“Secret gods live beneath the skin of the world. Five of them meet every year to exchange secrets and agree particular notes of history. Their conversations aren’t for our ears, but even after they’ve gone, their gossip still troubles the earth; the air still prickles with doors…”

🎉🐦 The Locksmith’s Dream tickets are AVAILABLE NOW! 🐦🎉

Each year the Avian Hours – that’s the Beach-Crow, the Witch-and-Sister, the Elegiast, the Vagabond and the little-known Name of the Moth, Ferezeref – meet to discuss the topics of the gods. Afterwards, mortals attend the Roosinghall to pick through abandoned tidbits of secret knowledge. This is what we’re calling the Locksmith’s Dream, and invite you to pick through the snippets of the gods this October and December with us.

Ivan has done a wonderful job of setting up the official site, where there’s bagloads of photos, info and you can see all the properly beautiful rooms you can stay in. It’s also where you can actually book tickets, so go forth and enjoy! If you can make it, see you there…

Secret Historian boxes: The Grove of Green Immortals

As you know from my blog last week, our first Secret Historian boxes are also now available on the merch shop! There are only 25 of them available, though, so nab yours quick – or wait until next month’s box comes out, which will be all about Crossrow. Your only two options! 😎

BOOK OF HOURS updates

We’re not ready to share a vertical slice of the game yet, but here’re some updates!

We’ve finalised the design of the Wisdom Page, the occult sort-of skill tree where you can choose which forbidden knowledge to specialise in, and which affects what you can do elsewhere in the game based on your choices. We’ve hidden the full size of the chart, but you can see the first four levels here:

Players choose cards or objects to commit to each slot up the chain, pledging allegiance – for example – to Birdsong by committing a skill card for Ramsund, the language of secrets. This will enhance the player’s Birdsong affinity and ability, opening up new opportunities elsewhere and unlocking the next tier of the branch.

We hope it’s also a nice roleplaying opportunity, as you can see that each of the nine Wisdoms is variously associated with several Principles from [i]Cultist Simulator[/i]. People have strong feelings about whether they’re a Winter-y sort who wants a beautiful end or a Lantern-type who’s brilliant but a bit caustic or a Forge-person who really loves hitting things with hammers. The Wisdoms are deliberately broader, drawing from multiple Principles at once, so they should open up new avenues of characterisation. Which is useful in, er, an RPG!

Speaking of the Wisdoms, we’ve uncovered a new letter from a mysterious ‘Arthur’ to his nephew, discussing the Illumination-affiliated events that took place in a Pyrhhic battle against the Khusgai of Persia, and the bravery – and unmasking of Lieutenant Malcolmson. Most importantly, though, weep for Menander, the bravest steed that ever was!

“Nephew, make a fist of your hand. Muscles move beneath the skin. So powers move beneath the skin of the world, at impulses equally invisible, but greater.”

Click here for alternative read-friendly text.

And finally, we also have a mock-up of Hush House’s layout to share. Please note that this is not what the game will actually look like (though mmmm isn’t it all nice and neat in a grid), but it is likely to represent the layout of rooms in the final game. We’ve censored some of the more deep-lore rooms, and you can’t see all of it – but here’s a first glimpse at the library at the centre of it all!

If you like what you see, please wishlist BOOK OF HOURS to keep updated with our progress! More on that in the next few months.

Cultist Simulator’s birthday

It’s Cultist’s anniversary, so we’re running a Midweek Madness sale on Steam throughout this week. You can get everything [i]Cultist Sim[/i]-y for basically dust and a broken ha’penny (50-66% off everything, to be exact). So that’s

• Cultist Simulator (66% off)
• The Dancer, Priest, Ghoul and Exile DLC (50% off)
• Cultist Simulator’s OST (50% off)
• Anthology Edition bundle, which includes all of the above @ 65% off-ish (bundle maths is hard)
• The Lady Afterwards: Digital Edition (50% off)

Enjoy!

The indomitable Canadian sensation that is Systemchalk – probably a Long by now, at least – is broadcasting Cultist on the Steam store page, for anyone who’d like to see the game being wrestled to its knees while a soothing voiceover describes the inevitable descent into penury, madness and occult calamity.

AND FINALLY we’re restocking The Lady Afterwards: Boxed Edition on the Etsy shop tomorrow at noon BST. We’ll restock the boxes every Tuesday, alternating between noon BST and 6PM BST to facilitate different international buyers. Be there! The box is really great! I promise!

Happy birthday to Iris, the Mansus, all the Histories and most importantly to Cultist Sim, the little game that could. Celebrate in your favourite way for us, Believers! We couldn’t have done it without you. We’re off to desperately refresh the Locksmith’s Dream back-end and see how many people are buying tickets, and then play a bunch of V Rising to chill out. TOODLE PIP ♥

But it can be difficult to remember. My strong inclination is to bunker up. I’m an introvert who ran a company for seven years, and being able to work from home and not have to talk to anybody unless I wanna is intoxicating. You can be feel – and sometimes be – very productive when you’re working on your own thing without having to spend time on communicating with a team or the world. But it’s easy to avoid thinking through things; it’s easy to overlook possible problems; and above all, you miss out on head-slap insights.

That’s why I want to get a (ugly, primitive) prototype of Cultist Simulator in front of other people ASAP. (Probably not tomorrow unless I trim my task list harshly today; more like next week). But it’s also why it’s important to bump brains with other people if you’re working on something alone. And by ‘bump brains’, I mean sit down for a chat with someone you can talk to in detail. I want to give a concrete example.

Here’s the basic UI as it now stands:

What’s going on here? I’m trying to use the Speak action with an Occult Scrap item. Occult Scraps have the Secret Histories aspect. This aspect used with the Speak action will recruit you an Enthusiast. (Enthusiasts are easy – you can recruit them with almost anything).

Here’s a slightly more complex action:

I’m using my Dream action on the Suitable Premises item, which gives me two crafting slots. An Occult Scrap goes in one, a notorious book in the other. This gives us Location, Lantern, Knock and Secret Histories aspects, plus the concrete aspects for the actual items themselves – some recipes require specific items, as well as or instead of generic aspects.

And since you can put some items with slots inside other items with slots, recipes can get pretty complex:

As any fule kno, you can only put followers (like Believers and Enthusiasts) or rituals (like the Rite of Slaking) in the slots of a society (like a Clique), but you can put almost anything in a Location.

So that’s a lot of possible combinations! effectively, simple puzzles, but simple puzzles that depend on lore that I made up. The big risk is that a player won’t be engaged by, or won’t understand, the lore, and will resort to trial and error. Some trial and error is inevitable, but I want people to spend as little time as possible in the state of mind that Chris Gardiner once described as ‘when you get to like USE FLOWER ON FRIDGE’.

I’m looking forward to trying to build engaging lore, but my delivery system for details about it is quite a narrow slot. The obvious place to put it, given that everything you interact with the game is effectively an item (even Health, Sanity and things like An Ordinary Life) is as quick descriptions attached to those items.

I can put info in that log on the right, but it contains a lot of valuable mechanical info and I don’t want to spam it with lore which is part-mechanic, part-flavour, part-hint. I also don’t really want people to feel obligated to examine everything. I really want something more like footnotes, which will seep in over time. Tooltips are a pretty good solution. But I put everything in tooltips in Fallen London, and spend months regretting it when we moved to mobile. There’s a good chance CS will end up as a mobile game, and I don’t want to assume it’s being played with a mouse.

So I took Liam Welton out to lunch and picked his brain about a whole bunch of UI things, including this one. Liam came back with a bunch of useful advice (including some things I wish I’d known about at the start) but his answer to this, in particular, was: CS displays item aspects in the workspace where ingredients are combined. Why not display item descriptions there too, just for the first item we put in there each time? There won’t be room for more than that, it’ll get crowded out. But it’s a really casual way of ensuring the player will sometimes see text for an item; can easily see text for an item if they want to; can interact with other items for a while before digging into the description; in a word, it feels footnotey. And it makes a certain sort of sense in the vague metaphor of a workbench you put things on. You’d put a thing you wanted to examine on the workbench in isolation.

It’s one of those ideas that seems blindingly obvious in retrospect. But as far as I’d been concerned, the workbench was for displaying aspects and recipes. I was considering adding a separate footnotes panel. I’d never have got there on my own.

If you’re working on something, take time to bump brains. You’re locked into your own perspective. The whole thing about other people is that they’re locked into an entirely different one.

EDIT: WUPS forgot the ‘sign up to hear more about Cultist Simulator’ link. Here it is.

Cultist Simulator is AdVenture Capitalist meets single-player Fallen London meets Doodle God, set in the NOON world that I’m going to build my next game in. You’re a curious soul in a world full of mysteries that willl bite your soul out if you look at the too closely. So obviously the thing to do is wrangle those mysteries, construct a temple, dig relics out of the desert and wreak apocalypse in the name of ultimate eldritch power.

The key mechanic is making things out of other things: narrative crafting. You put things together, use a verb, get another thing and a little snippet of AK rambly prose poetry. So you can put a Cinnabar Amulet and some Tentacle Oil in a box and use the Work verb to convert them into a Wriggling Amulet, or you can put a Shattered Fane and five Desperate Believers in one place and use Speak to make them into one Hardened Disciple, or possibly a Family Connection and a Wistful Dream together and create a Horrible Tragedy.

The reason I picked a crafting mechanic. Proximately, it’s because I was playing Hadean Lands (I know I mentioned it in the last post; I promise I’m not shilling for Plotkin; I’m not sure he entirely approves of me; but he’s probably a genius; play it!), and I was reminded what a strong and versatile metaphor a crafting mechanic is. Ultimately, it’s because I’m interested in experimenting with narrative mechanics that are strongly scripted but leave a lot of room for flexibility, creativity, discoverability, personalisation: as if you grabbed the angles of StoryNexus and moved them a half-metre further apart. And didn’t tie them to a 2009-style db-backed web app (ENTIRELY MY BAD).

I’m building a Javascript prototype to get feedback and try out the ideas. If it looks promising, I’ll probably do a Kickstarter and port it to Unity to put it on mobile and/or PC. Anyway the alpha will be a free demo thing, and the signup link is here: http://visitnoon.com/signup

oh that screenshot. If you insist. Brace yourself. oh of course you can’t just copy-paste into a WordPress post. hang on, here we go: