its aftermath, helped develop a rep for stodgy monotonous food that isn’t really deserved any more but I grew up in the 70s and 80s and Jesus Christ it was then.) So some of the dishes won’t look English at all, while some of them are so English they’ll make your teeth spin.

tl:dr; pudding is what you call dessert. But Yorkshire pudding is a savoury dish, duh, that you have alongside the main course. And meanwhile, also, when you put sausages in Yorkshire pud, you get toad-in-the-hole. (No, not bangers, sausages are generally only bangers if you put them in mash.) And black pudding is also sausage-related but isn’t something you should google if you plan on sleeping soundly tonight. Alright?”

…You can’t get this sort of #gamedev #content anywhere else, now, can you? It might sound a bit petty that we’re spending weeks of development time deciding on the most historically-plausible menu for a cast of fictional characters who may or may not be invited to dine at a made-up library on a made-up cliff, but this is actually the stuff Weather Factory games are made of! AK’s particular brand of bizarre but internally consistent period RPGs underpinned by a complex Aspect system means we not only have to research period-appropriate foodstuffs, but they have to make sense of people’s systemic affiliations too. For example, DI Douglas Moore feels like someone who’s more likely to want a simple, manly sandwich than some fancy French nonsense, but is there a manly sandwich that evokes his Principles of Heart and Lantern?

Speaking of Aspects, they’re also a good way to show the sorts of things we’ve been working on without spoilering anyone. So here’s a selection of new Aspects going into HOUSE OF LIGHT:

They range from aspects for all 63 non-language Skills in game to Agendas, Fears and Sympathies (feelings and intentions Visitors have which will affect their work if you add them to the Lighthouse Institute board). How many of them can you identify, do you think…?

ANYWAY. I hope to have some HOUSE OF LIGHT screenshots for you soon, but AK will be working on his lonesome next week as I have been called for a mysterious life event that I can’t talk about until afterwards. Until then!

What would a Weather Factory game be if it didn’t try to kill you every so often? The Hours are much more merciful in Brancrug, but the House Without Walls still waits behind the world, and it’s still a dangerous place. Elements of the Soul are vulnerable to maladies if overused, or used unwisely. Chor is drawn into Duendracy by music only you can hear. Wist becomes tangled and Shell-Crossed with pre-human thoughts. Ereb is vulnerable to Westengryre, and Phost… the HIGHER YOU RISE the MORE YOU SEE. You didn’t think we’d make too easy a game, did you?

On to the beta. Thanks so much for everyone who’s tested so far – it’s so helpful! AK mentioned this in a recent Reddit post, but here’s an easy visual guide to what happens next:

We’ll be removing access to the beta on Monday 17th (you’ll be able to load it after that point, but not get past the title screen), and reopening it on Thursday 27th April with a new expanded build, BARONIAL. We’ve also decided to add testers incrementally over the course of the rest of the beta. A bunch of people will get emails on the 27th, and every week or so – when AK updates Steam with a new build – a few more will find a tasty beta key in their inbox. I know some people were disappointed when they weren’t included in the first tranch of testers and had to wait a month before being in with another chance. This way everyone should be happier, AND we get a steady influx of new people to tell us our UI don’t work. Woo hoo!

Look how nice this one looks! And this is a screenshot, not a mock-up. We’re getting there…

Art-wise I’m astonished to say that we are ONE ROOM AWAY from all (base) art complete. There’s one place left to draw – a triple-sized subterranean chapel of the Sisterhood of the Triple Knot – but we’re looking pretty peachy. I’m now working on bringing it to life with animations (beta testers may have noticed the nice candle animations going in, for example) while Adrien makes a number of seasonal outside art and Important People busts you’ll find around Hush House. Here’s a sampling of what he’s up to. Any guesses on who these busts are?

Right! I’ll leave it here so we can get back to work on the game. More updates soon: beta hopefuls expect an email (maybe) on the 27th, and in two weeks’ time we have something important to share with all of youse. In the interests of getting hype…

🤫

That is to say, I’ve been working on the game’s background this week and it’s gone from the left to the right, which suits the game and the way you’ll use it much better. I want to parallel the unreal Wes Anderson-inspired symmetry of Hush House on the left, and to lean into the sense that this world is a place where things really do have real-world connections to one another, but aren’t trying to represent any sort of visual reality. Plus, I like the spooky storybook vibe – I think it’s a perfect page for Alexis’ words to shine.

Still stuff to do, but we’re getting there! AK and I both have also been working on various different weathers, as we’d like to show different environmental conditions, seasons (including the elusive Numa), and something AK alarmingly refers to as ‘incidents’. We want you to feel like you’re passing time in an actual, fully-functioning world, cultivating the places you’ve unlocked over time. Super WIP, but you get the idea below:

Similarly, we’re iterating on ways to shroud various parts of the game before the player’s progressed far enough to unlock them. Remember, the opening of BOOK OF HOURS is your sorry, amnesiac librarian washing up on the beach, soggily making their way for help to the village, and finally finding their way to their new gothic home… The answer is clearly groovy lil’ clouds on cocktail sticks. Hah, you thought this studio could only do words!

AK, myself and freelance codemaster Chelnoque have all been working on card management, too. This is by far the most ‘art heavy’ game AK or I have ever worked on, and we need to balance those visuals, lots of gorgeous AK-writing, crafting windows and the numbers of cards you would expect either from late-game Cultist Simulator OR the storage basement of a mad shut-in Magic the Gathering collector. We’re going with a drawer system for now, which we think is a good half-way house – but this may change.

AK’s found the time to write a bit, too. January will probably be a writing-heavy month (bring on the coffee!) because we’re hoping to get a solid, representative game build at the end of the month, but we already have early-game options like:

“I am the Librarian of Hush House. If I write Histories with an encaustum ink, it is no small thing. I’ll need to use one of the languages of power, and muster enough of a Principle to support my assertions.”

Conversely, if you’re a reprobate –

“I am the Librarian of Hush House. I probably shouldn’t write my Histories directly on the table.”

AK adds: one of the temptations in game writing, especially when there’s a lot of gaps to fill in, is to treat it like grout. Here’s a choice, here’s an outcome, twenty words that are different enough for this outcome, move on. And some writing is just filler. Maybe the introit is ‘Move to the next day’ and the follow-up is ‘A new day dawns.‘ It could reflect the game state – ‘the new day dawns fresh and cold’ but that might be redundant if you’re showing the weather graphically – which means you’re teaching the player that the text is ignorable froth, and also landing yourself with a bit of extra complexity and opportunity for bugs. It could be a gag or image – ‘Another day. I’ll be useful once I have some coffee in me’ or ‘Another day. I’ll shake the sleep from my limbs’ but maybe that conflicts with something else, maybe it sounds repetitive… especially on day 20. It could be one of several random text strings, but that almost never works as well as you might expect – it tends to draw attention to the repetition rather than otherwise – and it then takes several times as long to write.

One approach is to treat it like negative space, and really just go with ‘A new day dawns’, which takes no time to write and which allows the more interesting text to pop. Sometimes the player just wants a tiny rest. Another approach is to do what you’d do in a song or a poem, which is to have a chorus – something that’s intended to be read as repeated. This might mean a rhyme, or a striking image. As a result of Lottie’s influence I rather like kennings, which crop up a lot in OE poetry. Kennings for dawn might be ‘Day-beacon, sun-herald’. You get these things popping up in relatively trivial text and it might feel fresh and strike your brain at an angle. Or it might feel weirdly stagey, because people don’t do that in games. But then BOOK OF HOURS does a lot of things that people don’t do in games. We’ll see.

Back in art world, Adrien has been beavering away at more Hush House rooms. There are – at last count – eighty-something of them, so we’ve a bunch to get through! Below are all some of his recent work, from the wintry beauty of the abbey atrium to the luxurious, delinquent alchemy of Robert Fludd.

Finally, I thought you’d appreciate a first glimpse at some of the faces who’ll assist you in rebuilding your library. These are a mix of named village-dwellers (Denzil the Smith, Timothy the forgetful rector, etc etc etc) and specialists you’ll occasionally find staying – briefly! – in the rural yet quality rooms of The Sweet Bones.

I won’t name them all, but see if you can identify the poet, artist, musician, person with the darkest past (!) and Mr and Mrs Kille… (AK adds: and Tintin character, I reckon.)

I leave you with the less interesting but also important news that we’ve just moved our mailing list to a different provider, so if you notice anything hinky about the various ‘subscribe!’ buttons around the website, or see anything bizarre in the next newsletter you receive (later today!), do let us know.

The Etsy shop is now closed for the year but will open again in the first week of January. MERRY CHRIMBLETIDE, PEOPLE. AK and I wish you a wonderful holiday, a smashing 2023, and surprise and fluffy cats. ‘Til next year! ♥

This week we have a crunchy BOOK OF HOURS progress report: AK’s been working on the start of the game, the end of the game, and the bit in between. Over to you, Alexis…

Most crafting systems are combinations of recipes. Rags + Thread = Bandages, Coal + Iron Ore in Furnace =  Iron Ingot. There’s limited room for creativity. In Cultist Simulator I wanted to allow more inventiveness – hence the aspect system. What do you get if you mix a lot of Forge with a little Winter and Knock?

One problem with this is it suggests everything works like a stewpot. You put a lot of Forge and a little Winter and Knock in a pot, you cry out ARISE MY BEAUTY and a Caligine comes out. It doesn’t matter if the Forge needs two followers or half a follower and eight lumps of coal. Except it does, because you need a Rite, which limits you to one follower and one lump of coal, or whatever. Rites are the unsung heroes of CS design. They make room for more elaborate and flavourful decisions about how to combine. Except except people quickly converge to the ‘best’ rites, the ones that don’t use up hard-to-obtain resources (like Tools) and do use up easy-to-obtain resources (like Influences). This is why we make experimental games, to figure out this stuff.

In BOOK OF HOURS, I wanted more ways through the narrative crafting maze. Originally I said Workstations (Kitchen Range, Garden Plot, Mirrors, Piano) were like Verbs in Cultist. They are, but they’re like verbs with pre-fitted Rites. Guest Beds accept a Visitor and a Beverage. Rest Beds accept an Ability that you want to recover more quickly, and a Beverage. A Piano accepts a Skill card, a Memory card, and up to three Ability cards, one of which has to be Chor. Mirrors accept a Skill, a Memory, an Ability, and a couple of Light Sources. If your Purifications & Exaltations Skill is really high, maybe you can make Inks of Power on the Kitchen Range or even at your Desk, but it’s easier to do with Alchemist’s Glassware given the limitations on what you can put in it. It’s easier to study Hushery at the Pale Desk than it is at Abbess Nonna’s Desk. And so on. I’m aiming for a system where resources keep being unexpectedly interesting in unexpected contexts as you unlock more of the game. As ever, we’ll see how it goes.

You can see a bit of AK’s design already in the room art Adrien and I are drawing. Lots of rooms have variations on basic furniture like shelves because, by last count, there’s some bananas number like 1,000 books we expect to have in-game. But some rooms also have a specific workstation that will open up new crafting options when you unlock that specific room, making it a strategic and rewarding (we hope!) choice which rooms you unlock in which order. Take the rather alarming gurney-looking thing in the third image – this is the Scrimshawry workstation in the rooms of Natan of Regensburg – which allows you to do all sorts of artisanal things with whalebone and netsuke and (if no authorities are around) bodyparts, too.

You couldn’t craft the same items – or use the same ingredients – with the giant secretary desk in the sixth image, because if you tried stuffing bodyparts into Thomas Dewulf’s desk you’d find yourself in an oubliette faster than you could say ‘I regret my previous life choices’.

From left to right, then, these rooms are: Solomon Husher’s study, the Chapel Ascite, Natan’s laboratory, the Watchman’s observatory, the Abbey Church nave, Thomas Dewulf’s study, the cloister, and the infirmary.

I can also share a first pass at Hush House itself, perched like a owl above sepulchral hills. Our whole art style is about leaning into the unreality of things, and into theatrical, dolls-house-like artifice. So we’re testing out effects like this night-time scene – have a look at a WIP version:

The dark rectangles are, of course, where all the rooms go, and you’ll unlock them sequentially by unlocking a room before them. Hush House has been gutted by a fire, so each room will need a specific set of resources to fix them up before you can use, furnish and capitalise on any resources contained within them. AK came up with the truly horrifying idea that in the later game, when you’ve worked your way through the building to Brancrug Gaol on the left, you could even unlock rooms with people (could they possibly be people?) still walled up inside…

But sunshine flowers kittens springtime this is a NICE GAME remember! Not like mean ol’ Cultist Simulator though come on that bit about putting people in the cupboard is still very funny.

Anyhoo, I leave you with a reminder that Cultist is 40% off in Steam’s Autumn Sale and GOG’s Black Friday Sale, and everything in the merch shop (including The Lady Afterwards boxes) are 20% off for Black Friday. Tune in next week for the Sixth History licence reveal, our subreddit AMA on Thursday, and more BoH work. This game is my favourite game I’ve ever worked on – I hope we do you proud next year. 🙂

MPC are the absolute top of the pile when it comes to making beautiful antique physical items. They usually specialise in Lovecraftian stuff (AK and I bought their Hastur experience years ago, and it was amazing), so The Lady Afterwards caught their eye. The MPC edition includes everything that’s in our Weather Factory Lady Afterwards box, but adds an extra layer of high-quality artefact…ry: a custom wooden carrying case, hand-aged clues, an antique magnifying glass, a sterling silver cigarette case with never-before-seen business cards inside, an “Essential Hours” and a full Tarot of the Hours deck…

The MPC edition costs ~£180 + shipping and launches at 6PM BST / 10AM PDT on Tuesday 8th November 2022, just under two weeks from now. There’s limited stock available, so if the above floats your boat, I highly encourage you to join MPC’s Lady Afterwards waitlist to be pinged the moment the game is live.

(For the avoidance of doubt, we’re still happily selling the original boxed version of The Lady Afterwards. So if you prefer the original ‘cottagecore’ concept, that’s still available! Regardless, it’s incredibly cool to see this lil project that grew out of a pretty bad time in my life become something as gorgeous as this. Thank you, MPC.)

Now, I suppose I should talk a bit about that game we’re supposedly launching next year. AK’s been primarily working on BOOK OF HOURS‘ visitor loop – which includes characters you might recognise, like a certain Detective-Illuminate Douglas Moore, but also new faces like Señor Corso Reverte and the notorious Princess Coquille. It’s not ready to share yet, but I can talk about Brancrug village, your conduit to the outside world in BOOK OF HOURS. It’s the place you’ll visit to find the assistance you need to restore the library to ‘not a blackened ruin’.

First up, here are its five major stops: the post office, rectory, carpenter-slash-handywoman, smithy and village pub, The Sweet Bones. (A ‘handywoman’ is not what it sounds like – look it up!) Sometimes these buildings will be shut – at night, most likely, and perhaps in a particularly cold and impassable winter – but when they’re open you’ll be able to petition their owners for particular assistance. In The Sweet Bones, you’ll also find a rotating roster of specialists who may come in useful: a maverick geologist, a surrealist painter, an occasional convict, or perhaps an unexpected nun.

Here’s what it looks like when you put it all together. Remember this is ALL TERRIBLY WORK IN PROGRESS – lots more to do before it looks like the final thing. 🙂

Annnnd just as a petit digestif at the end of the meal, here’s a look at a few new rooms – not all drawn by me this time! We have a modded Librarian’s Quarters from our usual element artists Clockwork Cuckoo, the ground floor of the grand staircase by me, and the very first room you unlock in the game – the Lodge of Hush House – by Adrien Deggan, whom you may remember from that lovely concept art of Hush House and Brancrug Isle many yonks ago. He’ll be working on a lot more rooms in the future, which makes me both exceedingly excited and relieved…

(Click for larger versions.)

Hope you’re hype about The Lady Afterwards: MPC edition, and can see the shape of BOOK OF HOURS’ world coming together! If you haven’t already, please wishlist the game and tell your friends / familiars / enemies as a cunning double-bluff to wishlist, too. It helps us tackle the mighty beast that is Steam’s ‘How Successful Do You Want Your Game To Be’ algorithm, so you would gain the blessings of the Mother of Ants if you do. 🙏🙏🙏🐜

The Lucid Tarot

This is a project I started way back when AK was unwell, so work on BOOK OF HOURS was paused. Now he’s healthy again (woot!), this has turned into a personal project of mine – BOOK OF HOURS takes priority, so I complete the cards I can in my ‘spare’ work time. But today I’ve reached an important milestone: all the Major Arcana cards are complete! 🎉

Check out the Lucid Tarot page for a few larger versions of the below, or bask in the joy of seeing pockets of colour appear out of an inky blackness. I intend to go back and zhuz a few of these just before printing, but to give you an idea of the full set:

Each of these cards was designed, drawn and coloured from scratch, because obviously the Hours deserve as much love and attention as they can get. I wanted to put a more human spin on the Hours with this deck, as we already have a lot of gorgeous symbolism in the Tarot of the Hours. But what would you see in the chapel windows of the Church of the Bright Edge, for example? Or what would gaze semi-benevolently down upon the altar of the Temple Unceasing? I’d love for these to actually appear in the windows of Hush House in BOOK OF HOURS, but AK and I spent a lot of time talking production schedules this week and we have quite enough to get on with for that game already…

Minor Arcana cards are more numerous than Major Arcana (56 Minor, 22 Major) but they’ll deliberately harken back to cards you’ve mostly already seen in Cultist Simulator. You’ve seen the 10 of Swords already, for example:

The 10 of Swords represents martyrdom, victimhood and ‘bottoming out’ – so the Incursus seemed like a pretty good touchpoint for that. You can expect to see a Lucid Tarot reimagining of your Cultist cards in the next set of these cards you see – anyone want to guess who I’ve chosen for the Page, Knight, Queen and King of Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles…?

BOOK OF HOURS

Among many other things, AK’s been thinking about skills this week. When I turn around, I see the silhouette of his fabulous hair against a terrifying sheet of incomprehensible data, like an adorable kitten slightly obscuring your view of the sun exploding in the sky. It has tabs in it like this

And notes in it like this

AK alleges it is all very well organised and self-explanatory. The game has been through a hell of a lot of reworking and rethinking since we first announced it, so it needs a bit of a monster framework. For example, AK says –

The Illumination Wisdom: “Mystical exercises to purify and illuminate the self and its surroundings.” One of the skills in Illumination (and in Skolekosophy) started out life as the Four Regrets. This was an evocative name for a skill that deals with Edge and Winter. It referenced the ‘Four Regrets’ in an original CS tome, The Skeleton Songs (yes, like the podcast), and it was one of a list of skills (Three Exuberations, Nine Disciplines…) that sounded nicely esoteric. And it fitted into an elegant schema for crafting rarefied things about light and knowledge.

But when I went back to the skills list after some time away, I realised it’s hopelessly confusing to have Four Regrets at level 5, and Nine Disciplines at level 2. I didn’t want to change the whole scheme, so I tried out things like Crossroads Regret and Ninefold Practices. The numbers were still in there but less confusing.

But Secret Histories stuff balances rather carefully between the allusive and the incomprehensible. If I call a skill ‘Flame Enchantments’ that’s boringly on the nose and there’s no exploration to enjoy. But if I call it ‘Articulations of the Laminar Secret’ it sounds great, but it’s bloody hard to work out what the skill actually does. Especially when you’re crafting, like, a Wild Surmise into an Earthquake Intimation, or something.

So I went back again, and I worked it properly into our web of references. So Four Regrets has ended up as Ragged Crossroads (alongside Disciplines of the Scar and Meniscate Reflections). That would still be absurdly bewildering for anything game that isn’t about plumbing occult knowledge in a secret library. Even in BOOK OF HOURS, they’re the most obscurely named skills, compared to Drums & Dances or Lockworks & Clockworks. But anyone who’s dug into the lore – veteran, or newb ten hours in – will be able to guess which Hours they connect to, and once they see the items in the game, they’ll have enough to start figuring out what the hell they actually do.

We have a few other announcements in the wings – something Lady Afterwards related, for instance – and we’re moving towards monthly builds of BOOK OF HOURS like we did with Cultist Simulator. So expect more art, updates and LORE in the near future. For now, AK and I are going on a long-awaited holiday where we will curl up next to a roaring fire and wake up with sheep staring only slightly ominously at us through our rented cottage window. See you in a week!

Hey everyone! As you may have seen in his recent blog, it’s been a quiet sprint while Alexis deals with burnout. So I don’t have any BOOK OF HOURS updates for you, I’m afraid! I do have some other stuff to share, though…

First up, I’m delighted to announce we’re making another tarot deck! The Tarot of the Hours proved so overwhelmingly popular it gave me the tarot bug, and I’ve been thinking about making a BOOK OF HOURS version for a while. Stained glass has become a theme, so I’m currently designing another 78-card tarot deck printed on transparent PVC (rather than opaque card) to emulate the experience of looking through a stained-glass church window. I don’t think this has been done before, so that’s exciting! Here’s what it’ll look like…

The card on the right is the back of all 78 cards. Flip it over and you’ll see a corresponding face or suit design. This deck will use Cultist Simulator imagery and, of course, the Hours, but it follows the traditional major and minor arcana of the tarot more faithfully than the Tarot of the Hours. You can see the Mother-of-Ants is The Hierophant, and the Meniscate is Justice. Alexis used the major arcana as inspiration when he was originally designing the Hours, so they fit very well.

Unlike the Tarot of the Hours, every image in this deck will be brand new and drawn by yours truly! So you’ll see some familiar faces and some familiar icons from Cultist Sim, but with new twists. The deck – name TBD – will probably start life as a signed limited edition, but more on that later!

Finally, a shout out to The Star, also known as the Vagabond. Her sketch accidentally mirrors the infamous Ukrainian Eurovision performance of 2007 in ALL ITS SPANGLY GLORY, which is exactly the sort of whimsy the Vagabond likes. The Laughingthrush is ever at work in the world.

Full video here, if you haven’t seen it, and want to know what it is to LIVE.

My other project is even more secret than the stained-glass tarot. I teased it first in Gondishapur; here’s another clue. ANY GUESSES?

We plan to announce it on Cultist‘s anniversary at the end of May. So as my Geordie grandpa would say, keep yer wool on ’til then!

I leave you all with a reminder that we’re releasing German and Japanese on mobile on Tuesday 27th April (this coming Tuesday!) so if you’ve been waiting for the game in your language, now’s the time. Have a lovely weekend, and more news on all these projects – and hopefully more Alexis – soon. ♥

On the humble 26th of March, Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia, Nancy Pelosi was born and Ludwig van Beethoven died. Bit of a mixed blessing but it skews ultimately positive by being – wait for it – NATIONAL NOUGAT DAY! YAAAaaaaayyyy………….

Ahem. Let’s ask Alexis what he’s been up to, shall we?

I’m building BOOK OF HOURS inside Cultist Simulator. THIS DOES NOT MEAN BOOK OF HOURS WILL LOOK LIKE CULTIST SIMULATOR but it does mean that I can build up a common code base for future projects, and extend the options for modders while I’m at it. It also means that I’m having to rework a lot of Cultist code, of course; and the things I’m reworking at the moment are Portals and Otherworlds.

There’s one Otherworld in Cultist: the Mansus. It’s not implemented as an Otherworld. It’s implemented as a giant hack, because I paid a freelancer to spend a day and a half building the UI, and then I spent about a day plugging it into the content system… because the Mansus was a last-minute addition that we didn’t have room for in the schedule, because Lottie met Ian Livingstone, Mr Games Workshop himself, on a train and (I promise I am not making this up) he convinced us we should put a map in the game.

Where was I. OTHERWORLDS. So all an ‘otherworld’ is, is an Otherworld window linked to a Portal token, in the same way that Situation windows open out of Verb tokens. But Otherworld windows are much more assertive than Situation windows. And in BOOK OF HOURS, a Portal token isn’t necessarily an abstract counter like Cultist – it could be a book or a phrase or a physical door. And it’ll be possible to configure and customise them, for me and for modders, although I might just put them in as Unity prefabs and you might need to pick up a copy of Unity. Sorry, there’s only one of me and this bloody cat won’t shut up.

I’ve been doing a lot of marketing planning, which has thrown up some really fun stuff that’ll be happening later this year (particularly for Cultist fans) but is the second least shareable part of game dev. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

I can share another one of BOOK OF HOURS‘ libraries, though! Meet the final version of the Grove of Green Immortals, a mountain-monastery of renegade Taoists. They specialise in horticulture and medicine, under the watchful gaze of the Applebright. What a lovely name for a definitely lovely Hour, I’m sure you’re thinking! The Gods-from-Nowhere are always so unequivocally friendly and sweet.

Finally, we recorded a new Skeleton Songs. Alexis had just had his AstraZeneca COVID vaccination and was developing side-effects, so he felt a bit like this all the way through:

But LO the show went on and you have a migratory episode on BADDIES in games, A.K.A. antagonists, villains and a parlour game where you look around the room and work out which of your compatriots would’ve been a Nazi. Fun! Listen to “500,000 Sociopaths” on all the usual places, all handily linked here.

Next week is Cultist Simulator‘s mobile anniversary, so look out for a few small fun things on social media then. For now, have a lovely spring-y weekend! Lockdown’s nearly over – hang in there. ♥

The library of Tell Madikh (also known as Ebla) is the earliest known sophisticated library. It and its 17,000 fragments of clay cuneiform tablets were found among the ruins of an ancient Syrian palace dating back to around 2,000 BC. It’s four thousand years old and some bright spark was already organising things on shelves by category with codified little tags.

The palace complex also includes a necropolis called the TOMB of the LORD of the GOATS where the last Eblan king was buried. We only know him as ‘Immeya’, which is apparently a pet name like ‘King Smushkin’ or something. This is some kawaii Lovecraft shiz, people.

Aaaaanyway, back to the modern world! Cultist is currently 40% off on GOG, in a ‘Generally How Brave Are You Feeling?’ sale. Any excuse to post the Second Thirstly, right. Check it out here.

Last week we stealth-released a new episode of Skeleton Songs. “Twisty Little Passages All Alike” discovers the connection between the Labyrinths of Night and the Bright Ditches, discusses labrys as a lesbian icon and whether you should abandon kittens in mazes, and introduces Alexis Kennedy’s First Law of Narrative (which is, frankly, a cheat). Enjoy on Spotify, YouTube, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts or any of the other zillion places you tune in for people’s pumping mouth-flaps.

This sprint Alexis was exceptionally funny in his ‘Three Reviews of Unreviewable Games’, while simultaneously juggling BOOK OF HOURS production and code. Nothing to see here yet, but stay tuned…

We received our first proper music from Maribeth this sprint, too – the lady who Alexis has worked with since Fallen London to create weird and wonderful audioscapes reflecting such creative direction as ‘like a bear falling down a well made of diamonds’ and ‘I dunno more bats?’. I can’t share any in-progress stuff with you as Maribeth would be cross with me, but I can tell you that so far a lot of the themes revolve around this lady:

Finally, y’all seemed to enjoy the Crossrow concept art we posted a couple weeks ago, so have another one! This time it’s the heeby-jeeby Haustorium, an enclave beyond the Evening Isles established by an alliance of Catholic friars and Incan magicians. It preserves things it’s thought unwise to preserve and specialises in skolekosophy – a forbidden topic, as I’m sure you know. It is in no way safe to visit, nor even really to communicate with. Weather Factory takes no responsibility for injuries sustained while looking at this picture.

Click for a larger version! More news on BoH development, Japanese and German loc on mobile, and the alternate Secret Histories soon.

The House of Knowledge (or in romanised Arabic, ‘Dar Al-ilm’) was an Egyptian mega-library built in 1,004 AD. Its particular charm was that is was open to everyone – not just scholars or aristocrats – in the general spirit of ‘yay learning’. I imagine ‘everyone’ in 1,004 AD didn’t actually include women or slaves or whomsoever the head honcho was cross with that particular Friday morning, but hey! It was pretty revolutionary at the time…

This sprint Alexis has been finishing off final code foundations. It’s taken longer than expected, for tech as well as life reasons. But he should be able to move on to Hush House rooms and building mechanics next week. We’re also expecting some more music in the near future, so if it all goes to pot I can distract you with wistful Celtic melodies. Look over there! Harps!

We also made some significant design breakthroughs this sprint. I’m delighted to announce that BoH will have a skill tree – something we’re calling in-studio the ‘Mysteries Page’. Here’s a mechanical mock-up of the sort of thing we’re thinking, but please note: this is not how it will look in-game. We have a plan for that, but aren’t telling. >:)

The icons will be replaced by representative images showing the actual skills involved. You can expect the sort of things we teased waaaaay back in the day: remember this list?

I’m a pretty rabid RPG fan myself, so this gets me all hot under the collar. Many Cultist Simulator players lamented the lack of completionist features – things like a list of all books in the game, or a library of lore. Cultist Sim is all about feeling your way through a nebulous netherworld of uncertainty and dreams, so Alexis specifically chose to avoid definitive design like that. But guess what? BOOK OF HOURS is a game of peace, melancholy, satisfaction and curiosity, all of which fit rather nicely with completionist, controlled design. Om nom.

Speaking of skill trees, I’ve spent this sprint skilling up on art. I’m learning from the work we already have from the empress of colour and dreams, Catherine Unger. Here’s a direct comparison of our two Fuchsias – you can see the rules I’m taking from the original art and applying to a slightly different style.

(If anyone’s browser isn’t showing this snazzy slider, here’s Original!Fuchsia and My!Fuchsia for comparison.)

With that in mind, here’s a second piece of concept art for those new libraries we mentioned last sprint. Introducing jolly Crossrow, crouched like a perfumed toad in the backwaters of New Orleans. Click for a larger version!

Crossrow lies in a garden city of the far West, an establishment of uncertain age. Unlike its sister libraries, it specialises in musical manuscripts and nyctodromy, merrily guarding its secrets in a gloriously decaying, surprisingly complex manor house.

There’s a lot in the concept art for lore-hounds, if you can find it. BUT I’M NOT GOING TO TELL YOU ANYTHING. Happy hunting! More concept art – and lore, and music, and design, and Skeleton Songs – soon. ♥

Expeditions are, as you know, what crazed occultists mount to seize monstrous treasures from the lightless depths of adjective-haunted nouns. In Cultist Simulator, you’re playing the kind of villain that Indiana Jones will probably foil, although CS has no Indiana Jones… yet.

This is all WIP, bleeding-edge development build stuff. It also includes spoilers, so look away if.

I know these would be more compelling as gifs, but it’d have taken me three times as long to do, and I want to add Curses to the system before the end of the day! So:

We begin with the distant promise of Fort Geryk, with its attractive placeholder art. It’s in the Evening Isles, one of the tougher areas to go on Expeditions. Note that the Evening Isles are not necessarily or exactly the Caribbean. There’s more than one history in Cultist Simulator.

Expeditions need Funds and Followers. They’re a pretty significant investment of resources. but the rewards are worth it.

Familiar faces! That’s Neville and Valciane down the bottom, added to the slot, and I’m adding a summoned spirit too – one of the Hinter.. You can send summoned beasties on Expeditions. They may be too effective, may spirits, so some locations may have wards against specific beasties so you have to fall back on mortals.

….or, if you don’t have access to development builds from the Kickstarter or the early-purchase Perpetual Edition, wishlist here

or SIGN UP FOR EMAILS here

…and we’ll hit you up in May.

But one of the things I like about working with concept artists is that they’ll often have good ideas I haven’t thought of, that I can then incorporate back into the lore. This is how the Moth’s barber-affiliations first came about, although it’s core lore now; and it happens again below.

Here’s our conversations about the Mother of Ants card. SPOILERS!

SARAH: Mother Of Ants. What we’re looking at: a be-wimpled, ostensibly female, quite possibly pregnant figure with six limbs and somewhat insectoid eyes, holding a ring of keys, surrounded by a cityscape of drawers and windows. Severed hands are hanging above her, red lanterns at her feet. the dots you see will be ants swarming up her bloodied skirts (I think). Along with the keys clasped to her belly, she’s currently holding five snakes – was trying to figure out a gorgon reference… I don’t think this looks right, so will have a think about something else she could be holding. Lots of options. Was also considering giving her a couple of wounds, but wasn’t sure if that would be a bit too grim for this one (hanging severed limbs may get this aspect across anyway).

Colours Probably need a bit of a tweak.. we don’t have anything in the spreadsheet about that right now, so if you have an idea about where she should be on the spectrum do let me know, otherwise I’ll intuit something.

AK: Colours! Let’s go with rich imperial purple, to match the colour we’re associating with Knock in the game (the purple shade in the spreadie) with red accents. Purple eyes would work well.

I’d definitely like to make her definitely not pregnant, specifically because birth and pregnancy are the prerogative of the Grail, and I don’t want to mix the attributions up. (She’s called the Mother of Ants because [REDACTED]; I can immediately see why that was misleading!) I’d like her to be thin, strikingly so, to suggest snakes and ill health.

I like the hands, I like the lamps. Wounds: if in doubt, always go grim on this project. 🙂 What I had in mind with this Hour was the Gothic trope of unsanctioned penetration of an interface: where there is a sense of ‘should not’ because the things on either side are very different, because it is gory, because it is queasily sexual, because it is the result of harm or an accident, or all the above.

So how about this? tell me if it won’t work compositionally:

The Mother has cut a deep wound in her own neck, so that it’s almost severed. She’s holding her head at a forty-five degree angle in one hand, and she’s obviously still conscious and looking at the player. I like the zero-shit-taken expression on her face in your sketch: it reminds me of a gif I just showed to Lottie, here: https://imgur.com/gallery/o0RWXp1. In her other hand she should be holding a knife or cleaver, to make it absolutely clear that this is a self-inflicted in-control thing. Where the blood spills on the ground, snakes should spring from the blood: this gives us our Gorgon reference (Medusa’s blood [REDACTED], depending on who you listen to).

I also like the idea of a snake pushing its head out of her half-severed neck, for an extra grotesquerie and a suggestion that she’s opened the way. Lottie has pointed out that this may (a) distract from her expression and (b) suggest ‘lady snake pinata’. Please use your judgement and/or provide a couple of alternatives: I’m now undecided.

And finally, can we 1920s her appearance up? I like the idea of giving her a 1920s bob – partly because of that hat check girl gif, but it would be a nice incongruity, and I’m not sure how the severed neck would work with the wimple. All these cards immediately become less fantasy and more unusual when they have more period details, so generally I would push you in the more 1920s direction as well as the grimmer direction. (I think you’re responding to the Sumer reference in the row, in the original composition. Generally that’s there for historical / lore detail for my reference, and usually I wouldn’t need you to go to the Hour’s origin.)

Sarah: Changes made mostly to order. Tried having one of the snakes crawling out of her neck and it just seemed to confuse everything up there in a bad way. So am instead suggesting maybe having smoke rising out of her parted lips and her neck wound (am sure you know that girls with bobs smoking cigarettes was considered very sexy/kind of lesbian – doubly so if the smoker with the bob was also a mermaid). There’s also a bloody snake winding up her leg below her skirt. Hopefully a bit on the queasily sexual side. Too vulgar? I don’t know. Let me know. This may take a bit of tuning in before I get the level with this sort of stuff right.