“…There are, however, exceptions.” It’s Cultist Simulator‘s sixth birthday today, so let’s make an exception for her. This quote is from a high-level Secret Histories fragment called ‘Unresolved Ambiguity’, and it could absolutely be a metaphor for game development in general. Cultist could have been a hundred different games, but it ended up consolidated in the one it became (and the one it evolved into, after years of post-lauch DLC and updates). You may remember that we made Cultist Simulator in 11 months, with a budget of around £150,000. It’s now reached somewhere between 850,000 to a million people, making some serious allowances for chaotic data like Humble Bundles and Amazon Prime. So in honour of her birthday here’s a whirlwind tour of just under a year’s game development, starting with the most important part of all: the What Even Is This Javascript Greybox Prototype. (Click for larger images!)

People who’ve played Cultist Simulator will recognise a surprising amount in these early prototypes. The art direction isn’t there – AK is definitely theme and mechanics first, ‘colours’ second – but the game’s Cookie Clicker influence is particularly apparent, as are important other factes of the final game like verbs (Study, Dream, Work…), timers (45s countdown for ‘The body has its needs…’) and resource-based storytelling (Secret Histories 1 + Occult Scrap 1 = Recruit an Aficionado of Conspiracies). I’ve worked with AK since 2015, when we met at his previous studio, and he always has a weirdly clear idea of what the game will be at the start. It’s just difficult for him to explain it and for anyone else to see inside his head. I’m now well-versed in the two to six months of trust where I have no idea what this game is that we’re apparently making, before it all falls into place. That moment for Cultist was this updated prototype, where you could first see the basic card interface:

I get it now! I see what all those grey buttons on their grey backgrounds represented! This gives me a lot to work with – I can now see what needs to be artified – while being flexible enough for AK to still be able to play with basic mechanics and the all-important recipes at the heart of the final game. Looks recognisable now, right? But where it really comes to life is when AK and Catherine Unger, our brilliant freelance artist, settled on a suitable art style:

It now looks so much like the real Cultist Simulator, but with enough difference, to trigger a bit of sense of the uncanny valley. I still mourn those stick-timers on the verb tokens, for instance! But this was where people really started to sit up and take notice of the game we were about four months out from completing. So with a bunch of hard game dev, which looks in real terms like this…

…Cultist Simulator, as we know and love her, was born. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GAME ABOUT PEELING BACK THE SKIN OF THE WORLD! We really love you.

Over to AK, and the expansion he’s been focused on.

HOUSE OF LIGHT melds with the existing game like the Witch-Twin or half a diphthong. So we’re taking the unusual step of adding actual meta information to the menu when you buy it:

Squint and you might notice an incongruous presence behind the window. The HOUSE OF LIGHT menu icon won’t actually be a tiny photo of the Tourlitis lighthouse – that was just a reference I gave Lottie for art. Similarly, any and all of the text in this window might change. But this is roughly how the expansion is shaping up, and you can see now some more of what I meant by ‘the foot bone’s connected to the leg bone’.

There are probably just two bullet points yet unilluminated: FURTHER STORIES and LIGHTHOUSE INSTITUTE. These are at least 30% of the expansion, though. FURTHER STORIES is ‘what happens in each of the non-Numa visitor stories’ . Why just the non-Numa stories? Because Numa visitors were really hard to fit into the other points (FOOD, SALONS, etc) above. Does Coseley have an address? Is Bancroft actually alive? Can you invite Aunt Mopsy to dinner? I know that when I say ‘no’ to that last one there’ll be a chorus of AW NO FUN, but I’m saving you from yourselves. Anyway there are a couple of dozen of even the non-Numa stories, so adding even a modest bit of variant-outcome (‘branching’ if you want to use That Word) to each of them is quite a lot of work.

BOOK OF HOURS is 100%* backwards-compatible with existing saves. That * means ‘it’s a bug if it’s not’. This also means that to some limited extent your choices about who you helped and who you didn’t will carry over – for example, if you helped Coquille or Zachary with the Messenger’s Casket then its occupant is loose, if you helped Dagmar then its occupant is locked up tight, and if you helped both sides then the seals are cracking. Again, the branching variant-outcome effect is quite gentle, not least because I calibrated most of the original visitor stories so that you could conceivably help several people and never know the difference. But just this once I had the foresight to track effects for the future. So that’ll make a difference, at least for the 3% of players who both buy HOUSE OF LIGHT and don’t immediately begin a new run.

The Further Stories work is most of what’s left to do on House of Light, along with the coda which the Lighthouse Institute provides. Once I’ve completed three or  four of the Furthers, we’ll begin the closed beta… which you might have heard about on the grapevine… to which we’ve already invited about twenty players randomly selected from people who’ve been noticeably helpful with bug reporting. We have another randomly-selected twenty ready to go on the final beta before launch, so if you’ve been both helpful and lucky you might hear from us. I’m talking about this here mainly so we don’t get plaintive request emails – sorry folks, this one’s quite small – and I guess also to make the point that being helpful with bug reports gives you a small notional chance of being invited to future betas. If they happen. If we decide not to stop making games and turn Weather Factory into an artisanal custard distillery. I won’t promise we won’t. Hey Lottie, is this marketing? Am I helping?

Back to Lottie.

I actually don’t have A Marketing to bark at you, for once – though I thought you might be interested in the weirdness of translation that I’ve been working on recently. BOOK OF HOURS had a great launch (in large part to you, the people reading this blog post – so thank you extremely much if you were one of our early adopters, especially if you left a nice review). But it also highlighted one of our real weaknesses as a team: with just the two of us, cramming as much game into the game as we can before launching in a sensible indie-budget timeframe, we simply can’t localise the game in time for launch.

I remember some of the other games that launched at the same time as us – Shadow Gambit: the Cursed Crew, for example – came ready packaged with thirteen languages. THIRTEEN. We initially kept up with them until our plucky lil game (4Chan nominated us for ‘Best Game Nobody Played’, you know 💅) slowly but surely fell behind while translated games kept up their momentum. Loc really isn’t the sexiest part of post-launch development – that’s starygazy pie, obviously – but it can profoundly affect a studio’s fortunes, as well as bringing a world you’ve laboured over for years to a new audience, who may love it!

ANYWAY, all this is to say that Simplified Chinese and Russian is coming this August, so I’ve spent several days producing translated assets for several hundred books. This highlights some interesting challenges, like ‘how do pictographic languages deal with initials as short-hand for the full title’? (You try and fit In The Mountains As Upon The Plain There May Not Be A Path Where None Has Passed on a 194px spine. Initials are my friends.) But there are other, weirder challenges too, especially when they enter the ‘does it look like a bum’ area of art direction. What I mean by this is every time an artist draws something, there is always the chance that people look at it and do not see the gorgeously-realised impressionistic image of two mountains at dawn, they see ladyboobs, and you have to redraw them so they are definitely not light-soaked erotic mountain breasts anymore. This becomes important with initials on books, because every so often AK will create a book called something like Semi-Esoeteric Xenophon Youths and we have to rename it. In loc terms, you get to Debate of Seven Cups: ‘DoSC’ in English, no problem, and in Russian of course it’s

…………………………Well. Does this matter? Will it be noticeable to Russian players, playing in Russian? Will it keep me awake at night knowing that there is a book in my serious, beautiful game about life and history and magic with a big rude word down the spine? Yes and yes, I think. So of course I have cunningly changed it to incorporate Roman numerals for ‘seven’, and await the Russian beta with interest.

On a more positive note, loc also makes our books look really cool in other languages. Check out this Chinese selection, for instance –

Points if you can identify them without cheating! Assuming you don’t actually speak Chinese, which is, in this instance, also cheating.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. I’ll leave you with a loreful snippet from HOUSE OF LIGHT to infect you with Fascination while you’re waiting for it to actually come out. Are the gods-from-stone ever gentle? The Wheel, perhaps – but Flint? The Seven-Coils? Darest thou trust…. the Egg???

“Yvette and Ehsan speak wistfully of what they have read of the lost Hour called Tide. Yvette recalls that when the Sister withdraws, other Hours sometimes fill the space left by her withdrawal, and wonders whether the Tide is gentle enough to remain afterwards… but Ehsan politely insists that the gods-who-were-stone are never gentle.”

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.

These aren’t all struggles with the engine. Most of them are struggles with the sunken-footed helioporaceac structure of the codebase (which inherits directly from Cultist, which means there are parts of it that were written in 2016). Or with my own tendency to be distracted and the three-plus jobs I have in a microstudio (I feel the four years it took between full game releases as a personal stain on my honour, but Lottie sometimes reminds me that besides the eventful nature of some of those years, there are two novels worth of text in BoH as well as the actual game). And I can’t emphasise enough how domestic our set-up is on days we’re not in the office. Very likely at least one of these bugs was caused by my kid needing emergency purchases for art homework, or the cats thinking they deserve a second lunch. ANYWAY. Welcome, all ye merry souls, to the TWELVE DISMAYS OF CHRISTMAS.

TWELVE FLYING SCROLLS

I wish I’d thought to take a video of this one, but thanks to M.D. we have this screenshot, lest we forget:

Sometimes when a scroll tried to return to a shelf – perhaps because you’d just read it and clicked Collect – it would decide there wasn’t enough room for it and go somewhere else. If it decided there wasn’t enough room in Shelf B, it would whizz back to Shelf A, but unless you’d opened up some room for it, it would then whizz back to Shelf B again, like a ping-pong ball or a small child darting between alternative cupcakes. It would keep going, as long as you like, dawn and dusk, summer and winter, until you opened up space for it.

Why? A muddle about what size the scroll thought it was, and the methods it used in different circumstances to ask the shelf whether it fit.

I keep a trove of user-provided saves of a heavily populated late-game library, so I can test with real data (and confirm that even very old saves still work. One of these saves is still called CURSE OF THE FLYING SCRO2. Thanks, K.P.

ELEVEN RADIANT WINDOWS

Occasionally I get a fusillade of dismayed bug reports saying ‘everything in the game is just white!’ This screenshot courtesy P.V:

The Glory? Winter? a ferocious freezing fog? A promo for the first content expansion, whose name when revealed will make this look clever?

BOOK OF HOURS uses a great many 2D images. When a machine has to keep loading them individually into memory, the performance impact can add up quickly. So we use a ‘sprite atlas’, one big giant image with lots of smaller ones fitted together jigsaw style, that the machine can load all at once and keep in memory. Occasionally this big image gets borked, and none of the images can be loaded. Sometimes this is a download hiccup and the user can fix it by verifying the download, but Unity also sometimes chokes when I’m building the binaries for the game, specifically for some reason the Mac binaries. A few times I’ve missed this and uploaded a bad Mac build.

(You might wonder why the card images aren’t borked. We don’t keep them in the sprite atlas, because the narrative content system wants to be able to request images on the fly with names based on json. As with a hundred other things, there’s probably a hundred slightly more performant ways to do that, but the entire tech staff of Weather Factory is half of me plus some freelancers sometimes.)

Incidentally the atlas takes a few moments to load, and if it hasn’t loaded by the time we get to the main game screen, you get the white effect again. The quickest way to fix this was to reference the sprite atlas from the quote screen so it starts loading then, and the first small image in the sprite atlas that came to hand was a potted fern from the Violet Chamber, so every time you fire up the game, there’s an invisible plant just under the first quote.

TEN TINY PUGLINGS

The oldies are the goodies. When we launched the demo in February 2023, there were inexplicable tiny pugs scattered round the Atlantic Ocean and the Cornish moors, among other places, because they were half-finished default images for workstations that I thought were invisible and weren’t, and I’d “cleverly” used a very silly default image so that I “definitely” couldn’t miss ’em.

I did promise to add a PUG OPTION to the menu if we passed a certain wishlist threshold before launch. We did, so that’s still on my task list. Watch the seas.

NINE CRANIAL TCHOTCHKES

This is the Cranial Tchotchke:

It has the distinction of being the oldest non-book item in the game, because when Lottie was thinking about what other things an occult library might have on its shelves besides books, obviously ‘polished former Librarian frens’ came first to mind, so I had art handy for it when I was prototyping.

This is its close friend, the Glinting Cranial Tchotchke, which contains a small secret revealed by close examination:

But this is what it looked like briefly at the end of August – thanks L.M. for this screenie:

This is the effect you get if an image is missing, but I checked and the image wasn’t missing – it had been there from the beginning – so I didn’t realise right away what the actual problem was. A follow-up report and screenie from P.V. was the clue for an instant House-style diagnostic epiphany – you could now hang the thing on the wall like a painting:

There are more than six hundred items in Hush House – not counting books! –  so I use a spreadsheet to track their associated text and properties, and output it automatically to the .json files that the game uses to store content. (In the days of Cultist Simulator, I did this manually, which is why I try very hard to avoid doing it manually ever since.)

If that last column is blank, the spreadsheet knows to assume the item is a generic ‘thing’. I’d somehow let ‘wallart’ leak into the cell for the Glinting Cranial Tchotchke when I was jiggling things. Not only did this mean you could hang it on the wall, but it meant the game looked in a folder called ‘wallart’ for the image instead of a folder called ‘things’.

You can no longer hang people on the wall in Hush House.

EIGHT MAGIC CHAIR LEGS

You can Consider anything in the House that isn’t nailed down. Often it yields a Memory, sometimes it yields something else tucked down the seat cushions. Occasionally it got more exotic. Bug reporter J.D. during the beta in July 2023:

“I took a lamp from the Reading Room and put it into coNsider with Mettle and when the recipe finished I had a Melodic Chair.”

I checked, and he was right. If you looked too closely at the lamp, it turned into a chair.

Again, this was just a bit of spreadsheet borkage. The Lumpy Melodic Chair, when examined, yielded a treasure and turned into the Melodic Chair. I’d just put the Melodic Chair in the wrong row and instead created the world’s first developmentally metamorphic reading lamp.

SEVEN CREEPY MOMMETS

The enthusiasm generated by this bug has been rivalled only by the PUG REPORTS incident. Time to reveal the truth.

This dapper gent is the first Baron Dewulf, and his bust traditionally lives in a slot on a little table at the bottom of the Grand Ascent.

However, after an innocuous update at the end of November, some players noticed that the slot where Hendrik could be placed had disappeared; in fact, if Hendrik was in there at the time, he had disappeared too:

After another update, Hendrik returned. But he’d brought a friend back with him.

In fact to the mounting alarm of the affected players, wherever he’d gone, he’d clearly been a hit with the locals, and he’d brought a whole fan club back with him (thanks A.H. for the screenshot):

The clue is in the timing of the updates, which both occurred around the beginning of December, when we unleashed our advent calendar,and when Christmas decorations appeared in the Grand Ascent among other places:

I haven’t been able to piece together the precise sequence of events. but it went something like this:

1. In mid-November I prototyped the code that puts Christmas stuff in the game, and then immediately went on a week-long writing break to do the initial planning for the first BOOK OF HOURS expansion.
2. I wanted to make sure we had the Christmas stuff live the week before December to work out any remaining kinks ahead of time, so it was a bit of  a hustle when I got back, and Lottie and I had some merge problems getting the art into Unity. I’d been testing the Advent code on Hendrik’s niche, and I let the test settings leak into the live version, so Hendrik’s niche became invisible when it wasn’t December. And it wasn’t, at that point, December.
3. I almost immediately did another update to fix another issue, and this update (without me even realising it) removed the test settings which had made Hendrik invisible. Unfortunately this code had been live for I think 48 hours, it had made the niche invisible in a number of saves during that time, and now the test setting was gone, there was nothing to make him visible again.
4. When people reported the Hendrik-still-invisible issue, I got another fix up which made Hendrik’s niche visible in all times and places. All fine, I thought.
5. Not quite. The test settings had used some of the code which puts things on Timothy’s Christmas tree on specific days. So while the bust niche was invisible for 48 hours, it had also been calling some code which invisibly populated it during that time.
6. Worse – all this ran into something which wasn’t just a test setting left over, it was an actual bug. The game normally populates a room according to the spec when the room is first opened, and I had to work round that to make Advent presents appear in existing saves (Brancrug Village counts as ‘a room’). The first version of the code, when I was testing, made an Advent present appear every time the game was loaded. I’d already spotted and fixed the bug by the time people reported Hendrik’s disappearance, but meanwhile the bug was quietly doing its thing in the game, and when his niche reappeared, it contained one doll for every time the game had been loaded until the bug was fixed.
7. So what happened in non-technical terms was this. Because of an error in a summoning technique I’d been practising, the bust disappeared behind the veil of reality. It remained there until I found out that I’d accidentally created a haunting, and used a counter-invocation to bring him back to the world. Unfortunately, a side effect of the spell was to conjure creepy dolls while he was elsewhere, and because the spell was operating without any oversight or intervention, we got a Sorcerer’s Apprentice scenario. I hope that clears everything up.

SIX DAFFY BANCROFTS

Much simpler one. A.K. (no relation) reported just after the game launched:

“Lord Franklin Bancroft seems to have written his diaries in Latin, a language he seems to be unable to understand.” 

There are a couple of dozen visitors in the game, another dozen aspects they might be interested in, and another dozen-plus languages they might speak. So early on I put together a list of who cared about what and what they could care about it in.

You might notice some discrepancies with the information in the game. That’s because this is an old spreadsheet from an earlier phase of design, and I hadn’t set up the automated outputs back then, I just manually typed it into the content files. Later, I considered linking it all up, but the information was in the game already, the sheet was already outdated, it was too much hassle, and the languages they spoke wouldn’t change, right?

When I put together that sheet, it seemed interesting to say that Douglas, being just a copper who’d come up through the ranks, didn’t speak any of these fancy languages. But when I started testing the visitor system, it was inconsistent and mildly annoying that he couldn’t read so many books. So I thought, well, he’s permanently with the Suppression Bureau now, he must have had a decent education; and I got a decent gag about his school scholarship into the game. It’s always fun when character backgrounds expand organically like this.

Unfortunately because my design spreadsheet and actual files were out of date, I just moved around the languages carelessly – I think I had some notional rationale why Franklin spoke Greek but not Latin – and ruined the original cross-checking I’d done against the book list.

For the expansion – and for Game Three – I’m being a lot stricter about connecting everything up round the back. That causes problems too, though, as you’ll see in a moment.

FIVE! LOST! THINGS!

Hahaha wow I had a hell of a time with this one. It went through a couple of different similar iterations while I tried to track it down.

For a little while in September, you could make an object disappear by doing this:

1. Pick up an object from Room A on one side of the House.
2. While holding the object, pan (technically ‘truck’ as systemchalk would point out, though he’d be very Canadian about it and wouldn’t want to make a fuss) at least a screen’s width to the other side of the house. Yup, your screen’s width, not anyone else’s.
3. Drop the object in Room B. Watch it immediately disappear!
4. Zoom out in panic and see it reappear.

Here’s what this was.

BOOK OF HOURS had some performance troubles at launch. Like most performance troubles, these had many causes, but one of the most significant causes was that, initially, we were rendering lots of hi-res 2D art all the time. Now we only render a lot of the art when you can actually see it on-screen – this is ‘culling’, it’s pretty standard, but unfortunately for boring technical reasons we couldn’t use some of the out-of-the-box approaches Unity provides to implement this. So there’s custom code that tells the game not to bother rendering rooms, or their contents, when you’re not looking at them.

The key phrase here is ‘their contents’. When is something no longer ‘in a room’? When you pick it up? Or when you drop it in another room? Both of those are reasonable natural assumptions, and different bits of the code made those assumptions slightly differently. So as far as one bit of the code was concerned, when you were dragging a vase from Room A, it was still provisionally in Room A, but another bit of the code assumed that it had already left Room A. So if Room A was no longer on screen, because you’d just moved your camera across the house and it had slid off the left-hand edge, then we should cull Room A, and not waste resources displaying the room or the vases which were probably still in there, right? And because the game updated its records when you did a bunch of other things, it only got out of sync in this one specific situation, so it went mostly unnoticed most of the time. And ‘mostly unnoticed most of the time’ is the helliest smell of bugs.

FOUR MISSING SLOTS

This is the nerdiest example in the whole list, so if the last one made you tune out, wait until the next one to tune back in. But people have been very curious about this one. So if you get excited about spreadsheet formulae and naming conventions, stay with me.

Just a couple of weeks ago, all books in the game written in Deep Mandaic became unreadable. Generally to read a book written in one of the nine great languages, you have to provide a Language card, and no Language slot was showing up for these books. Wut?

Every card in the game has an id, like ‘grapes’, and a human-readable label, like ‘Bunch of Grapes’. These are generally very similar but sometimes quite different – for example, most of the furniture art was sliced out of room art by Lottie, and I originally used her temporary names but changed the labels when I was writing copy:

… which nicely why it’s useful to have a stable ID – I didn’t have to go back and change all the config every time we decided it was a ‘Snug Chair’ not a ‘Cosy Chair’.

Lots of ids follow a convention, too. ‘Sky Stories’ has the id ‘s.skystories’ so I know it’s a skill when I’m writing content code. And it’s much easier if they’re consistent with each other, but ‘consistent’ is subjective. ‘s.skystories’? ‘s.sky.stories’? ‘s.sky_stories’? What about ‘Transformations & Liberations’?  What I settled on was that ‘&’ in skill names is replaced with a . and spaces are just removed, which is different from the furniture convention but means I don’t have to look at ‘transformations&liberations’ or convert it to ‘transformationsandliberations’ or anything else ugly. Okay? still with me? a few of us? okay. Break out the good Scotch, Ponsworth, these are the real connoisseurs. San Pellegrino for the teetotallers.

To keep everything 100% consistent, I put a formula on my Skills and Abilities tab that converted the human-readable label into the ID according to a consistent set of rules. So it could never get out of step. Then I output the skills json. All written up, all consistent. Lovely.

Except the language skills were s.vak, s.killasimi, s.fucine… s.deepmandaic. Deep Mandaic was the only one with two words in the name, the inconsistency annoyed me,  and a couple of times I typed it as ‘s.deep.mandaic’ so one day I just changed it to ‘s.mandaic’ everywhere, one big Find-Replace, no problem. This also addressed the plaints of a couple of very consistency-oriented people who thought it felt like a mistake that ‘Deep Mandaic’ was alphabetised under ‘D’ rather than ‘M’ (actually, alpha ordering via ID and otherwise in the game is a whole different story later, but there isn’t enough single malt in Scotland for that one).

Then I realised that I had broken my nice formula-driven consistent naming system. So I went back into the Skills & Abilities tab and manually overwrote it. I was in a hurry. And it was probably fine, probably. So I went back into Skills & Abilities and manually overwrote it rather than adding a distinct override column. Here it is! It’s just one value! What harm can it do? I put it in italics to remind myself! and Excel has a nice helpful Inconsistent Formula notation!

Here a third spreadsheet tab enters the story. (Top up their glasses, Ponsworth, come on man, quick sticks there.) This is the Tomes spreadsheet, a list of all the books in their game and their properties, which is auto-output like most of its kin.

Between you and me, and now we’re a couple of whiskies in, I’m going to confess that Excel is probably my favourite piece of software ever. It’s not a database, it’s not a word processor, but for the sweet spot for a system-oriented but distracted and arbitrary game designer, it’s a gorgeously customisable tool that supports all kinds of bizarre one-off requirements. Some of which come back later to bite me. Like that last column above with its 0 or 1. What’s different about Greek? There’s no Greek skill. All Hush House librarians know Greek. It’s just a bit of flavour that affects visitors. So Greek books don’t need a language slot. So I had a formula that checked whether a language with this name existed in my Skills & Abilities tab. And for this kind of lookup, I usually look up the label, not the ID, because it’s much more human-readable. But in this case I also wanted to output the language ID into the JSON which determined the slot that should go on the book. So I got lazy and I just stripped the spaces out of the human-readable label I found in this column, lowercased it, added an “s.” and wrote it into the json. Because the nice thing about language skills was, the label and ID were always identical if you did that! Vak, “s.vak”, Fucine, “s.fucine”, Deep Mandaic, “s.mandaic”…. ah.

This is where I compounded my first, cardinal, sin with a second, venial, one, for does not the Church of the Unconquerable Sun teach us that there is never only one Cloud to obscure the Light? Instead of changing the logic, I just went through and edited ‘Deep Mandaic’ to ‘mandaic’ throughout the Tomes spreadsheet.

FINE ALL FIXED LET’S PUSH WHATEVER URGENT PATCH NEEDS PUSHING.

Months passed.

The game grew more stable under my increasingly calloused hands. I even found some time to pay off a bit of technical debt. I reordered some of that which had been disordered. And so at at some point I did something careless. I can’t remember exactly how or what now. Tidied up ‘mandaic’ to ‘Deep Mandaic’ in the Languages column of the Tomes sheet? autofilled the ID formula down Skills & Abilities? Whatever it was silently broke my innocuous little formula hacks. In a constantly changing spreadsheet with 44 tabs, it’s not hard to lose track now and then.

Then at some later point I ran another output from the spreadsheet, and put it in another build, which I then at some other later point pushed live, immediately erasing all the Deep/Mandaic slots.

A week later I sheepishly came back in fixed it so I could output a non-broken version of the game json.

Finis. Except –

THREE MORE MISSING SLOTS

The following day I was fixing one of the bugs above (Hendrik, I think) and I USED AN OUTDATED VERSION OF THE SPREADSHEET BECAUSE I WAS ON MY LAPTOP AND HADN’T SYNCED EVERYTHING. All the Deep Mandaic slots disappeared, again. I fixed them, again.

F I N I S.

Ponsworth, I think we’re finally done, please fetch the coats and also the hats. Ponsworth? Ponsworth? Somebody wake up Ponsworth, he’s dribbling again.

TWO INPUT DEVICES

Usually, it’s my fault. Occasionally, it’s not my fault. Here’s a standard prefatory response I now send when someone reports mouse control problems.

“(1) I had a similar report from another user a couple of weeks ago… they later followed up and said they had a second input device attached to the machine that they’d forgotten about. so it’s worth checking that :)”

Because occasionally the bug is actually just “someone attached an extra mouse to the computer.”

AND A RAGDOLL IN A BUST NICHE

The week after launch, I had this email from bug reporter M.S. :

“Hello, I found a very important bug in the game: you can’t put your cat on top of the bust pedestal in the grand ascent. Here, I’ll send you a picture of how it should look:”

This is the picture he sent:

I’m happy to report that I fixed this bug in the next patch. And then, much later, I added another feature to the Thirteenth Librarian niche that not many Librarians have yet noticed.

Happy Christmas. May your Januaries be bright and your Februaries tolerable.

I updated our Steam page at the end of last year. Check it out if you haven’t seen the new screenies!

“There was a storm. It smashed the ship like an egg. But I seized this book as the sea seized me… then the sea brought me here to Brancrug.”

BOOK OF HOURS looks like it’ll end up five times the size of Cultist Sim. The whole game is set in a single location (see below), but there’s a hell of a lot to dig into with the story, nine different origins to choose from which direct your initial interests, and that’s before you get into the lore in all those books or the nine Wisdoms. We wouldn’t normally attempt a game as large of this – it’s just the two of us + friendly freelancers – but we’ve a big leg-up from Cultist Simulator. It provides the basic code framework (things nobody thinks of but you have to do before launch, like saving and loading systems, or Steam achievement integration) and the core mechanic (card + card = new things + new story).  This means we can focus on improving things from CS while building out a new world for BOOK OF HOURS. It’s not a roguelike, which makes us a bit nervous because we’d love people to replay the game as much as people replay Cultist Simulator. But it is big, deep and visually charming, like Chi at the bottom of a well.

We’ve been really hustling these last two weeks to get a first-look demo of BOOK OF HOURS in Steam Next Fest at the start of February. We’re on track for that – just! – so look out for more info in our newsletter, going out next week. It’ll be pretty rough around the edges, but it should give you a good understanding of where we’re going with the final game. You’ll crawl your way out of the freezing sea to the door of an old friend, charm some suspicious rustics who just want to be left alone with their pints of bitter, and eventually cross the Cucurbit Bridge all the way to Hush House, where you’ll unlock the first room of the library. Until I played an earlier build this week, I hadn’t realised how large this game world is.

In the meantime, this means I have a great many other things to update you on. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Firstly, we confirmed the final look and feel of the overall game world – goodbye old cliffs, hello turquoise sea. It’s still WIP (don’t look too hard at the beach) but the vibe is there. We’ve also revamped the misty effect that the game opens with, which form the fog of war you spend the first part of the game unlocking. I’ve a lot of work ahead of me representing the different seasons (including Numa), and animating various parts of it to bring it alive. But I like where it’s going, finally.

More importantly, Alexis has finally been writing content! He’s focused on the first half hour of the game, with our upcoming demo in mind – which is why he has been reading up on Cornish hospitality in the ’30s, and why he left a card on my desk which just says ‘YARG’.

“At last, the light of a hurricane lamp bobbing in the dark. As it approaches, a face looms out of the night.”

A face! Quite a rugged face, but not a rock, or a vengeful sea-bird, or a poisonous snail. This face helps you to the nearby village (banishing Brancrug’s misty fog of war), where you end up dripping interesting patterns into the well-worn wooden floor of The Sweet-Bones. But it’s not exactly an overwhelming welcome:

“After the Restoration of 1930, the New King’s agents came looking for his enemies in these parts… and they weren’t gentle about it. Since those days, the locals are suspicious of foreigners. No-one in the Sweet Bones will talk to me.”

Using your character’s chosen skills, an old friend and your own actual brain, you must convince the villagers to aid you. Once you have, it’s on to Hush House, to unlock the first of very many unusual rooms…

Now, books. You’d expect a game christened ‘That Damn Library Game’ to have quite a lot of them. But how to represent them is a surprisingly thorny issue, because they have to fulfil lots of sometimes contradictory requirements. They must be small enough to fit reasonably in rooms designed for humans; they have to be large enough that players can click on them realiably; they have to be complex enough to tell you something meaningful about their contents just by looking at them; they must be simple enough that Lottie doesn’t lose her mind. Most importantly, they’re also the meeting point of our two different art styles – the vibrant, vector-style element art we’ve kept from the cards of Cultist Simulator, and the textured, illustrative style of the world of Hush House. Because books are now objects, not cards. They exist as real-world items you’ve carefully organised on a shelf in the library, but they can also be used within the UI as part of recipes with cards and other objects. So they need to straddle two quite different and demanding worlds. And you thought books were just opportunities for Hokobald of Pocsind to complain about the various iniquities perpetrated against him! #BIGHUFF

Anyway, we’ve come up with the following, which I think does all of the above very nicely. There are lots of different designs (in various sizes, so they look interesting together when you arrange them on a bookshelf), but you get the idea from the two examples below:

We can also use this style to differentiate the nine different starting roles you can choose for your Librarian. You start every playthrough freezing and storm-wrecked on a beach, your only possession a carefully-wrapped journal. These journals accompany you through the game, ‘evolving’ into different versions of themselves as your Librarian progresses.

“My journal – I’m sure of it. The storm scattered my thoughts, but each page I turn is familiar. I begin to recall now why I came here… and the knowledge I yearn for.”

While I’m futzing about with books and AK’s writing about cheese, Adrien continues his great work populating Hush House. The Curia-period rooms are now totally complete, so puzzle over what, exactly, needs so large a cage in an upper room of Gullscry Tower; settle select guests in the moony Severn Chamber; be grateful that the unseen servants of Hush House clean the morgue for you; and don’t set foot in the Hall of Division if you’ve ever insulted a Hint.

We’re also working with Clockwork Cuckoo for our card art, so perhaps you’d like to try and guess what skills are represented by their latest batch of sketches. We only pick one from each group to become the Final Icon, so look out for a number of polished versions of these in the final game.

If you’ve seen our latest screenies, we’ve also been revamping the UI. UI is the part of game dev that’s interesting to artists and lethally boring to anyone else, so I won’t go into too much detail. But there’s one new change you might find interesting:

Alexis still has nightmares about the tooltips from Fallen London. If you’ve ever played a Paradox game you’ll probably know what I’m talking about: hovering over something brings up some extra information about that thing, which is a really useful way of explicating deep and complex games without overcrowding the user’s basic experience. The downside is that you can often end up in a terrifying SCP-like tangle of tooltip after tooltip after tooltip, ending up more confused and distracted than you were before. So we’ve come up with the above approach for the deeper lore in BOOK OF HOURS: it’s optional (only displaying if you click on it), linked to other relevant parts of the game through aspects, and visualised separately from the main text. This is something Alexis wanted to do in Cultist Simulator, actually – we just never had the time.

Anyway, you’ll see all of the above and more if you choose to give the demo a go next month. So I leave you with news of a totally different project! I received a few enquiries about the Lucid Tarot over Christmas, so I just wanted to confirm that the deck is very much still going to happen, and it’s probably still going to happen this year. Here are a set of Swords cards I drew over the holidays to prove it’s still an active project – nice to see some familiar faces, eh?

More news on the demo next week! Get hype, Librarians.

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!

Gimme summore lore

[Written by Mr Lore himself, Alexis.]

We’ve already intimated that Hush House is one of nine notable libraries, each of a very specific foundation that ensures the attention of the Hours. That foundation is sometimes called the Watchman’s Tree (or occasionally, in Britain, the Covenant of the Rood). At one point I wondered whether we might some day release DLC to allow librarians to manage each of the other eight. I think now that will never happen. Hush House drips with history. I’ve drawn on months of research and years of reading around UK history and mythology to make it fit together satisfyingly. The thought of trying to do something like that for a library in China or Indonesia just ain’t realistic.

So there’s centuries of material available for the librarian to explore, but we want players to be able to enjoy it without feeling like they’ve been given homework (5% of you want a fifty-page downloadable PDF, but for well-rehearsed reasons, it ain’t gonna be that way). It’s better, ultimately, for it not to be visible at all than to feel like homework. It still affects the game. An iceberg only just peeks out from under the water; the motive force of a swan is rarely visible; most of the universe is dark energy.

But it is going to be visible. As Reverend Timothy has already intimated, Hush House has grown up in layers, like a coral reef or a complicated personality. The game board reflects this. It’s the opposite of the Cultist Simulator board, which begins as a tabula rasa until card arrangements form their own set of layers. With one exception, of course – there is a part of the CS board which isn’t a tabula rasa at all.

Lottie tells the story of how she met Ian Livingstone on a train, he advised us to put a map in Cultist Simulator, and that’s why the Mansus is in Cultist Simulator as a new screen.

BOOK OF HOURS is all map. Some things go in your hand at the bottom (making that hand usable with potentially dozens of cards is its own challenge, but we’ll get back to that). But most things go on the board – for example furnishings, visitors, weather, and, of course, books. Most of the map begins locked and dimly visible. Hush House was, after all, abandoned seven years before the Librarian arrives, in the wake of a mysterious fire. That fire, of course, is part of the history you’ll explore.

But the primary board isn’t the only map. There’s also the Tree of Wisdoms, which we’ve already shown peeks at. It’s one part character upgrade system, one part history crafting workstation, and one part endgame planner. More about that soon.

Art and UI

You saw BOOK OF HOURS’ situation window designs in an earlier blog, but we also need a way to manage a CS-number of cards and objects (there’re about 700 individual cards in Cultist Simulator, to give you an idea of the scale) with the much more visual approach in BoH. You need to have a clear view of the whole of Hush House while also being able to zoom in and manage individual rooms, be able to open multiple situation and/or information windows, AND be able to easily find and select whatever resources you like from an inventory.

These designs will almost certainly evolve before we actually launch, but it gives you an idea of the mechanics going on behind the scenes if nothing else.

I hope it also gives you the same sense of a hygge little window on a magical world of books and Secret Histories that you control, which is how it feels to me! Also, you can stare at a little Neville portrait all day if you keep inviting him round. Do. His favourite snack is Assam tea and pistachio éclairs, and that is officially canon.

(And yes, Monsieur le Grand-Duc du Jambon is one of the many, many names belonging to Chi, our resident scaredy cat.)

I also have some new room mock-ups to share with you! You may have seen #1 if you’re on our mailing list, but it’s the first chthonic room carved deep in the foundations of Hush House, and shows the Chapel Calcite – the Minoan-inflected sanctuary dedicated to the Red Grail, consecrated centuries ago by the mysterious Sisterhood of the Triple Knot. #2 is our first external ‘room’ which is, of course, actually a garden – near the pantry and kitchen gardens, but one of the more unusual ways to descend to the underbelly of Hush House through a secret set of stairs within the well itself. Like a sort of jolly reverse-version of The Ring, with Gothic architecture. And #3 is our first look at Nocturnal Branch’s lonely, sea-damp cells. Sparse, cold and infested with things you hope are spiders, but at least you get a jaunty portrait of a certain Mr J. C. to keep you company (or to judge you, implacably, with those icy blue eyes).

Finally, we can also share some new element art from our most excellent freelance artists over at Clockwork Cuckoo, the same team who worked for us on Cultist Sim. This batch are all skills, some of which we’ve already mentioned in previous updates. Any guesses which images represent skills you’ve heard of? There’s so much MEANING in all of them…

Into the future

We’re now finally in a position to announce a release date for This Damn Library Game. DRUM ROLL PLEASE:

📚🎉 BOOK OF HOURS will launch in June 2023! 🎉📚

We’ll confirm a specific date nearer the time, and are now are working towards a public, playable alpha/beta/whateva later this year. More on that in our next update – we really see BoH coming together, and AK and I are incredibly stoked by its future design and improvements.

Oh! And one more thing – WE GOT MARRIED! Finally. [AK adds: we’ve been together for six years, and trying to get married for three of them. We finally did it, and we did it under a ship. Worth waiting for even if I’d married her under a bin, though.] We’re waiting on the professional photos, but here’s proof! Anyway – more BOOK OF HOURS soon, Beloveds. It’s gonna be swell. ♥

Linguistics quiz! Everyone loves a linguistics quiz.

1. 1. Name three Semitic languages. Take a minute to think about it.

Now tag urself –

If you got as far as (4), feel good. I only got to (6), and I have a linguistics degree, though not a very good or recent one. Likely wrong answers include Yiddish (it’s written in Hebrew but it’s mostly Germanic), Farsi/Persian, Turkish. If you said ‘Egyptian’, I vaguely think that’s wrong, I think it’s more about areal influence, but I’m not enough of a linguist to argue the case either way.

A fair few people are surprised to learn that Arabic’s a Semitic language, because ‘Semitic’ and ‘Jewish’ sound associated to most English speakers, while ‘Jewish’ and ‘Arab’ sound very distinct. So, about that:

2. Why ‘Semitic’?

I would have gone with (3) until I looked into it. I had no idea about the etymology.

So to be clear, ‘Semitic’ is simultaneously

(a) a commonly used and widely accepted term for a major branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family which serves as a meaningful basis for investigation into the quasi-phylogenetic taxonomies of diachronic linguistics;

(b) a comically inaccurate relic of eighteenth-century scientific racism, itself based on mediaeval folklore about the origin of nations

And this is a good thumbnail for some of the problems of using material from historical linguistics in a game.

1. most people’s understanding of anything linguistic is based on shorthand and stereotype
2. it kind of has to be, because linguistics is complicated
3. there’s usually something in there that someone can take offence at if they feel so inclined
4. which leads to a bonus point: it can unexpectedly connect to current political issues that are invisibly far from the mainstream of UK/US discussion, but which are furiously important – sometimes life-and-death – to the people involved in them.

Let me give an example of that bonus point. If you’re not from south-east Europe, you may be hazy on the differences between the nations and the republics and the languages of the former state of Yugoslavia.

3. What are the official languages of the successor states of Yugoslavia?

My guess was 6, and I was confident I was right, and I wasn’t! I left out Montenegrin, because I just thought they spoke Serbian in Montenegro, but Montenegrin is a recognised language, not just a Serbian dialect, I learn. While (Eastern) Herzegovinian is classified, at least in what I’m reading, as a dialect not a language. And the Republic of Macedonia became the Republic of North Macedonia in 2019 to settle a naming dispute with Greece, which has its own region of Macedonia, but the language (which is very similar to Bulgarian and almost nothing like Greek) is still called Macedonian not North Macedonian

The funny thing is, if you picked 5, you would be arguably nearly right, except you’d have left out Macedonian and you’d have pissed off a lot of people who find the term ‘Serbo-Croat’ offensive and inaccurate. My Croatian friend Ivan is one of them: he points out that Serbian and Croatian don’t even share an alphabet. My Croatian ex-wife Ana is not one of them: she reckons there’s more difference in the spoken varieties between US and UK English. Wikipedia describes Serbo-Croatian as ‘a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties’, but the talk page is what you might call lively.

The name Serbo-Croatian was coined in 1824, by Jacob Grimm (yup, that Grimm). But in the 1930s when BOOK OF HOURS is set, the constitution of Kingdom of Yugoslavia declared that its official language was ‘Serbo-Croato-Slovene‘ (and Slovenian is actually a fair way from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian). So if I put a contemporary book of Yugoslavian folktales in the Hush House library, what should I call the language it’s written in?

The former Yugoslavia is a more complicated bit of the world than some, but not uniquely so. It’s approximately the same size, with approximately the same population, as the US state of Florida. It’s about half the size and population of the nation of France. So now multiply that issue a few dozen times, to cover the rest of Europe over the last hundred years (lotta borders changed in that time).

Now do India. Which has 22 constitutionally recognised languages and almost two thousand other languages, many of them (e.g. Tamil) the focus of furious and contemporary ethnonationalist disputes. Where a language like Nihali is, depending on who you talk to, a fascinating language isolate used by a threatened minority, a dialect, or even just a thieves’ cant.

“An entire mythology is stored within our language”

So why am I diving into this alarming ocean? Cultist Simulator had a really simple model of four real languages for texts – Latin, Greek, Aramaic, Sanskrit – and four fictional languages, or fictionalised versions of real languages – Fucine, Phrygian, Deep Mandaic, and Vak. I can’t think of another game which has spent even this much effort on simulating languages and study. I could just stop there. I would get some niggles from people telling me that book x should really be in Hebrew not Greek, or that you can’t learn Koiné Greek and then just start reading Herodotus in Ionic Greek, but it’s just a game, after all.

But, and let me put this in the all caps it deserves, ALL THIS STUFF IS GLORIOUS AND AMAZING AND IMPORTANT AND FASCINATING AND ALMOST COMPLETELY UNTOUCHED IN GAMES. If you strongly disagree, I doubt you made it past all the business about Macedonian vs Bulgarian. If you slightly disagree, I invite you to look at this gorgeous item by Minna Sundberg:

Click for larger version!

Don’t tell me you don’t feel something when you look at this, cos I won’t believe you.

Or how about this: earlier I mentioned an Indian language isolate called Nihali. An isolate is a language with no identifiable relatives (like, famously, Basque/Euskera). It can be hard to determine whether something is really an isolate, because it’ll often absorb words and features from other languages in the region, but the words for, e.g., egg and blood in Nihali can’t be linked to any vocabulary in other languages. When you’re writing a game about cults and libraries and esoterica, that’s the kind of fact you want.

A scrap of one of the many languages in BOOK OF HOURS

Or how about this: there’s an obscure Andean language called Kallawaya, used exclusively by a wandering group of Peruvian healers, who can be plausibly claimed to pre-date the Incas. Kallawaya has features in common with Quechua, the indigenous Peruvian language(s) used by the Incas, but also with Pukina, an enigmatic and extinct language that might have been connected with Capac Simi, the secret language of the Inca royalty. None of Kallawaya or Quechua or Pukina have a known script of their own – Quechua uses Latin script, and the Incas may or may not have used knots to record their language.

Or how about this, since we mentioned Basque: Basque is old, really old. It’s probably the only pre-Indo-European language left in Europe. So there are excitable theories that it’s a Neolithic or even a Neanderthal relic; there’s a hypothesis that the similarities between haitz, stone, aizto, knife, and aizkora, axe, suggest that it dates back to when tools were made of stone. This is probably not true, but crikey wouldn’t it be fun if it were.

A scrap of one of the many languages in BOOK OF HOURS

So it’s an absolute mithril-vein of ideas which feel powerfully relevant to the subject matter. When I invent languages, like the ones above, I can plunder real history and linguistics. And even when I stick to the facts, then I can tell a player through the system ‘your character knows Old Saxon, which will give you a leg up with learning Yiddish’ and, again, there’s depth which is hard to fake.

‘Serious affairs and history… are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.’

There are a lot of languages in the world. Call it 7000+, but it depends on definitions. There are an awful lot more classical or dead languages. I can’t put them all in the game, especially because I’m happily inventing more fictional languages to go along with the real ones. So how am I choosing?

(1) Cultist Simulator and BOOK OF HOURS are both Eurocentric games. That’s just how it is, and how it’s going to be. The early inspirations of CS are European mythology and occultism; that’s what I know most about; and I could spend the rest of my life drawing from that well without it ever running dry. So there will be more Latin books than Chinese books in Hush House. This also nicely side-steps a current culture-war trap.

(2) On the other hand, I’m not going to ignore the rest of the world, are you kidding me, two out of three of the fun ideas above are non-European. And it’s not like there are tidy boundaries between cultures anyway. Is Mithraism an Asian phenomenon? A European one? The only sensible answer is ‘yes’.

(3) Equally, I’m going to trim the hell out of European linguistics anyway, and cheerfully simplify when it’s convenient. This brings us back to the former Yugoslavia (and Wales, and Catalonia, and Moldova, and everywhere else that language is a live political issue). How am I going to deal with it? Tact helps; research helps; but honestly, I’m going to steer clear of anything too difficult. I have to strip out at least 80% of the European languages I might want to use. Minority languages with difficult political contexts are less likely to make the cut anyway, because there probably isn’t a lot of literature written in that language. Unless there’s something unexpectedly fascinating about them, in which case hell yes they’ll make the cut.

History vs game design is a false dichotomy, just as is politics vs game design. You never choose one over the other, at least not if you’ve read more than one book. Creative work is synthesis and arbitrary choice. Which is another way of saying I’m going to put the languages in that sound the coolest.

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. ♥

Marinell – Sir Marinell, to you – is a knight of the sea whose nervous nymph-mother Cymoent misinterpreted a prophesy that he would be mortally wounded by a maiden. She thus teaches him that LOVE is BAD and he is NOT TO PLAY WITH LADIES. Turns out one maiden does gore him – good ol’ Britomart – but not the one he’s destined to fall in love with – that’s Florimell, beautiful and chaste/chased through the whole of The Faerie Queene. The moral of the story? Never trust a water nymph.

You definitely should trust awards, though! We’re delighted to find out that Cultist was nominated for not one, not two but three mobile games awards by TapTap, one of China’s biggest mobile platforms. We, er, didn’t win any of them but PARTICIPATING IS THE REAL REWARD. Cultist was nominated for Best Gameplay, Best Indie Game and Best Game (😱) in TapTap’s Game Awards 2019. So yesterday we received this ultimate swag bag with a whole book, loads of medals and a beautifully framed award!

Thank you so much, to all our mobile players, to TapTap, and to the unparalleled Playdigious who made such a beautiful mobile port! ♥

Of course, I have no idea what the extracts in the book say. Any Chinese speakers reading this want to help us out? Let us pray it is not ‘Please request Chinese copy from the developers’ or ‘Here is why Cultist Simulator is a rubbish game’.

This sprint I’ve been thinking about merch. We’re going to try something new, and gauge how people like ’em: you lot are a literary, erudite sort, so I figure you all have Kindles and eReaders, right? So behold: our first custom Kindle/eReader cover! Christopher Illopoly, you’re finally real.

I’ll come back with more photos soon – there’s a nice belly band, and it’ll be cloth-finished in real life – as well as specific specs, but the TLDR is that it’ll basically fit any eReader/Kindle you have. Woot!

I’m also working on some suitably culty candles, so you can play Cultist Simulator – and later, BOOK OF HOURS – with an appropriately esoteric ambience. I don’t have any pictures of them yet either but WATCH THIS SPACE. The jury is still out on cultist pair pillows, if only because storing 500 of them under my desk would require some appropriately non-Euclidean geometry.

(Also, imagine 500 Nevilles staring up at you.)

Finally, no Skeleton Songs this sprint but we do have Alexis’s EXILE: Director’s Commentary video, which is not only a good run-through of his designer’s intent but also a window into an ADHD brain. Enjoy!

Anyway. It’s my birthday this weekend, so everyone have a sip of something fancy for me. ‘Til next time!

That’s right, we have some spicy info to drop on Version 2019.5.a.1 of Cultist Simulator. That’s not even including the big exciting reveal at the end of the month, but ssshhh for now.

Research Update!

The most important thing you may notice is in relation to Research!

We’ve just released a major, long-promised change to the Research mechanics – the ones that allow you to upgrade Lore to the next level, or subvert it to different types. As a refresher, this is a feature that was going to go into Christopher’s Build in January, except that the New Game + Apostle content ate Christopher’s Build.

Research was one of the earlier mechanics in Cultist, and we’ve never really been happy with it. The way it used to work – you matched a Lore fragment with another type to upgrade it, or a different type to subvert it, and then you watched the Study timer tick round, asking you for Glimmering or Erudition or Reason at random. If you fed it what it wanted, the Research succeeded. Hurrah!

This was a problem because it required a lot of care and feeding, it took a chunk of time, and it was hard to plan for – especially because Glimmering and Erudition decay. It also meant that upgrading Edge lore and upgrading Grail lore worked pretty much the same way.

Here’s how it works now:

(1) Every lore fragment has one or more challenges you need to solve in order to upgrade it. So a Practical challenge means you need to risk your own Health, or use a Prisoner. A Grim challenge means you might need to provide Dread (which might breed) or use the Silent Intensity top-level Reason skill, or use an HQ with a Pit. An Obsessive Research challenge means you need an HQ with a Library; or the Never-No skill; or you need to risk a Reason which might be damaged. There’s always more than one way to solve a challenge.

(2) The challenges now suit the lore types! So Winter and Edge lore tends to involve Grim challenges, but Lantern lore might involve Paradoxical or Illumination challenges.

(3) You can stop a complex research process halfway through, with just some of the challenges solved, so you can come back to it later. Handy when you really need that Study verb for something else.

Finally, you might have noticed that both Skills and HQs are involved in the research mechanic, because this change is what we were leading up to. So high-end Reason and Passion skills now finally have a proper use, and swapping HQs is now a lot more than just flavour.

(Note: There’s a nuisance issue right now with card stacking around the new mechanics, but we’re working on that.) Thank you as always for your belief!

Hi, I’m Nikhil Murthy (twitter: @murthynikhil) and I make experimental video games. You can find my last one, The Quiet Sleep, on Steam and Itch. I’m currently working on a 4X game called Syphilisation in which you play one of a group of students writing a group report on Winston Churchill. You can read the manifesto for this here. This article however is on The Interactivity of Reading.

This article is to put down something that I’ve had come up in conversation multiple times, but that I have yet to put across as clearly as I would like. I believe that we can apply game design principles to things well outside their normal ambit, such as reading. It is axiomatic that game design principles come from underlying truths of people and so it follows that they apply to more than just video games.

Interactivity In Processing

The primary form of interactivity while reading is in the mind digesting the text of a book. Actually taking the words on the page and converting them into a full cohesive story in the reader’s mind is an interactive activity. It requires effort from the player and is even a developable skill.

Difficulty Levels

It is generally accepted that some books are harder than others, but it’s not that the physical act of reading changes. There’s very little variation in the act of turning a page and even dealing with obscure words will only require the occasional dictionary reference. However, coming to terms with the ideas of the book can vary greatly in difficulty.

One of my favorite lines is from James Joyce’s Ulysses, where Leopold Bloom is introduced with

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.”

This line tripped me up for a moment with the specificity of “inner organs”. I had not until that moment paid any attention to the standard of eating the flesh over the organs and the unusual structure of the sentence brought that to the forefront. This slowed me down when reading and forced me to pay greater attention to the book, much in the way that a difficulty spike in a video game forces me to re-engage my brain when I had been on auto-pilot.

Similarly, a common trope in traditional media is to introduce a twist in the plot right as it begins to settle. Processing the unexpected is more challenging for the reader than processing a part that follows naturally from what came before and this difficulty spike forces the reader into a deeper engagement.

Inversely, here is a brief paragraph from The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

“No! He tried to fight them off, but he had no arms … no fists. Or did he? Suddenly he felt his body materializing around his mind. His flesh had returned and it was being seized by powerful hands that were dragging him upward. No! Please!”

Note how simple the English is here and how short and punchy the sentences are. Additionally, the material here is heavily redundant and easy to understand. You could probably skip half of the words here while skimming and not miss a thing. This all allows the reader to adopt a breakneck pace when reading this section, which in turn makes the book feel fast-paced.

There are some reasonable design takeaways already illustrated here. Lowering the difficulty of games that are meant to be fast-paced is an interesting conceit that I would love to experiment with further. There are two much meatier concepts to work with here though. The first is to think more about the narrative difficulty of our games and not just mechanical difficulty and also to think about their interplay and the second is to start mining things other than video games for difficulty curves. We’re very used to the idea of a wave in a Csikszentmihalyi graph but there are clearly many more options that we have yet to formalize.

Black Panther

What made Black Panther so excellent to me was the pace of the ideas in the movie. Killmonger’s forcible decolonization of a museum, the structure of Wakandan society, the combination of a lip plate and a matching suit, the morality of isolationism, the radicalization of the impoverished and probably a number of other things that I’ve forgotten, they all came one after the other at a pace rapid enough to keep me off-balance the entire way. Inception was the same way for me.

Essentially, it takes time and effort for a viewer to digest an idea. Often a movie will go over some variations itself so as to aid in that digestion. Some ideas require more work because of their alien nature, as in Inception, and some require more work because of how they resonate, as in Black Panther. Both of those movies use the combination of the pace of the ideas with a heavy dose of action to keep you off-balance the entire way through, while a movie like Arrival takes its time with the ideas and gives you the space to work things out, which results in a very different feeling.

There are certainly video games that bury you under a deluge of ideas, but the way in which games often abdicate the responsibility of pacing to the player keeps them from generating the feeling of unbalance that defined my experience of both Black Panther and Inception.

An Artist of the Floating World

At one point in An Artist of the Floating World when Ono is still at Mori-san’s villa, the star pupil has schismed from the rest of the school and as he is leaving, he has a brief conversation with someone who is presented as a third pupil, but is clearly Ono. A narrator that is so unreliable as to be flat-out lying to us is clearly an instance of difficulty, but it is used here so that we can see Ono distancing himself from the memory.

This difficulty naturally forces engagement. Once we realize that Ono is lying, we now must scrutinize the rest of his words more carefully. It also adds detail to the encounter and about how Ono feels about it now that would be missing were it more direct.

I think that this is a case of a technique meant to build distance also increasing difficulty as a side-effect and so I’m not sure how much information I can pull from this with the use of traditional game design tools, but it does still make for an interesting thinking point and one that I don’t think I have fully resolved. Incidentally, the game that really used the trope of the unreliable narrator, The Beginner’s Guide, doesn’t have much in the way of mechanical difficulty but has tons of narrative difficulty.

Progression Systems

Books are honestly incredible at progression systems. This is especially true for SFF series, but you can see it over a large spread of writing. Readers invest time and effort into the pieces of the book, the characters, the setting and the rules of the story being put down. So, the book gains the increased retention that we see from our video game progression systems and people rush out to buy the latest Harry Potter because of how invested they are in the books. I’ve played games past the point where they were fun because of how much I’ve already invested and I’ve read books past the point where they were good because of how invested I am and the two feel quite similar.

This is also the investment that mattered the most to me in Yakuza 0. The story and the complicated web of yakuza politics was a much more compelling investment than the Real Estate Royale or the skill tree.

Another facet of progression systems that holds true is the promise of the reward. I’ll read to get to the happy ending because I want good things for the characters. Things that the reader wants to see can be viewed as a reward in just the same way as a powerful card in a deckbuilding game. Similarly, an unsatisfying ending can cause dissatisfaction in the same way as an underwhelming quest reward.

Self-Expression

At the end of Lost In Translation, the whispers between Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are kept from the viewers. This explicit space is key to a lot of traditional media. We’re used to the camera cutting away or the scene ending right before the event. This gives the viewer some space to self-express, even if only subconsciously. As game designers, we are often quick to make our decision points explicit and sharp. There’s a lot of space in quieter, more implicit decision-making that we have left to explore.

Conclusion

There’s not much that’s particularly novel in this post, but putting it all down like this helps make the point clear. This was more about the learnings we can pick up from traditional media because of my personal leanings, but a lot of it can be reversed and I could see a writer using a video game difficulty curve or an unrolled random reward system to great effect too. However, my core point is that as game designers, we can learn a lot by applying our standard tools to non-standard questions, like dissections of traditional media.

Christopher’s Build – named for the urbane, devious, melancholy occultist Christopher Illopoly – is about two things:

(i) Thing the First – making the game a bit shorter
(ii) Thing the Second – ADVANCED LEGACIES AND VICTORIES.

(It should also drop at the same time as our Priest DLC, but I’ll talk about that another time).

This week (when I haven’t been applauding my co-founder at a big event at BAFTA) I’ve been doing more detailed estimation and design on this, and today I’d like to discuss how things will get shorter, but how they’ll get, in the advanced legacies, Long-er.

Making the Game A Bit Shorter: Expeditions

As I’ve confessed elsewhere, the pacing in the late game is a bit draggy. I keep seeing this in reviews – people like the game to start with, then lose patience when they need to slog through all the Expeditions until the right items finally turn up in a random drop.

The most immediate change to Expeditions is this: I want to make the rewards more predictable. There’s a double-randomness effect right now. You draw an Expedition, and then you draw random rewards when you complete it. I did it this way so there was some element of surprise each time you completed an expedition… but the randomness of rewards contributes to that grindy late-game, and often frustrates players.

In the near future, then, you should see Expeditions give thematically consistent rewards, so if you really want a high-end Grail tool, you’re looking for Raven Isle, or wherever. They may retain some randomness; I may add new Expeditions to fill out the range of rewards; I may restrict some spirits or mortals; I might add more choices to some expeditions; and above all, I might add ways to find particular Expeditions more quickly. All TBD.

Making the Game A Bit Shorter: Research

Research was one of the earliest systems in the game, and I’ve never been especially happy with it. It also contributes to some of the make-work – you need to stock up on Erudition and Glimmering, and you need to sit through several cycles waiting on randomness.

I wanted to make it more interesting, and I wanted to make it a bit brisker. I’ve also been leaving this chunk of the system ready to receive the business ends of Reason/Passion skill specialisation (which you’ve seen in Teresa’s Build) and variant HQs (which everyone is asking about). 

So the current design thinking is this:

Lore subversions, and low-level lore upgrades, will just happen, bish bosh, easy, quick.

For higher-level lore upgrades, you’ll discover specific obstacles for each bit of lore when you try to upgrade it, each resolved in a different way. So for a lore obstacle which requires a Grim Lesson, you might need to use Dread (which will breed), or a variant HQ with a Pit. For Obsessive Research, you might need a temporary sacrifice of Reason, or a variant HQ with a Library. And so on. Each flavour of Lore tends to need specific obstacles (Winter lore often needs Grim Lessons), and you can come back and deal with the obstacle whenever you’re ready.

If you successfully upgrade, and you have the right specialist skill, you’ll sometimes have the option to try for a double upgrade… but occult research is chancy, and the human mind is fragile. So if you upgrade second-intensity Winter lore and have the Silent Intensity skill (one of the Reason specialisations), you might be able to leapfrog directly to fourth-intensity Winter lore… but there’s a significant chance it’ll go wrong, and you’ll just get a basic Lore upgrade and also suffer a MISAPPREHENSION (for Winter lore, probably a dreadsplosion). But if it goes right, you’ll improve a bit quicker.

So we’re shaving some time off the end of the game… and providing somewhere else to put the time.

Warning: the next section contains giant spoilers. It also probably won’t make much sense unless you’ve played a lot of Cultist.

Advanced Legacies, Advanced Victories

I’ve said different things about different times about how all this will work, and I’ve said some of those things very fast on design streams. So here’s my current thinking. It might change again. I’m an UNSTABLE DESIGN VORTEX and who can predict ow ow Lottie sorry pls not to hit pls don’t use the Producer Frown okay this is very likely how it’ll work.

Complete a Power, Sensation or Enlightenment ascension, and you’ll be able to play one of the three distinct Apostle legacies. Each of these allows you to carry over some hefty starting benefits, because you’re playing a member of a cult whose leader’s just ascended. To be clear, that’s you, and the ascended leader is also you. Your current character is your previous character’s possibly faithful admirer, working to further a mysterious and sinister project which might cause disaster, and might just allow your previous character to ascend even further – from the ranks of the immortals called Long, to the ranks of the Names, the minor divinities of the House of the Sun.

But your old character isn’t the only immortal with an interest. In the Apostle legacies, you’ll be dealing with one of four different Long who each has their reasons for preventing this further ascension. Some of them are rivals for Name-hood. One is just trouble. Either way, they make Detectives and Rivals look like playground bullies, and the only way to the higher reaches of the House lies through them.

All of these adversaries will ultimately be familiar to anyone who’s taken an interest in Cultist Simulator and Noon lore over the last year, and their appearance will resolve some long-standing questions. As anyone who’s followed my work knows, though, there’s often a new question behind an answer.

Anyway, that’s on course for January at the moment, though I should probably put in a bit more contingency for flu in my estimates. All the stuff above will be another free update; find the gateofhorn beta branch on Steam or GOG if you’d like an early look at some of it in the next several weeks.

Bit of housekeeping first. I want to remember that most games are not written under perfect circumstances where writers see all their work go into the game in a perfectly executed way. Maybe someone wrote a series of dialogues with a companion NPC where the protag carefully teases out the oral history of that NPC’s homeland, and why they’re at war with the player’s homeland, and that serves as a basis for choice-driven relationship development between the NPC and the player… and the setting information seeped invisibly into the game… and then the NPC got cut at the last minute because budget. Now no-one understands anything about the setting history and it’s two months from launch and a big chunk of the plot no longer makes any sense. What are you going to do? well maybe you’re going to wince and add pop-up text screen explaining the whole thing and resign yourself to people groaning ‘UGH LORE DUMP’ for the next five years because it’s the smallest evil.

Nother bit of housekeeping. Some people like lore dumps. Technical manuals for film franchises keep on selling. You know your audience and your game better than I do. But you don’t have to put it in everyone’s face. You can leave it in a book on a shelf, where it belongs, and where it won’t annoy the non-dumpthusiasts.

But here are some signs that you’re going to put something in your game that will send your player off to make herself a cup of tea, or alt-tab out to bitch about your game on Twitter.

1. Lore dumps that don’t sound like something a human would say.

Player: tell me about this city.
NPC: Darkburg is the capital of the Kingdom of Gloaming. It attracts merchants from all over the world, although many people here are concerned that the coming war with Shadowville means we’ll see fewer visitors.

Player: tell me about this city.
Alexis: London is the capital of the UK, and of England. It attracts tourists from all over the world. But many people here are concerned that the coming exit from the European Union means we’ll see fewer visitors.

2. Lore dumps that don’t read like something a human would write.

[Letter]: As you know, my lady, the Chancellor is very concerned about the coming war with Shadowville, although she claims in public that it’ll be a triumph that will regenerate our nation…

[Email]: As you know, Lottie, the Prime Minister is very concerned about the coming exit from the European Union, although she claims in public that it’ll be a triumph that will regenerate our nation…

3. Lore dumps that feel like homework.

NPC: the West of Darkburg contains some of our highest-rent districts. In the centre, we have the Temple of the Great Night, the Empress’ Residence and the Museum of Pain. You can find lots of shops in the Brass District. The best way to get around is…

Alexis: the West of London contains some of our highest-rent districts. In the centre, we have St Paul’s Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament and the British Museum. You can find lots of shops in Oxford Street. The best way to get around is…

If you’re thinking ‘here is a big list of all the information about this place: I should put the information into some words, and then the words will go into the player’s head, and so will the information’ then you risk ending up with something like the examples above. It’s okay not to tell players some of those things. It’s okay to tell them things in character. It’s okay not to tell them everything right now. They’re still going to be in your game an hour from now, and if they’re not, you have bigger problems.

4. Lore dumps that could be copy/pasted into another game without anyone noticing.

NPC: Hundreds of years ago, the Dark Lord Alpha seized the power of Beta for himself, and covered all the lands of Gamma in illimitable darkness. At last the wise mage Delta bestowed his finest pupil, Epsilon, with the power of Zeta. Epsilon fought her way to the heart of the dangerous realm of Eta and slew Alpha with the Zeta. Peace reigned over all the lands of Theta. But now we hear dark rumours of dark stirrings in the dark heart of Eta. In the peaceful hamlet of Iota you know nothing of this, yet, but soon you must begin your journey to

Honestly, why bother? ‘Because I’m on a day rate to write a Terry Brooks pastiche for a mid-core mobile game’ is actually a fair answer, but there’s probably something more interesting to be done. Or at least shorter.

5. Lore dumps that are in there out of a sense of mistaken duty

A lot of things in games are there because people kinda thought they ought to do that because isn’t that what people do? This is the same reason that indies write press releases that begin “we’re excited to announce”.

Here are some things you can do to minimise the tea-making and the bitching on Twitter.

0. DON’T WRITE THE LORE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Some folk write lore because it’s what they love doing, some folk write lore because they need it to fill the technical manual spinoff book, many because isn’t that what you do when you’re making an SFF game? you sit down and invent five nations and write a timeline?

I mean, you can, but the thing about things that everyone does is that those things are then things that people get bored with, because everyone’s done it. I love Tolkien, but he started putting his legendarium together almost a hundred years ago now, and he doesn’t need to be the default model to follow. More along these lines here: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-02-02-against-worldbuilding

If there are five nations in your world and the player is only ever going to visit one and they’re not involved in politics anyway, maybe only write up two nations.

If you need a third nation, then you can invent it later! And if you haven’t given the player a tour-guide talk on the Wheat Wars between Cerea and Gluta, then when you cut the Wheat Wars from your plan, you’ll have fewer continuity issues.

I’m being a bit glib. Planning helps. But it’s okay to leave room to invent or change stuff later. You don’t need to show the player all your draft setting notes.

1. Keep the information to an absolute minimum.

Here’s the lore dump I put at the beginning of Sunless Sea.

There is a lot of Fallen London lore. This doesn’t mention nine-tenths of the setting info. The first draft was like five paras. But I realised very quickly that most of it is just so much blah to new players, and so much yeah I know to people who’d played Fallen London.

So this says (a) you are in Victorian London but (b) it’s weird and (c) underground, nevertheless (d) people are used to it now and, btw, (e) the Unterzee is the thing in front of you. That’s actually all you need at this point.

The awful clanging obvious expository sections in everything that seem utterly crass? Big chunks of the audience demand them and get upset when they’re not there.

— Mode 7 – Paul Kilduff-Taylor (@mode7games) July 18, 2018

That’s the tweet that kicked off this blog post. Paul’s right (I think ‘a big chunk’ is ‘about 5%’, but with an audience in the hundreds of thousands that’s still thousands of players). But you know what? Let ’em. No game is universally beloved, and it’s better to frustrate the impatient than to bore the attentive. A minority of people have complained for ten years that Fallen London needs a codex or an opening cutscene or something. But the vast majority of people are there to get the lore nugget by delicious nugget. And a lot of the frustrated folk come around in the end.

Every time an interviewer says “how could game narrative improve” my answer is “actually it’s very often very good these days. But we could all do with respecting our players’ intelligence more.”

2. Give the player a reason to be curious.

NPC: For a thousand years the Moon Queen ruled over Selentia, and her werewolves were everywhere. Theirs was the power of the Moonplague! Finally she was imprisoned, but only with the use of…. [dramatic pause]
Player: WHERE’S THE SKILL TRAINER
—

Player: Something bit me!
NPC: Lo, the dread bite of one of Selentia’s werewolves!
Player: Okay. Cure Disease, pls
NPC: For a thousand years the Moon Queen ruled over Selentia, and her werewolves were everywhere. Theirs was the power of the Moonplague! Finally she was imprisoned, but only with the use of… [dramatic pause]
Player: CURE DISEASE PLS
—

Player: Something bit me!
NPC: Lo, the dread bite of one of Selentia’s werewolves! which drives mo –
Player: I’ve got an Intelligence drain? it looks permanent?
NPC: drives mortals mad!!
Player: CURE DISEASE PLS I AM A MAGE I CANNOT AFFORD THIS SHIT RN
NPC:  For a thousand years the Moon Queen ruled over Selentia, and her werewolves were everywhere. Theirs was the power of the Moonplague! Finally she was imprisoned, but only with the use of… [dramatic pause]
Player: DID I STUTTER? CURE DISEASE
—

Player: Something bit me!
NPC: was it, like, a big silver wolf? Do you feel your wits grow weak and
Player:  yes! intelligence drain! fix!
NPC: I don’t know much about big silver wolfs, but is there anywhere around here that looks like it has to do with big silver wolf magic?
Player: oh God I don’t know unless maybe well there’s that white marble place with the silver glow over in the Moonwood haaaang on a sec
NPC: the palace of the Moon Queen? yes, that sounds like a good place to start looking for a cure! 
Player: ta. I hadn’t realised this was a game where setting and mechanic worked harmoniously together, so I’d written it off as scenery. back in a sec
NPC: how did your weapons work against that big silver wolf?
Player: it had some pretty serious phys resistances, actually
NPC: Mm.
Player: What do you mean, ‘Mm’?
NPC: Oh nothing it’s probably just a silly story
Player: No, go on, we burnt through all our potions fighting just one of those things, and if there’s a plot weapon somewhere I’d like to know
NPC: For a thousand years the Moon Queen ruled over Selentia, and her werewolves were everywhere. Theirs was the power of the Moonplague! Finally she was imprisoned, but only with the use of… [dramatic pause]

Player: TELL ME WHAT DEFEATED THE MOON QUEEN ALREADY

__

Okay, I’m exaggerating for effect, and actually the player has prolly kept reloading until they managed not to get bitten, and then gone online to complain that the intelligence draining wolfs make mages unplayable unless you keep reloading, but yswim.

3. Write it extremely good

“The Dwarves tell no tale; but even as mithril was the foundation of their wealth, so also it was their destruction: they delved too greedily and too deep, and disturbed that from which they fled, Durin’s Bane.”

If you write it so evocatively that people recognise the quote seventy years later and TV Tropes names the trope page after your lore dump, you’re allowed to do it. that’s official. if anyone asks, tell them AK sent you. tell them he says it’s okay not to capitalise sentence starts if you’re writing online and wanting to sound urgent and conversational, too.

NB though that part of the reason it’s evocative is that he was writing about an endgame boss coming up from the bottom of a dungeon thirty years before D&D was even thought on. Never copy Tolkien outright.

4. Add a point of view.

Cultist Simulator is pretty much a lore dump redesigned to be playable as a game already, but I jazzed up some of the more expository occult tomes by adding a point of view.

label: “Read this volume of Travelling at Night”,
startdescription: “Illopoly’s disquisitions on fire and the Unburnt God are interrupted by passages of distractingly erotic poetry addressed to ‘Baldomera’.'”,
description: “‘To reach the Stag Door, I believe that all you really need is to want something enough. But I’ve never wanted anything that much, except of course Baldomera, and I’m very much afraid that the knot in the story is this: what Baldomera wants is the Stag Door. But here’s something I learnt in Persia. Perhaps it’ll teach you what you want.'”,

Exposition here (which will probably only make any sense if you’ve played a bit of CS): this book contains Forge-principle lore; the Unburnt God is one way the Forge of Days was worshipped in Persia. Christopher Illopoly is sweet on Baldomera; Baldomera might not reciprocate; the player should use Dream with their Desire to approach the Stag Door. I could just have put that as a list of bullet points, but it was more fun to make it a character moment. It nearly always is.

5. Let the player ask questions about it.

Even if it’s a basic lawnmower dialogue where the player says things like ‘Tell me about the north side of Darkburg’, that’s better than a text crawl. Little bit of call-response to keep them awake is all you need. This is a good way to get a point of view or some character writing or a reason to care in too.

6. Break it up and scatter it through the game. 

If you’ve ever tried to feed vegetables to a small child, you’ll know the principle.

Loading screen messages are great for this. Coincidentally, so are conversations where the player asks questions.

If you do this, the best approach is to approach the same fact multiple times from different angles.

7. Lampshade it.

“We’ve got to sit through this really boring lecture on the Trade Federation blockade, but I’ll sit next to you talking about my backstory and I’ll nudge you in the ribs when the lecturer gets to an important bit.”

Lampshading is generally a technique of last resort, but sometimes you need a last resort.

I had an NPC interrupt like this in Fallen London, actually, when you go to talk to the Lady in Lilac while a performance of the Seventh Letter plays out in the background. There’s some juicy lore in the Seventh Letter, but if you had to sit through me write out the whole thing you’d be bored as balls and I’d be way over deadline.

8. Don’t use words.

Okay, there are words on screen here. But writers can forget there are other ways to convey information.

Yes, I said, you’re right, and I want to reduce the amount of trial and error.  There’s an underlying scheme, and I’ll be spending a lot of the next few weeks surfacing that scheme and seeding clues about it. Working out the game is a lot of the game.

Okay, said some players. But it feels weird that I can pick up a thing, a verb slot will highlight, I’ll drag it to the slot, and it’ll do nothing. Can’t you highlight only slots with valid combinations?

I couuuuuld, says I, but that would encourage people just to tap every card on the desk with their mouse, see what highlights come up, and just drop the highlit cards into slots. They’ll stop reading the text. And anyway, some only have valid combinations if you then add a second card, and the game would need to find a way to tell you that this might work, when you get another card, but not yet.

Which is true, but I had that conversation enough times that it kept bugging me. That was a largely useless interaction, and it means a lot of the early experience of the game was ‘nope… nope… nope…’.  You need a lot of nopes for a ‘yes!’ to feel satisfying, but I didn’t want the balance to be too nope-y. And I was adding lots of clues, like this:

So this helps, but it’s still more text to read, and adding explanatory notes is expensive in writing time; they need updating if the game changes; and most importantly it’s giving people still more stuff to skim over. When you’re in trial-and-error mode, it’s when you’re most likely to skim stuff.

But I kept thinking about it, and literally on the plane to Dubrovnik for Reboot last week I suddenly thought of this approach:

and I spent the plane trip coding it.

All the main verbs in the game now have a basic aspect filter to

(i) stop you putting things in there that definitely just will never work.

(ii) give you an idea of what kind of things you can put in there – what the game expects from you. So Work can use an Ability, a Job (placeholder icons!), a piece of Lore, a Ritual, or a Desire.

The first point is important, because it reduces the number of things the player can try in each slot from about eight hundred to about fifty, which means a lot less trial and error. (There are still a lot of subsidiary combinations – too many to brute-force, really). But the second is, I think, even more important, because it gives the player an insight into what the game is thinking, and what its expectations are.

I’m putting this out in a patch todayish tomorrowish, and I’m looking forward to seeing the community response.

Feedback. For a game dev, it’s like gold dust, but like gold dust, you can’t just pick it up and take it home. Sometimes you have to treat it first, until you understand what’s there, and how to get to it.

HELLO I propose occasionally to talk about the art and process of writing pithy game microtext at ironically unmicro length. So! you are about to get 2000 words on a 35-word description for one of the locations in the Cultist Simulator Explorer’s Build.

“The Unnumbered Stones: Megaliths placed in obsessive, inerrant rows by priest-castes long dead. Time has long erased the original blood-stains, but on moonless nights, the locals supplement what remains. Hidden chambers might guard hidden treasures.”

Here is the thing. If you are writing microtext, you want every word to do as many things as possible. This is usually true of other writing, of course, but here, and in poetry, it’s extremely fucking true.

Let’s unpack the megaliths.

“The Unnumbered Stones”: this is an opening description for a place a player can loot. It’s based on the Carnac Stones in Brittany, but like everywhere in Cultist Simulator, I avoid using real-world place names where I can.

I’ve never specified, for instance, that the player is based in London, although plenty of people have assumed they are, and London is likelier. Equally, the Unnumbered Stones are on ‘the Continent’, i.e. somewhere in Europe. (Non-UK types might not be aware that UKians, with our typical alloy of elegantly expressed xenophobia and ethnocentrism, refer to That Land Mass Out There as if it were (a) something we’re not part of and (b) the only continent out there.)

Anyway “Unnumbered” refers to the frequent folktales about standing stones that can’t be counted. I could have gone with “Uncountable” but it then immediately sounds like it wouldn’t be a name in use by the locals: someone would have gone out there and tried to count them, and either succeeded, destroying the ambiguity we need to be eerie; or failed, in which case it couldn’t be too close to civilisation or it’d be a proper scientific curiosity.

I mean there are ways round these (“what counts as a stone?”) but if you are having an argument with your hypothetical reader about what you meant, you’ve already buggered it up. So “Unnumbered” it is, and that has the extra benefit of suggesting there are a lot of them.This works particularly well because the Stones are a repeatable location: you can keep going back and digging for treasures there, unlike the various Tombs and Collections and Towers I have elsewhere.

“The Unnumbered Stones. Megaliths placed in….” Megaliths is a great word anyway, but (i) I can’t say “The Unnumbered Stones. Stones placed by…” The repetition just sounds rank. (ii) I often like to start a sentence off with a dactyl – stressed syllable then two unstressed. It’s a nice dramatic cadence to start with, like rolling thunder.

“Megaliths placed in obsessive, inerrant…” and after a strong start I want to get a little crunchy. “obsessive rows” would be okay, but that focuses attention on the obsessive, and demeans the placers a bit. “Obsessive, inerrant” makes it clear they’ve done it properly, presumably according to some deeper schema; and “inerrant” is a crunchy enough word that it slows down the progress through the sentence, gives it a bit of ceremony.

“rows by priest-castes long dead”. Two things here. Cadence first: I do that stressed-stressed stressed-stressed thing (double spondee, I think) at the end of a sentence all the time, and sorry, I’ve basically just ruined everything I ever write for you, once you hear it you can’t stop. Anyway dum-dum dum-dum says “we”re done here but it’ll take a moment”. Ceremony again.

Setting stuff. Not just priests, priest-castes. This gives us the cadence but it also implies a larger structure and context. These aren’t just bits of rock chucked down in a field, a whole society of bronze age lithenthusiasts have been doing something grand for unknown reasons. I don’t come out and commit to this, but it sounds like a thing. I specifically had the priestly caste of druids in mind, and I hope that resonates somewhere, but I certainly didn’t say druids, because (i) the word now sounds a bit daft (ii) erryone knows there’s no evidence the druids actually placed megaliths, quite the reverse. But if I signal them, I can suggest blood and mistletoe without being called up on my dodgy history.

and this is why I’ve gone with the passive. I could have said “Priests long dead have placed megaliths in obsessive, inerrant rows”. But aside from losing the lovely dactyl and then the dum-dum dum-dum, I give away the answer right at the start! You see rocks in a field, you think, ooh, what hands long past, and then I tell you, ah, these hands long past. The passive is often a problem because it witholds information the reader needs to parse the sentence. But sometimes we want to withold that a bit longer.

Okay. “The original blood-stains are long gone.” That would be weak af. “Time has long erased…” Let’s put Time front and centre, because we want to emphasise age. “Long erased” is a little highfaluting, but not enough to distract, it just sounds minutely austere and high-style, like a quick draught of arctic air. It also neatly gets us out of committing to any history or worrying about druids. How long? Hundreds? Thousands? just, long, let’s move on.

and the good bit: blood! so we’ve got the implied druids, we’ve got the stones, this is a game about secret gods and occult murder, everyone was basically expecting blood the moment we got into the sentence. So we’re bringing in the blood, but only apophatically, i.e. only through mentioning its absence. I tell you what, you could read this sentence twice and come away with the impression there’s actually some actual visible blood. I did, which is why I made the mistake we’ll come to in a moment.

“Time has long erased the original blood-stains, but on moonless nights, the locals supplement what remains.” Moonless nights, can’t go wrong with a moonless night in a bit o’ horror. And importantly, then, (i) we’ve got a continuous tradition to the current day, which means that I can put loot in here that has been left any time between like 500BC and 1900AD. This makes my loot tables much more flexible. And (ii), the perils in my design table for the Unnumbered Stones are: “Forest, Hidden Door, Watchers”. The Hidden Door I’ll vaguely imply, later, is in the side of a tumulus. The Watchers are now set up as locals repeating the ceremonies of the ancients, and I don’t need to write any more specific text for them when the player gets to that point, hurray.

Originally the sentence read ‘the locals add more’. Just,  “…but on moonless nights, the locals add more.” Like they’re topping up a barrel of cider. So that wasn’t my greatest moment. Lottie picked me up on it, and I did a recast.

What I like about “supplement what remains”:

(i) The fancy word and the coy structure withold what the locals are doing for just long enough to provide a quarter-giggle or a half-shiver. “The locals kill animals or people and smear the blood on the stones”. Well that’s a bit Eli Roth. We don’t want Eli Roth, we want Arthur Machen, so we hint and tease. The sentence takes long enough to work through that it can mist the details and also have a teeny payoff. I learnt to do this from Graham Greene. Not personally. He did it in ‘Our Man in Havana.’ Here’s Dr Hasselbacher, an elderly World War I veteran who one night is found tragicomically dressed up in his old cavalry uniform:

“Dr Hasselbacher sat facing him wearing an old pickelhaube helmet, a breastplate, boots, white gloves, what could only be the ancient uniform of an Uhlan… he sat forlornly in the bulging breeches. Wormold saw that they had been unstitched along a seam to allow room for the contemporary Hasselbacher.” 

– Our Man In Havana

Greene is balancing the whole scene between the melancholy and the ridiculous; and the tactful grandeur of “the contemporary Hasselbacher” means we don’t focus on the specifics of how Hasselbacher might actually look, and we spend enough of a moment puzzling through the phrase that the effect can concentrate into a laugh.

(ii) the word “remains” has now got an impression of corpses into the sentence, implying without committing to them. This kind of trick works better in in-game text because people will often see the text multiple times and skim it subsequently, so they may take away an impression of words without absorbing the whole thing. (They may do this on the first reading, too, in which case a lot of all that careful rhythm work may be for nothing, but that’s the breaks. This is also why rule number 1 of game writing is to keep everything short.)

But did you spot my mistake? “The locals supplement what remains.” Hang on, Kennedy, I thought that time had erased all the bloodstains? so what does remain? Anything? Nothing? This is the kind of thing that often crops up when a writer fusses with a sentence – fix one issue, and and another pops out because the writer forgot what they were saying earlier. Once you’re used to this, you can often tell what’s over-polished in other people’s work.

Honestly though I think it’s okay. A sentence with enough vim and bravado can just gallop over oddities like this. Poetry does that all the time. Let me know whether you spotted it back at the beginning. I’m not going to go back and tinker with it, though, partly because I have a lot of text to write, partly because I don’t want to tempt people into offering suggestions for changes.

And we’re nearly done! “Hidden chambers might guard hidden treasures.” Straightforward bit of repetition. Repetition in a bit of game microtext does a few things, and this is all the things it does here: It can be a neon sign saying PAY ATTENTION TO THIS BIT. It can provide a calmer, less complicated place for the player to rest their eyes, after they’ve got through an info-heavy segment with lots of distinct concepts and implications. It suggests authority (though it can easily tip over into parody, which is always a problem when you write as purple as I do). The authority here lets it work like gently tapping a gavel: we’re done, let’s move on.

Final point. The sense of “Hidden chambers guard hidden treasures” is slightly odd – does a chamber guard a treasure? it’s the kind of thing an editor would probably call me up on. But I tried switching it to ‘hold’, and that was ugly because of all the aitches in a row. I tried ‘contain’ and it (a) is a bit clinical (b) doesn’t scan so well. I like the active quality of ‘guard’, and I like again that it’s hinting at those troublesome locals. There is probably a better option, but a lot of writing to deadline is a matter of getting something that’s 95%, and then moving on. Which I’m doing, now.

Does it sound ridiculous? If so, does it sound ridiculous because we have seen seventy years of Tolken pastiche, or because it sounds like a request: MORE GOTH! And that’s if you’re a native English speaker with an Anglo background and some dozens of books under your belt. I’m not sure how it sounds to someone reading the Silmarillion for the first time in their teens.  I’m not sure how it sounds if your introduction to mythology was more Indian-inflected than Norse or Celtic -inflected. I might have some sense of how it sounds to a Spanish or a German speaker (I probably don’t). I don’t have any idea how ‘Morgoth’ sounds when the Silmarillion has been translated into Polish, or Tagalog, or Japanese. (Feel free to weigh in below if you do).

This has been in my mind because I’ve been going through Kickstarter-backer-supplied names for Cultist Simulator.

right, so

I got two hundred and nineteen.

It’s fine. It’s actually fine. I’ve got 150+ tomes planned for the game. Another two-three dozen NPCs. I can reference people as historical characters. From experience I know maybe 80% of backers will actually supply a name. We’re past the cutoff date, I got about 170 responses, if you’re reading this and you still want to fill in the survey, chuck it in quick and I’ll make it work, but basically, yes, it’ll be 180 supplied names, I reckon.

Still a lot of names. That’s fine, though; in fact it’s good; you can never have too much inspiration. Using backer names for landmarks on Sunless Sea really helped populate the map:

But then, of course, there’s this issue.

So there’s the fun task of writing emails to customers that hit the right note between Thank You But Not Quite Our Thing and Come On Sunshine, Don’t Mess Me About. But that’s only if they’re obviously taking the piss. And what if they aren’t? What if the name doesn’t work for Cultist Simulator, or sounds great in their own language but odd in English, or looks odd to me because I’ve been staring at a spreadsheet of names for an hour and my eyes have started to cross? What if it’s a treasured forum nym they’ve been using since they were twelve?

Here’s the guidance I put on the name survey:

“It doesn’t need to be your real name! You can use a pseudonym, middle name or other alternate identity. However, Cultist Simulator is set (more or less) in the real world, and names should sound like they plausibly come from a real-world history or culture with a tradition of literacy. Ideally, they should sound like they’ve come from Europe or Asia no earlier than the sixteenth century.”

So ‘Flamedragon212’ is right out. I’m not being mean about Flamedragon212, or about anyone else, because I know that if someone has backed eight Kickstarters and clicked a link in their email on a cloudy December morning at work, they’re not going to read the small print on the questionnaire. So that’s fine; I’ve sent them a polite email and said, sorry, won’t fly, can we have something else.

But what about ‘Argentrose’? Someone chose that, mailed me to check it had gone in because it’s a name they’re attached to; and it doesn’t fit the guidelines. It sounds like a high-fantasy character, not an eighteenth-century mystic. ‘Rose Argent’ would be fine, if a little unusual, and I’ve suggested that.

‘Fine, but a little unusual’ is what you’re looking for in occult books, really. ‘Matt Nash’ and ‘Ian Thomas’ are fine,  and you want some relatively straightforward names in among the rest of it. Nico van Driel, Jacob Oliver Topp-Mugglestone,  Emmanuel Raveline, Jay Wigglesworth Jensen, Anaël Verdier, Lars Westergren, Niels Frederik Malskær… these are all great. The thing is, at least some of them are real names. All of them might be. I know Jay Wigglesworth Jensen is, because they mailed me when they were deciding whether to back at Stolen Name level, and asked me if their name would be okay. Niels Frederik Malskær: if your first language is English, this sounds like the earl of a haunted castle. If your first language is Danish, I’ve no idea how it sounds. Maybe super mundane, maybe super dramatic.

(My ex-wife is Croatian. When we were talking about kid names, I said we should totally call our kid Zvonimir,  a Croatian name which sounds amazing if you grew up in Oxfordshire. She reacted with horror: no no, it’s an old man’s name, it sounds like Reginald or something… if you’re a Zvonimir, sorry, it’s her opinion not mine, I still think you sound great.)

Back to basics. What do I actually need in a Cultist Simulator NPC backer name? I don’t want to make an aesthetic judgement on whether it’s a good name. There are lots of good names that won’t fit. I do want something, then, that fits, that sounds like it could show up on the spine of a well-thumbed book in a library in a slightly alternate, but basically familiar, early twentieth century British city. And I don’t want to make my backers feel embarrassed if they’re not native English speakers and they’ve picked something that sounds fine to them, but doesn’t sound fine to a nerdy writer thigh-deep in invented world stuff trying to make sure all the names fit just right.

Another problem. Let’s try a quick quiz. Supplied backer name, or real-world occult pseudonym?

• ‘Porphyry’
• ‘Amber’
• ‘Frater Perdurabo’
• ‘Christian Rosenkreuz’
• ‘Hieronymus Pseudo-Hypnerotomachus’
• ‘Messana’
• ‘Scire’
• ‘Dafo’
• ‘Gwaer’
• ‘Snow’s Keeper’
• ‘Percy Flage’

I’m going to ramble a bit about the context, to provide a spoiler space, and also because it’s interesting. Some occult or esoteric writers were poseurs and dilettantes. Some were intensely focused scholars who took their work extremely seriously. Some of them picked pseudonyms as casually as a fifteen-year-old might pick a gamertag now: they banged some syllables together and picked a sound they liked. Some of them were elaborately chosen for specific reasons (that might still fall apart under the gentle pressure of actual scholarship). Some of them use nicknames, some of them have been given identifiers by subsequent scholars, some are possibly, but not definitely, fictional: Hermes Trismegistus, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Anyway here are your answers: Amber, Hieronymus, Messana, Gwaer and Snow’s Keeper are backer-supplied names. (Hieronymus Pseudo-Hypnerotomachus, to confuse things, looks like a play on ‘pseudo-Hieronymus’, the author who was not, but was mistaken for, Hieronymus, and the work called the ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’.)

Porphyry (aka Porphyrius), Christian Rosenkreuz, Scire, Dafo, Frater Perdurabo and Percy Flage are all names that have actually been used. The last two are both Crowley, the last one Crowley in a particularly silly mood even by Crowley’s standards.

So practically anything, even something quite high-fantasy-looking, might go in as a pseudonym. But if someone thinks [not actual example] Masticus Indomitablus looks like a really cool name, and I use it as the name of a notorious charlatan who made up their name after four absinthes too many, that’s going to be unfortunate.

(Here’s another fun wrinkle! A lot of the authors who wrote in the 19th and early 20th centuries had fallen in love with Indian, Chinese, Native American or Middle Eastern philosophy and mythology and literature, and imported and mangled it in a way which would cause comment or look insensitive today. When does authenticity become authentic? Blavatasky actually wrote about the Secret Masters in Tibet in the 1880s, but this looks like nonsense sub-Orientalist cliche now. But it still has real period flavour. And there are still Theosophists in the world today who might take exception to ‘nonsense cliche’, not to mention Wiccans who might be hurt by my suggesting that a lot of Wiccan writers in the 1900s+ made up a lot of the secret texts they were supposedly quoting from. That’s another blog post for another day.)

Pickle, huh.

Here’s a rule I’ve settled on. If a name looks inappropriate – not Dankmeme Swamp inappropriate, just, well-intended but it doesn’t fit the obsessively tuned setting –

if a name looks inappropriate, I’ll punch it into a search engine. If the first page of hits I get are Steam forum usernames, and it doesn’t show up elsewhere, then I’ll probably need it changed. If it turns out to be a place name, or a real-world surname, or have other interpretations, it can probably stay.

I worry way too much about this stuff. But then, worrying way too much about this stuff was what made Fallen London work, and why people can go down the delirious rabbit hole of making connections for days. Cultist Simulator is meant to be a rich, intriguing ball of yarn that you can tug on for days, or the fictional equivalent of one of those boxes in the Room games. I very much want everything to fit. So if you’ve just got an email asking you politely for an alternate name, then please, it’s not you: it’s just me being a nerd.