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.

What secrets lurk in old grimoires? What histories lie beneath Hush House? What’s true about the invisible world, and what legacy will you forge with your hard-won numina? It’s finally time to share BOOK OF HOURS’ launch trailer, the first step across the threshold for all Librarians. Hopefully this gives everyone an appealing taste of the game, from hardcore Cultist Simulator fans (here’s looking at you, Apostle Entheates) to people who’ve never heard of the Secret Histories. Watch below, share it around and let us know what you think! 🤫

So shiny! Much heart-feels! Wow!

Now, onto development. Our beta period is now officially over, so a serious thank you to everyone who participated in any of them over the last few months. Your feedback has been incredibly helpful, and AK’s full-time job at the moment is tweaking the game based on what we’re hearing from players. He only implements a few suggestions – as with all Kennedy games, BOOK OF HOURS is highly distinctive and therefore divisive – but he really does read and think about every email we receive. AK + Feedback in the ‘Consider’ verb = Better Game + Need of Gin…?

As a result of everyone’s hard work, I’ve finally been able to take some shiny new screenshots (see ’em all on the Steam page)…

…and have been feverishly finishing off all remaining Aspects, Elements and Things, with some help from veteran element artists Clockwork Cuckoo.

Most importantly, we now have proper states for all pets. Like the Wild, Tame and HONGRY cat below:

AK, meanwhile, has been working flat out on polishing the game post-beta. This means bringing the last 20% of Hush House to life (that’s right: the caves under the House remain unexplored until launch), QoL improvements, and zillions of technical bugs like ‘this runs at 3FPS on my potato’, ‘this runs at 10FPS on my laptop’ and ‘are you trolling us with the phonograph, where the hell is it’. Having finally had the time to play more of the game myself, oh my Hours am I sorry I didn’t put in more wall art / comfort / thing slots for you all to put things down! I love the idea in theory of picking up a snake and then never, ever being able to put it down, but in reality it’s less fun. So… I’m working on that! But let me hand over to AK for one moment…

In Sheri S. Tepper’s Sideshow, there’s a recurring children’s story that has always stayed with me. I re-read it today, and it sounds oddly relevant in some expected and unexpected ways.

“And so, sustained by this ambition, he went higher and higher yet, gray stone and gray cliff and gray rain falling, year after year, until he came at last to the place the swallows danced in the air above the bottomless void…”

Back in 2021, Lottie and I described BOOK OF HOURS as a game of ‘peace, melancholy, satisfaction and curiosity’. If you’ve followed our work, you’ll know that we’re theme-first; you might also know that I have a thing about there always being an core, understated theme that the others orbit like an invisible sun. In BOOK OF HOURS, this understated theme is loneliness.

“When they saw him, they stopped dancing to perch beside him on the stone, and when he saw them there, silver and black, beautiful as a night lit with stars, he was possessed once again by a great longing, and he told them of his desire for wings. ‘Perhaps you may have wings, but you must give up your shell,’ they cried…”

One of the things they tell you in children’s books is that if you’re a loner, but gifted, or virtuous, or interesting, you will have a happy ending. This much is often true. But many children’s books end with the loner getting a medal, or a big parade, or a special hat, while everyone cheers. This is not, in my experience, how it generally works.

“And even as they told him he might have wings, he seemed to hear in their voices some of the carelessness he had heard in the voice of the owl and the bat and the bullfrog, who had told him where to go without telling him the dangers of the way. He heard them rightly, for the winged gods have a divine indifference toward those who seek flight. They will not entice and they will not promise and they will not make the way easy, for those who wish to soar must do so out of their heart’s desire and their mind’s consent and not for any other reason…”

The Librarian of Hush House has left the world behind. Visitors will pass like seasons into their life and out of it, and the Librarian may never see them again, let alone know the end of their stories. The Librarian will live, die, and leave something for whoever might come after. This is of course what all of us do, all our lives. Much is taken, but much abides.

“And the turtle struggled with himself, wanting wings but not wanting wings, for if he had wings, they told him, he would no longer be interested in going back to the pond to tell the creatures there of his journey—that comfortable telling, the anticipation of which had been, perhaps, more important to him than the wings themselves. So, he struggled, wanting and not wanting …”

I don’t think anyone will thoroughly enjoy BOOK OF HOURS if they have never been lonely. I hope that people who’ve never been lonely will still like the game. But, honestly, I don’t know if there’s anyone in the world like that.

………I always come across as a bit of a cheesepuff (light; dusted; non-profound) after I let AK write anything, so I shall epilogue succinctly. We’ve a bunch of stuff coming between now and actual release, including streamer access, social countdowns, a launch-day AMA on r/Gaming and a gameplay-focused final video. It should all be terribly exciting and I will be appealing to YOU good souls to help us, if you like, make BOOK OF HOURS’ release as big as a game about being left alone to read quietly in a library can possibly be. Thank you for sticking with us so far – you must now enjoy launch on our behalf while we run around with our hair on fire saying British things like ‘ah, I am undone’ and ‘halp’. Stay tuned.

For our final ‘dog on a skateboard’ story, I leave you with news that everybody’s favourite Weary Detective from Cultist Simulator has been working hard, working out and has duly received a much-deserved promotion. Good job, Douglas! That means you get a cooler hat. ♥

“Detective-Illuminate of the Suppression Bureau. A stoic, but weary, fellow. His dearest wish is to move to Chingford and grow roses. But the buggers won’t let him retire.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

🤫

Don’t worry everyone we finished the game

AK said he wanted a ‘Generic Thing Image’ (‘Thing’ being our development term for any movable object you can place on top of other things, like candlesticks or mounted skulls or alembics), I gave him a Generic Thing Image, and he’s all, oh, that looks insane, why is our game full of gigantic ragdolls, and I’m like, babe, leave the art to me.

(After much energetic debate, beta players next week will notice that the Generic Thing Image has been replaced with a much less interesting triangle with a question mark in it. Le sigh.)

In more joyous news, I have loads of new art to share with you along with our beta milestone (scroll to the bottom if you just want to read about that). We received some more beautiful element art from habitual element-er Sophie H. Unlike the previous portraits we’ve shared (who have been assistants you’ll meet in Brancrug Village), the following are all Hush House patrons – people who’ll appear from time to time with a request for a book, help with lore, or simply checking up on you.

You’ve met a few of these characters in Cultist Simulator, and a few of them have even been physically represented in The Lady Afterwards. Any guesses on who’s who above?

Meanwhile, Adrien and I have been hard at work drawing new rooms. Adrien’s drawn over 70 now, which is officially nuts. Here are some of my favourite recent ones, starting with a room in which nothing bad has ever happened (the destroyed room at the top of the Crucible Tower) to the peaceful whimsy of the Lower Cliff Path:

Oh, and just to whet your appetites on something totally banonkers that Adrien’s working up now – anyone have an idea of what THIS room is?

I’ve also been tweaking the background art, redrawing Hush House (it’s now much sharper and those dotted lines line up really nice, a la Wes Anderson perfectionism) and the world’s trees. We now have seasonal variants and animations, so you’ll see the year change (and the resources you can nab from it) over time. Behold the four basic starter animations…

We’ve added some new books to the game, too! Here’s a selection of covers and how they might look lined up on a shelf:

I leave you with the news that BOOK OF HOURS’ beautiful soundtrack composed by Canadian soundstress Maribeth Solomon and co. is finalised! I can’t share the final music with you yet, but I can say it’s double the length of the CS soundtrack (15 tracks in CS, 31 in BoH) and pique your interest with our nearly final track list…

Finally, the beta

“Long long ago, this was a forest. Now it’s the place where the sea ends and the world begins (or the other way around).”

We’re equal parts excited and frightened to be admitting the first batch of beta testers into BOOK OF HOURS next week. Thanks to the three hundred or so of you who emailed in telling us you’ve spent 8,0000000000000 hours in Cultist Simulator and have named your first-borns ‘Propsy’. Everyone who’s been picked will get an email next week with their Steam keys – if you don’t get an email, don’t worry! We’ll be adding new bunches of beta testers every month, so you have a new chance to be selected with every refresh of the moon.

AK wants you to know that CURIA is the first beta release, named for the Curia of the Isle, the scholars who restored the House in the eighteenth century after the line of Barons Brancrug died out. One of the themes of BOOK OF HOURS is that the same things keep on happening, but they keep on happening differently (de Camp: ‘The notes are always different, but the tune stays much the same.’) One way or another, the House and the Isle have been abandoned again and again over the years, but eventually, someone always turns up to chase the shadows out. This time, of course, it’s you.

What’s in CURIA? A number of rooms; a multitude of objects and books; and the skeleton of the crafting, studying and unlocking systems. CONSPICUOUSLY ABSENT are most of the rooms (you can go as far as the Grand Ascent, the staircase that serves as the spine of the House); a lot of the actual text (FNORD, as veterans will know, means “AK hasn’t written this”); lots of UI work (it’s still quite primitive) and most of the little surprises, contextual clues and unexpected combinations which will make the crafting system come alive.

The crafting in BoH is already more complicated than the one in Cultist – depending on which way you reckon it, there are maybe sixty recipes, maybe two hundred – but the balance is all over the place, and it still feels quite bare-bones and unfriendly. The skeletal metaphor again. Let’s say CURIA is the skeleton’s head and torso. BARONIAL, the next beta, will add more bones, and we’ll start grafting on the flesh and then the skin. Skin goes on last. After the eyes, not before. You don’t make that mistake twice. NO THIS IS A NICE GAME.

We’re still accepting beta tester sign-ups, if anyone missed the call. See a hundred or so of you next week, and fingers crossed you like what you see!

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.

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. ♥

Cultist Simulator

TLDR: it bork, we soz

As you may have seen, AK revamped the entire Cultist Simulator code base (to make it more stable, and to prep for BOOK OF HOURS), nearly had a nervous breakdown because coding is not what he likes best, released what we professionals call a ‘buggy AF’ update in March, and has since pushed a patch a week to put the fires out. [Now I’m doing a patch a week. In the first two weeks I pushed a patch a day. – AK] All while also developing a second game on top and agonising which doublet to wear in Witcher 3.

His latest update was Tuesday: read for experimental multi-select and snippet-saving! He’s now working on improvements to the new card placement system, which has a few weirdnesses and bugs, and is by far the most annoying thing still going wrong in the live game. We’ll update ASAP when that’s ready to go out.

Maybe we should implement a ‘Chaos’ slider that places cards ANYWHERE THE GAME GODDAMN WANTS

BOOK OF HOURS

TLDR: prototype in May!

To be totally honest – we usually pride ourselves on being good at production and hitting deadlines – our plans went rather sideways on this one. We’ve had some problems as a studio over the last few years, and dealing with them meant AK almost burned out, couldn’t work as usual, and I had to come up with projects I could do primarily on my own in lieu of making our lovely library game about peace, melancholy and satisfaction on the top of a rock in pseudo-Wales. But we really are still making this game (!) and by the end of May we expect to hit prototype, showcasing the central game loop. Huzzah!

We’ll be inviting a small number of people to test the game then, so make sure you’re signed up to the mailing list if you’d like to see an early first pass of the game.

In the meantime, have a look at what we’ve been up to! Starting with UI, which we’re trying to base as much on Cultist Sim as possible but updated with hard-won experience and, frankly, a leather grimoire-y vibe. Here’s what we’re working with so far in your main Librarian window:

Familiar but different, right? But unlike Cultist’s approach – where the UI is the same whether you’re taking a tincture of opium with the Dream verb or sending a Hint to murder Connie Lee – BOOK OF HOURS needs a bunch of complementary but different UI for different moments in the game. Cultist’s square verb tiles, for example, will be replaced in favour of real-world interactable locations like desks, gardens and ovens. Clicking on these open different recipe windows where your items and intangibles can be used, and where you can (possibly? probably?) store items. So you’ll click on your librarian’s desk to open the ‘Library Desk’ window, for example, and it’ll reflect that it’s a different interactive point in the game with slightly different UI. Here’s what we’re trying right now:

You might remember that BOOK OF HOURS is a melancholy, lonely game about managing a crumbling antique library of esoteric books and we want it to feel like a hygge, isolated escape from the world, where you can curl up with your cat and some marginalia while the rain gently patters the lead-glass of your study window. One of the best ways to evince a feeling like this is to occasionally – OCCASIONALLY – have someone visit you to pierce that loneliness, and make you feel it all the more when they depart. Sometimes they’ll be friendly. Sometimes they might not. And those pesky Suppression Bureau agents have frankly nothing better to do, and like the way you make tea. So we need a basic UI dedicated to talking to these visitors, every now and then.

Overall, we’re working on the assumption that the zoomed-out view of BOOK OF HOURS will look something like the below. NOT the art, which is a super super early mock-up I made in 2019, but a pulled-back simulator view of the whole of Hush House that lets you see an overview of everything going on in your game, and a vaguely mechanically appropriate UI, essentially giving you a quickbar for commonly-used cards and access to a much larger menu of items, skills, attributes, etc. You’ll be able to zoom in to see detail and do small, specific tasks like personally ordering your books on your bookshelf. (Please note, if AK sees anyone ordering their books by colour he is likely to cry EHEU and delete all the code).

To make the prototype look even slightly like the final game, I’ve been mocking up some very basic assets to indicate relative sizes so we can answer questions like how high the ceilings shoul dbe, how many books you can put in a bookshelf, and whether we want a cosy librarian’s nook or an intimidating Smaug’s lair of occult grimoires. This is all TBD, and the art style will almost certainly change. But for now pls enjoy tiny Fuchsia’s head on a 1930s outfit inspired by President Zelensky’s war-jumper. Because why not.

I’m very keen on being able to customise characters, and have plans – but AK is sensibly undecided on this for now and gets the final say. MORE ON THIS LATER WHEN WE KNOW OURSELVES.

Secret Historian Boxes

TLDR: monthly release of limited edition box, £100 + shipping, coming in May

Speaking of letters… I’m back on my boxy bullshit!  I’m releasing 25 special, limited edition library-focused boxes each month from May to August to mark That Damned Library Game’s prototype, sold via our Etsy shop. You might have seen this photo from our last newsletter:

This is the prototype for May’s box, from the desk of the librarian of the Grove of Green Immortals, the mountain-monastery of renegade Taoists specialising in horticulture and medicine, in Moth and Heart lore, under the hand of the Applebright. We’re working with a totally brilliant artisan who’s hand-carving each box, which will then contain something like the following:

There are inks in which histories are written, and inks which protect against untruth. There are inks which can only be read by night, and inks binding the author to the one whose name is written. And then there are inks of which the Hours take note – and inks that are forbidden. So every box will contain a highly restricted sample of six: uzult, porphyrine, nillycant, perinculate, marakat and the Orpiment Exultant (mixed by the fair hand of your resident apothecary, me).  [As WFCAT aficionados will know, one of these things is not like the others. – AK] They’ll look a bit like the Cultist Simulator launch present I made AK, which lots of people kindly asked if they could buy but I can’t make it work as a product:

Each box will also contain a unique collection of visitors, calling cards from notable guardians of the library, a library membership card, genuine 1900s-1930s sealing wax and ephemera and a couple of letters, among other things. Each box has a particular affiliation with a guest, who’ll appear in every copy of that box. In the Grove’s case, it’s Zulfiya the Barber. You might be able to guess the two of the three other libraries from their main guest, perhaps…?

And some of these guardians you’ve heard of. Any idea who these cards are from? (In reality, each of these will be gold-foiled – so imagine them being shiny and impressive.)

We’ll announce each box at the end of the month when it goes on sale on Etsy, along with a design update on BOOK OF HOURS from AK.

I can already hear some of you thinking: twenty-five? Only twenty-five boxes? These people are MORONS they will CLEARLY SELL OUT IMMEDIATELY! And you’re sort of not wrong. AK and I are a two-person team doing almost everything ourselves, and I nearly lost my marbles assembling, packing and sending 500 Lady Afterwards boxes earlier this year. So I’m trying to balance making fun, unique real-life items you can’t get anywhere else (like these Secret Historian boxes) with not going totally batshit managing a production line I can’t sustain. 25 boxes a month won’t make me want to throw myself into the Thames. This is good.

Against that, I do appreciate our volume limitations make it annoying for someone who logs in five minutes later than planned and finds all the boxes they’d been excited to buy have been bought. So if that’s you, fear not. Once we’ve released all four limited edition Secret Historian boxes – which we’ll advertise ahead of time, so you know exactly when they’re coming – we’ll then sell an unlimited Hush House edition, sold in batches so I don’t go nuts. This’ll make sure everyone who wants a box gets one.

Anyway, back to the fun stuff. Here’s the first batch of letters I received from our printer this morning:

You’ve seen these letters before, though not with their nice updated designs. But there’s one that’s totally new… What do you lore-hounds make of this?

Read-friendly text version here.

The Lady Afterwards

TLDR: boxed edition for sale from 31st May

As I mention above, I took on too much assembling and shipping 500 Lady Afterwards boxes on my own. But lots of people still want one, I’m delighted to say. How to square this circle? BY MAKING YER MUM DO IT FOR YOU! (But, paying her a decent wage to do so, so she can buy tulip bulbs and wine, her two major expenses.)

So we’re releasing another 1,000 Lady Afterwards: Boxed Edition boxes for sale on Tuesday 31st May 2022 on our Etsy shop. Like we did with the original runs of the Tarot of the Hours, we’ll release these boxes in tranches of 50-100 so my mother doesn’t totally lose the plot. This means if you go to our shop and don’t see any boxes available, don’t worry! We’ll restock every week – if you miss out one time, there’ll be another batch of boxes available very soon. Hopefully this’ll allow our teeny studio to provide boxes for everyone who wants one, without us having to stop doing all the other work we’re doing on actual games and becoming a physical-first TRPG store. Woot.

The Locksmith’s Dream

TLDR: prices + dedicated website coming soon

This post has gotten waaaay too long, so I’ll just say that there’ll be a separate website coming soon, with photos of all the different rooms, more info on what goes on during a weekend event, and allowing ticket purchases. We’ll announce ticket prices next week, most probably – keep an eye out! They’re pricey, because you’re buying a luxury weekend holiday in the Secret Histories, with posh nosh and Bureau agents and everything. And with everything we’re planning for Treowen they’re worth every English penny…

We have a new BOOK OF HOURS roadmap available here where you can see the outlines of next year. I’ll add more detail as we get further along with BoH and our other projects (The Locksmith’s Dream, Lucid Tarot, The Lady Afterwards second run, Sex, Lies and Video Games, etc). But it should be an interesting year.

Speaking of BOOK OF HOURS, AK and I are committed to making the game as mod-friendly as we can, as we’ve loved seeing how modding has blossomed on Cultist Simulator. So we’ve published a new page on getting started with modding, here.

AK’s new game design book – The Snare of the Tree – finally went live in paperback form on our Etsy shop, along with a Kennedy Combo bundle inclduing Snare and Against Worldbuilding, saving you some shiny spintriae. The shop is still open for business, but will close for Christmas at noon on Monday 20th December. Get yer cursed gifts sooner than later!

Cultist is currently on sale in GOG’s Winter Sale, we make slow but steady progress with the pre-order Lady Afterwards boxes, and if you missed it we published a postmortem on TLA here. Lots more coming in the new year – look after yourselves and be merry and loved for now.

Project synopsis

We started The Lady Afterwards in March 2021 when we had a surprise gap in Weather Factory’s production schedule. AK burned out and needed an indefinite time off work to recuperate. When you’re a two-person dev team and the ill person is the only one who can code, that’s a problem. So I needed to think of something commercially viable and interesting I could do as a solo developer over the uncertain time period AK might be off sick.

This seemed a good time to try making a Cultist Simulator tabletop RPG which we’d been talking about – mostly as a joke – for years. We decided to ship two versions: a premium physical boxed edition, and a more mass-market digital-only edition.

The project had four key aims:

1. 1. 1. Provide Weather Factory with a marketing beat in an otherwise quiet year
      2. See if we could attract new fans from the TRPG community (particularly Call of Cthulhu and D&D)
      3. Test new physical merchandise
      4. Test high-cost merchandise. Was it out of our customers’ means? Could we make something actually worth a high price point?

The Lady Afterwards launched as a limited physical edition (£150) on 21st October, and as an unlimited digital release (£30) on 18th November. Aims 1, 3 and 4 have all been successes, and we’ll know how Aim 2 went in six months when we can realistically evaluate sales across physical and digital storefronts.

What went well

1. The physical edition couldn’t have sold out faster.

There were only 100 boxes for The Lady Afterwards physical edition. We sold them in sixty seconds with no press and no advertising. I had advertising planned – announcements to 23k-ish social followers and an email to a 20k mailing list, for example – but I never ended up sending those out, because suddenly all my carefully-planned calls to action didn’t mean anything. “Hey thanks for being on the mailing list / following us on [ social media channel ], here’s a thing you can’t have!”

We didn’t expect to sell out so quickly, but we had considered the possibility of selling out at some point. So we had 500 not-yet-made pre-order boxes ready to sell through SendOwl, a direct-sale platform, on this website. We pushed this live ASAP on launch night with a hand-wavey estimate that we’d probably ship in about three months but it wasn’t a promise. We sold out of all of those in 72 hours.

We regularly get emails from people asking if there are any more physical boxes available, and when the box will go on sale again. There’s clearly appetite for the physical Lady Afterwards box. It’s made a nice contribution to the Weather Factory coffers already, and we plan to release another 1,000 physical boxes for sale next year. 👌

2. We tried loads of new things, so we learned a lot.

Neither of us had ever made a physical commercial game before, though AK has a long history of releasing video games and I’ve run a successful merchandise shop since 2018. We’d never made a commercial TRPG before, though I played a bunch of Call of Cthulhu at university and AK has been writing and running TRPGs since he was eight. We’d also never converted one of our IPs (in this case, Cultist Simulator) into another medium (TRPGs), I’d never worked with PDFs properly, designed and printed books of the complexity of The Game Runner’s Guide, and we think we’re the first game studio to sell a digital TRPG through Steam (grossing £10k in three weeks, so far). Now we’ve done all this, we have experience, we have suppliers and process, and we’ll do it better next time.

The project also changed our company strategy. We weren’t sure if anyone would buy a physical box of stuff we made for £150 + shipping. That’s more than ten times the cost of Cultist Simulator. But so many people clamouring for a box meant we really were producing something prestigious, unique and attractive enough to merit the cost. This has changed our expectations of ourselves as a studio, will make us more accurate with price points and sales projections, and means we’re highly likely to offer similarly boutique products in future. We have several new plans in motion that have only happened because we experimented with The Lady Afterwards.

3. We produced a project we’re proud of. 

The box looks beautiful, the game is 80 pages of well-researched 1920s Egyptian occultism, and the rules feel loyal to Cultist Simulator while respecting their new medium as a tabletop RPG. Designers and artists are always hypercritical of their work – you see all the flaws and the ‘could have beens’ – but even I thought it looked great when I saw the components together, tied with various ribbons, placed in various velvet bags and nestled into black shredded packing paper in its custom eco-box. I don’t think there’s anything else like this out there. The Lady Afterwards was inspired by the Horror on the Orient Express deluxe box set, but that’s no longer available (or costs £750) and is geared towards hardcore CoC players, not the more generalist audience we focus on. I’m proud to call The Lady Afterwards a Weather Factory product.

The digital version – after a few post-launch tweaks in response to feedback! – is equally unusual. Graphic design isn’t usually a key part of TRPGs (with a few notable exceptions, such as Swedish ‘doom metal’ eye-candy MÖRK BORG), but it matters to me. Subtle feminist touches that don’t alienate audiences but update old assumptions aren’t that common, either. And I did a lot of research into Alexandria at the time – from the British occupation to it-girls’ cheetahs and the history of gaslight on the continent. Most people who play The Lady Afterwards probably won’t care that much, but I do! And it all contributes to a coherent, believable setting unlike any other TRPG I’ve played. 

4. We made it really quickly.

Here’s a mock-up of the The Lady Afterwards from 2nd April 2021, next to a photo of the final thing on 21st October 2021.

The whole project took just over six months with one main dev and assistance from one other, neither working full-time on the game. There are 49 separate components that go into hand-packing a Lady Afterwards box, using 11 different suppliers. 44 of those components required individual designing. Two of those 44 were fully-fledged TRPG scenarios and rulebooks, totaling 80 pages of original design, writing and research. This is just the physical edition: the digital edition required other things, like turning print-first designs into editable PDFs and editing files to make them manageable and disseminable for online-only players.

Six months from conception to launch means we spent about £30k in total on it. This kept our costs low and limited disruption to Weather Factory’s other projects. We like doing projects quickly and efficiently: the quicker you work, the lower your costs, the less pressure on launch to turn a profit. There’s also less pressure on you as a developer to pick something ‘safe’ that’s been done successfully before, meaning you’re more free to try new, creative things.

5. We’ve added to our back catalogue without burdening our main dev.

We now have two high-value additions to the Weather Factory back catalogue which don’t rely on AK. I can manage the creation, shipping and customer support. He’s free for tech support on Cultist Simulator, and oh, to develop that whole new game we’re working on. 

It also boosts our commercial long-term viability. Cultist Simulator did well for us, but every year it’s an older product and there are newer, shinier games cooing seductively beside us. Steam sales are the most obvious and effective way to keep cashflow coming in year on year, but this increasingly reduces the money you make on each copy sold. Being able to inject a new, higher-price offering into the mix is really valuable. We did this before by bundling Cultist and all its DLC into an Anthology Edition, and our new Tabletop Bundle does this again with The Lady Afterwards. This should keep money coming in over time, while we work on other games!

What didn’t go well

1. We limited how much money we could make.

Selling out rapidly was great, but it strongly implies we could have sold many more Lady Afterwards boxes than we did. We had limitations because we’re a two-person team and have finite storage space, but if we’d expected to sell a greater number of boxes at launch we could have brought on extra help or hired extra space. We simply didn’t have the data or the confidence to make more realistic projections, meaning we significantly underestimated demand. This probably cost us some tens of thousands of pounds in potential revenue.

If we’d been overconfident with our sales estimates, of course – bearing in mind this is a physical product which needs stock ordering prior to release, and significant cash upfront – we could have ended up with tens of thousands of pounds of stuff that nobody wanted to buy. But we should expect to sell more high-value physical items in future, and be more bullish with our sales estimates next time. 

2. Production took a back seat.

There was a lot wrong with The Lady Afterwards‘ production, for two main reasons:

• The producer was also the main developer of the game. I was both in the business and on the business. But you can never be in and on the business at the same time: they’re fundamentally conflicting perspectives. It meant production took a back seat to creative development, and there wasn’t a neutral outside observer checking reality against estimates. I’m fortunate the project was successful, and that it was designed as a small project for one dev to complete on her own. Things could have gone a lot worse – I could have burned through £30k of Weather Factory’s money with limited return, for instance – if I’d been unlucky.

• I didn’t properly spec out the project. Because The Lady Afterwards wasn’t a project! It was a side-project, like the Lucid Tarot! Except that wasn’t true. Whether it had ever truly been a side-project or not, it certainly turned into a major project, and I didn’t acknowledge that. We’d started in such odd circumstances – when AK was too ill to work, indefinitely – that I didn’t consider it a serious Weather Factory project like Cultist Simulator or BOOK OF HOURS. I thought of it as time-filler with a nice commercial return while he recovered. This was a huge mistake, as it meant I did almost none of the usual budgeting, planning or sense-checking we’d normally do on a ‘proper’ project.

Exacerbating these mistakes was the fact that I’d never developed a TRPG before, and other than writing Cultist Simulator‘s romance victories, I’d never written a game before. I vastly underestimated the amount of work it’d be to research, design and write, as well as the amount of work I’d need AK to do. He was originally supposed just to be an occasional independent advisor, but that’s not what happened. The more I dug into TRPG design, the clearer my own limitations became. I was faced with the choice between with lower quality systems and design versus asking a sick, stressed AK for more of his time, undermining the whole point of the project in the first place.

We ended up somewhere in the middle. I was still the main developer but AK jumped in to design specific parts of the game like the re-roll system and to write chunks of lore for some Cultist Simulator characters. There was quite a lot of tension between us as a result. AK kept having surprise work to do, and I kept feeling like he inexplicably resented this lovely game I was working on. Normally we work excellently together, as we’ve worked closely together since 2015. But we were set up wonkily from the start, and it’s hard to right a ship in motion. This is part of the nature of creative work: when there’s something wrong with it, it often spills over into real life. I think the solution is to do production upfront and properly so you’re not fighting your own project from the start.

3. We launched the same thing twice.

The Lady Afterwards was always designed as two distinct parts: the limited physical box, and the more affordable digital-only version. I’d originally planned to launch both at the same time as part of Steam’s Digital Tabletop Fest in October 2021. Digital tabletop fans convert particularly well for card-game-y Cultist Simulator, and we usually get at least a smidge of featuring during relevant Steam sales. AK sensibly talked me out of this, to limit variables and lower stress. I acquiesced, and our sanity benefitted, but we missed capitalising on a sudden influx of high-converting traffic. We had nearly 61,000 page visits over that five day Steam sale – wouldn’t it have been nice to get even a percentage of those 61,000 digital tabletop fans to buy The Lady Afterwards: Digital Edition?!

Everyone hates launches, as a rule. Every developer knows about post-launch blues, the strange emptiness that follows even the most successful release. And I’d been focused on this project as a developer and as a marketer for half a year. So when we launched The Lady Afterwards boxed edition in October 2021, it was a fantastic relief to have it finished and done with. But it wasn’t! Not really! I had to start beating the same drum almost immediately for the second launch of the same product, which was kind of exactly the same but less prestigious, and that felt weird and boring and draining. I’m not sure what the alternative would have been, other than launching both versions at the same time. If we release anything like this again, with a physical and a digital component, I’m forewarned.

4. Focusing so much on physical meant digital suffered.

The key selling point of The Lady Afterwards was the glamorous limited edition box. The digital edition was secondary: something to give the project more reach, to ensure everyone who wanted to join in could without a prohibitive price-point, and to make the project more scalable. (One of the big things I’ve learned selling physical merchandise is anything you have to send through the post doesn’t scale – it gets harder and harder to manage the larger your business grows. Digital is wonderfully easy to distribute, appearing instantly to the customer and without the messy interim of packaging and shipping. Digital scales brilliantly.)

But we’re game devs, so we know digital. We don’t know physical that well, so The Lady Afterwards was first and foremost a physical project. That meant that every part of it was designed with the physical box in mind, and later retro-fitted to suit the digital-only release. Sometimes that mattered very little: the game’s Spotify playlist of 1920s mood-music is exactly the same whether you bought the physical box or the digital edition. But sometimes that mattered a lot. The original print version of The Game Runner’s Guide is 50 colour A4 pages of text and images at 300dpi wrapped up in a PDF. That’s 364MB for one gigantic, unsearchable word document, which went down about as well as you’d expect when we included it in the initial digital edition. A few iterations later and I’m glad to say the Guide’s searchable online and less than a third of the size, but it wasn’t at launch. Equally, our eight different character sheets – lovingly designed like real-life 1920s British army forms – had similar size issues (one combined 28MB 300dpi PDF) and no editable text-boxes. We fixed this shortly after launch in response to feedback, but it again marred the original release of the digital edition.

5. Digital TRPGs are… their own special world.

To put it bluntly, I don’t know how anyone makes money making digital TRPGs if they don’t already have an audience. As well as selling through our own site and our Etsy shop, we launched The Lady Afterwards on two TRPG-specific storefronts: DriveThruRPG and the Open Gaming Store. We’re selling in line with my sales estimates on the TRPG-specific platforms, but digital TRPG sales seem more similar to book publishing than video games. If we’d released The Lady Afterwards only as a digital TRPG on only digital TRPG stores, the project would be a failure. Here’s why.

DriveThruRPG is the biggest, most successful digital TRPG shop out there. They operate a tiered badge system for increasingly successful products, ranging from Copper to Adamantine. They’re not super open about the number of sales needed for each tier, but here’s what I found out with a little research. My experience on DriveThruRPG corroborates this so far!

• • • Copper: needs 51 units sold (14% of all DriveThruRPG games sell this much)
    • Silver: 101 (15%)
    • Electrum: 251 (7%)
    • Gold: 501 (4%)
    • Platinum: 1,001 (1%)
    • Mithril: 2,501 (0.3%)
    • Adamantine: 5,001 (0.1%)

To put these numbers into perspective, we’ve sold an average of 250 copies of Cultist Simulator a day over the last year. Take that number with a pinch of salt because of the feast and famine effect of periodic major sales, but we’re still talking about a divisive three-year-old indie game, not Stardew Valley. Video game numbers eat digital TRPG numbers for breakfast.

DriveThruRPG also operate a 65% royalty rate for non-exclusive games, meaning if I sell The Lady Afterwards anywhere else, they take 35% of my money on every sale I make on their shop. If I promise only to sell through them, this royalty shifts slightly up to 70%, like Steam. But many devs already think Steam doesn’t do enough to justify their blanket 30% cut, and I can tell you as someone who’s sold on both platforms that I see more value added by Steam than I do DriveThruRPG.

This isn’t me hating on DriveThruRPG: other digital TRPG stores have similar terms, and they’re able to set self-preferential rules because they were smart enough to build the go-to digital TRPG storefront. But the combination of low sales figures – even for the most successful products – and a hefty platform cut means the money you make selling digital TRPGs is low. It’s bloody low. It encourages people not to spend lots of money making an original digital TRPG, but to do something quick and low-cost, probably using an existing ruleset that players already know. I’m also strongly disincentivised to spend any money marketing The Lady Afterwards on digital TRPG sites, as I make much better profit margins through SendOwl and Etsy. This explains why there are so many non-professional $0-10 digital TRPGs in digital TRPG shops: it must be extremely difficult to make decent money as a full-time digital TRPG developer.

Conclusion

Am I happy with how The Lady Afterwards went overall? Absolutely. The physical edition was a huge success, beyond my wildest dreams, and the digital version is a modest success which a bit of tenacity and cunning marketing will likely turn into a solid success over time. I learned more on this project than any other project of my career, and saw through the looking glass what it’s like to run a creative project. That’s a wonderful, empathy-inducing experience for a dev like myself, as I’m more usually on the production or art side of things.

The outcome of the project is that Weather Factory will consider special, limited, high-value physical components seriously in future, including them more frequently in our offerings alongside our video games. It’s already influenced some key factors for The Locksmith’s Dream, another off-beat non-game project we’re spinning up next year, and we’ll know whether it’s worth producing more non-game digital items once we have some long-term sales figures for the digital edition of the game. But I levelled up during these six months, we added another flawed indie gem to our collection, and I bloody loved working on it. More like this, please.

Our clearest update is the new Weather Factory website being finally live. We’ve a new freebies page, better navigation through our blogs and a wildcard SHUFFLE option which’ll pick any blog post or page from the site – including, potentially, one of the fabled WFCAT pages (‘Weather Factory catalogue’, if you’re not following AK on Twitter). There’s some hinkiness – it looks less good on some resolutions than others, for example – but please let us know if you discover anything technically borked. There’s a lot of weird formatting going on in blog posts, so don’t worry too much if you click SHUFFLE and are taken to a page with a massive grey box as a header and seemingly random blank spaces where images once were. It’ll take me some time to work my way through it, but I’m on it.

The Lady Afterwards is this sprint’s big news. The original 100 boxes sold out in 60s, and the 500 pre-orders we put up on the site sold out in 72hrs. This is not only hugely encouraging – thank you so much to everyone who joined in, either buying a box or joining the AMA or just being part of the community – but gives AK and I much food for thought when it comes to the future of Weather Factory. We’ll always be video-game-first, but seeing The Lady Afterwards‘ launch makes us seriously consider more TRPGs, more complex boxed items, and more ambitious physical offerings in future. Though I need to finish The Lucid Tarot before I start anything new…

But the lady’s not done yet! I’m mid-pre-order prepping (it’s looking like February 2022 for shipping at this stage, for anyone who’s pre-ordered a box), and we’re launching the digital edition of The Lady Afterwards – the £30 unlimited version – next sprint, on Thursday 18th November. This’ll go live at 6PM GMT / 10AM PST across our merch shop, digital TRPG sites like DriveThruRPG and OpenGamingStore, and even as a new ‘Complete the Set’ bundle on Steam – which we don’t think any indie has ever done before!

The digital edition contains everything you need to play The Lady Afterwards, just none of the physical components. So each edition includes:

• The Secret Histories Rule Book
• The Lady Afterwards Game Runner’s Guide
• 18 artefacts
• 8 character sheets
• Map of Alexandria
• Spotify playlist

Can’t wait to see that out in the field, and hear what you think of it. So far we’ve only discovered one typo and some bad Latin, which is pretty good for a launch!

AK’s putting up a new build of Cultist to the Steam and GOG beta branches shortly, and we can finally get back to all you patient players who’ve sent in bug reports we haven’t been able to resolve for a while. Thank you for giving us time on that! Next sprint we’ll have some BOOK OF HOURS updates to share, along with photos of our new IRL office which is covered in ivy and overlooks a sort of posh caterpillar full of street food. A snapshot of Weather Factory’s new digs coming soon…

Happy secret library sprint! Anyone notice anything different about the website? Ha ha me neither because staging site issues mean our designers haven’t been able to push it live this week after all. Which is a bummer, but not enough of a bummer that we’re going to push a new site live on a Friday and spend all weekend going OH GOD and HOW DID SOMEONE DO THAT and THE SITE IS SENDING EVERYONE TO A PHISHING WEBSITE IN NEVADA

(True fact: The Lady Afterwards was briefly purchaseable on this site, and someone found the link and nearly bought it before sensibly asking us if it was legit and us nuking the page into the sun. TLDR: websites are tricky and you should never give them an inch.)

Speaking of The Lady Afterwards, it’s now 🎉PRINT READY🎉! We’ve had most of the boxed edition items for a while, but the final versions of the 27-page Game Runner’s Guide and 15-page Secret Histories Rulebook will arrive on Wednesday next week, to shrieks of delight and/or horror when I realise there’s a typo on the cover. (It’s okay, they’re only proofs – I already found two typos on the page where I joke about being mildly dyslexic. 🤦‍♀️)

I can’t share much of the scenario without spoiling it for everyone, but I can gesture to what’s inside by sharing the contents page and the updated A3 map. Ommmmm nom nom nom.

One of the most significant recent changes was giving all our major NPCs faces, characters and relationship states. It took a long time to find relevant ’20s photos for everyone, but it really adds a new dimension to the game and should make it a lot easier for the Game Runner to get into character. Here’s an early section where we intro the NPC system:

The typo on this page is already KNOWN and NUKED >:(

Separately, we have The Secret Histories Rulebook, where Cultist Simulator is squeezed into a set of TRPG rules like some sort of arcane sausage. Here’re a couple of examples which don’t give too much away: the Chart of Days mechanic, and something AK mentioned a while ago – having to be really clear about things that we’re not normally up-front about.

We received a lot of feedback early on with Cultist Simulator that people wanted either some sort of glossary, library or other form of list in-game to track progress and show them how much was left to discover. There are lots of good reasons to do something like that – I love seeing a progress bar go up, or ‘x/9 collected’ somewhere in my quest inventory – but it would’ve punctured Cultist Simulator like a cat’s claw to a balloon. Cultist‘s whole thing is peeling back layer after layer of lore-snippets and comparative references; if we’d said things like ‘You have read the blue book and there are four more blue books you can find’ or ‘The Mansus is a physical place where magical people live, and there is a river in it full of salmon and grebes’, I don’t think you’d be reading this blog now.

Anyway, we’ve had to solidify things for the Game Runner to be able to do their job, but we hope we’ve managed it without draining the invisible world of too much of its mystery. YOU DECIDE!

One clarification, before we move on: after multiple enquiries, we can confirm that anyone buying the boxed edition of The Lady Afterwards will also automatically get the digital edition, too – in case they want to play with people who aren’t in the same physical place as they are.

Now, what was that video game we’re allegedly developing, but haven’t been sharing much of recently? Ah yes, BOOK OF HOURS. Updates have been slow because AK’s in the final throes of Cultist code rework (also the reason our tech support has been so shoddy recently. Thank you for bearing with us!), so I thought I’d share some of his design as it relates to the game’s soundtrack. This week we received a second round of BOOK OF HOURS music from composers Maribeth Solomon and Brent Barkman. They’re beautiful – a bunch of Cultist homages, a bunch of new tracks, a scary Wolf-Divided song that isn’t so menacing I don’t like listening to it (here’s looking at you, “The Old Must End”).

So let’s do a deep-dive into creative direction for music in a video game. Here’s what AK started with for BoH:

We also needed specifically musical references. When I was helping out with Sunless Skies‘ soundtrack I went into a lot of detail about specific instruments, but AK’s always been a big-picture kind of guy. So he suggested particular composers and big themes (like Sunless Sea was a game of ‘exploration, loneliness and survival’, while Cultist was a game of ‘apocalypse and yearning’).

Now for the game-specific stuff. AK already has a rough idea of BOOK OF HOURS‘ plot, and we know we want the game to follow a much more repeatable, seasonal cycle than Cultist Sim. The Hours are good thematic touchpoints: they each represent different parts of the world, and underpin the whole game – but they’re rarely interactable with, and easy to forget in mechanics. I love the idea of them and their music laying the foundation for the player experience in BoH.

We work with Maribeth and Brent to develop the final soundtrack, and our creative direction moves around and changes over the course of composition. Names and briefs morph as we develop actual, listenable tracks to work with, but here’s an early snapshot AK sent to commission, develop and assemble first passes at the soundtrack.

As Maribeth puts it, “The grid becomes a conversation in words and music… It’s a  conversation I cherish like a hidden story only I can excavate. I usually arrive somewhere else, somewhere unknown, and swim or travel back to new ideas. We fill out the grid together and walk around in a new space together.” See? THE CREATIVE POWER OF ART FTW!

I have dreams of using my otherwise useless knowledge of ’30s jazz for trailers (think “Blue Moon” from Fallout: New Vegas, but like, on a major budget), but I’m sure we’ll use at least one of the final tracks listed here too. Can’t wait to share them with you!

Next week, expect photos of our office – very Chapel Perilous, which is, of course, also our wedding theme – and FINALLY MAYBE THE NEW GODDAMN WEBSITE.

Have a lovely weekend for now! We’re off to play Psychonauts 2. 🧠

The Lady Afterwards release date

You can get your hands on The Lady Afterwards‘ limited edition physical box on Thursday 21st October 2021 and we’re releasing the digital PDF bundle a few weeks later on Thursday 18th November 2021. Here’re the deets:

We have some contingency plans if the boxed edition sells out in five minutes, but I don’t want to count our chickens before they’re hatched. But whatever happens, we gotchu.

This sprint we ran another TLA playthrough with Alexis as Game Runner – he’s alarming good. As a result I’ve made another round of changes – splitting the original booklet up into a Lady Afterwards guide and a Secret Histories rule book, for example, and replacing Mansus candles with a second set of dice to better build the Regard of the Hours. I don’t think we’ve spoken about the Regard of the Hours yet, the dice-rolling mechanic reflecting the Hours’ personal interest in players’ goings on. So here’s how it works:

Wish I could share more mechanics with you, but I can’t without spoilering the plot or revealing too much of the Secret Histories rules! But I think Cultist fans will like it. 🙂

Enigma

Finally – some of the more eagle-eyed in our audience have already noticed this, I believe – Alexis has relaunched the Enigma of Secret Histories project. He says:

Cultist Simulator, like Fallen London before it, had a complexus of Easter eggs and puzzles for highly engaged players to chase down. And just as with Fallen London, this complexus – ‘Enigma’ – got more elaborate and difficult over time, in a sort of arms race between me and the keenest players that left everyone else behind and took up way too much of my time.

So for attempt three, I’ve designed it as a more relaxed, more accessible, and longer beast. A sun-basking serpent, as it were, rather than a hummingbird; or a hedge maze rather than a carnival. I want people to be able to wander into the labyrinth on their own, or in pairs and threes, without needing help from or feeling that they’ve missed out on the fun.

• The initial phases are much less obscure. (They’re still quite obscure.)
• There are many ways through the labyrinth. If you find your way to the top, you can go back and explore the others.
• Right now it’s theoretically possible but, currently, ridiculously unlikely that anyone will be able to solve the whole thing. This’ll change over time as we release more clues. I’ve often seen Enigmatics get obsessive and frustrated. So it’s a long slow engagement, to help everyone stay a little more chill.

There are marks of distinction to be gained from engagement. You may see them on other folks’ avatars or elsewhere. Go here to begin. 🌓

Still here? Let me talk about WFCAT. WFCAT, the Weather Factory Catalogue, is an illustrated accounting of all our works, distantly inspired by the Factory Records catalogue. It’s very much a work in progress, but it already includes prototypes, games, books, occult entities, material entities, artworks, merchandise and miscellanea. When we’ve done, it’ll be something you can browse on the new site – a formal garden to go alongside the hedge maze of Enigma, which will occasionally afford views and clues. We like the idea of putting out an illustrated book, too.

Our new website should go live next week, and we move into some snazzy new offices managed by – I kid you not – something just called ‘The Bureau’. Stay tuned for more BOOK OF HOURS, Lady Afterwards and photos of our cats having their birthday. Happy weekend for now!

A day late ’cause last week was stressful, but HERE’S A NEW UPDATE ON FUN GAMES THINGS ANYWAY

BOOK OF HOURS [ in the voice of AK ]

A long time ago, I decided that everything I ever said about the Secret Histories would be inside quote marks. Or to put it another way, a long time ago I decided that everything I ever said about the Secret Histories would be ‘inside quote marks’. No, put the candlestick down please, I’m getting there.

What I mean is this. ‘There are many Histories’. Everything you read in game text is something that appears to have happened, or something that someone believes. All the books, all the primary sources, are books. There’s no one window into truth. If there is any kind of canonical truth about what is really going on in the Secret Histories, it’s contained in my notes, and I’m afraid that I’ve made arrangements to have my hard drive ritually pulverised and buried with me. In the past I’ve occasionally made clear and specific statements, but I’m just another source. Anything I’ve said ex cathedra you should consider to be a quote from the sermons of Ferezeref the Magpie, of whom you’ll hear more soon. Including that. ‘Including that.’

Except, except that Lottie is writing a sodding TRPG.

We can put a lot of stuff in quotes, and infoboxes, and on texture, but at some point, if you’re trying to GM/GR the game, that just gets precious and frustrating. So here and there she’s nailed me to the page. I’ve had to work through some of the details of what Forge-long and Lantern-long can actually do, at least in this History. Here’s an excerpt.

…can send dreams to trouble an enemy. The better idea the fulgent has of the enemy’s nature and real-world location, the more likely they are to find them. [Each of these is a bonus from Trivial to Major.]

– If the fulgent knows what city the target is in, that’ll help. If they know their address, that’s much better. If the fulgent has visited the address, that’s best.

– If the fulgent knows what the target might dream of – their hopes and fears – that’ll help. If the fulgent knows what the target has been doing recently, who they’ve met or what they’ve eaten, that’s better. If the fulgent has met the target recently, in dreams or in the world, that’s best.

– If the target has fulfilled potential requirements for entering the Mansus – e.g. someone’s been murdered in the room recently, or if they’re a Know – then they’re more vulnerable. If they’re in the Mansus, they’re most vulnerable.

– However, if the target has fulfilled requirements for entering the Wood, they’re safer. These include cutting a lock of hair; wounding the sole of the foot; or sleeping in the presence of as few colours as possible other than white and black (including hair and clothes).

– The more light there is in the place the target sleeps, the more likely the fulgent’s sendings are to find them.

Fulgents can enter a mirror, lens or light-source in the physical world: a process that has been called ‘transinhabitatation‘ by the Church of the Unconquered Sun, ‘alighting‘ by the Tragulari, and ‘scrining‘ by the Obliviates. An inhabited item of this kind, then, is a ‘scrine‘…

THE LADY AFTERWARDS

If your eyes haven’t been burned from their sockets by all that Lantern colour, I’ve been working on three things this sprint: the Game-Runner’s Handbook, the all-important artefact handouts, and actually getting my mitts on physical, IRL versions of everything prior to setting a release date for the game.

I have a release date in mind – I’ll announce it as soon as I’m confident we’ll be able to deliver on time. Watch this space!

It’s difficult to share images of the handbook or the artefacts without giving significant spoilers away. But here’s a look at the general aesthetic of the handbook…

…and here’s some of the physical stuff I can share.

(Please note that the map is a basic print-out for testing purposes – it’ll look much better in the final version!)

The boxed edition will be both limited and pricier than our other merch, but it’s worth reiterating that we’ll absolutely sell more boxed editions if the appetite’s there, and we’ll also be offering a digital-only PDF version for those on tighter budgets. So everyone will get a little slice of the tabletop pie if they like, and none of it will have Glassfinger Toxin in, probably.

A NEW LOOK

Lovely though it is, we’re revamping the Weather Factory website so it looks and works better! You may have noticed some odd numbers and Hush House-style category notes in the ‘Games’ dropdown of the site already – check out Ophir and Procopius if not.

We’ve been talking a lot about the Factory Records catalogue (the cats are definitely each getting their own catalogue number) and the SCP Foundation, which reminds me of the Cultist Simulator wiki if it had gotten drunk and fallen over. So we’re working on a new WF.biz that leads people through a variety of info, lore and strange pages with ‘artist’s impressions’ of centipedes on them, in the hopes it’s a more interesting (and easy!) place to browse with the new design. I expect this live at the end of the month, but we’ll confirm when we know for sure!

Also, this might be relevant:

🌓

BUGS

Finally, I’d like to apologise for anyone who’s been waiting on support help from us for Cultist Simulator. We’ve been behind on the support queue since AK’s been ill, and I, sadly, am as gifted a programmer as a vole from the eighth century. We’ve also been unable to push out smaller JSON-specific changes because all the refactoring work AK’s done to Cultist‘s code base to make BOOK OF HOURS work better has to be finished before we can build new versions. TLDR: we’re sorry, and we should be back on support form in the next few weeks! Thank you very much for bearing with us. <3

Alexis has been on some weird Wes Anderson odyssey with his best friend in Croatia this week, but he kindly found the time to write an update on the work he’s been doing on BOOK OF HOURS before then. Take it away, AK-from-the-past!

Last time, we shared this image. This week, we’re going to talk about it. Some spoilers follow, including a couple of possible ending spoilers, so skip ahead to the cat pic if you’d rather not see ’em.

There are nine Wisdoms in BOOK OF HOURS which a librarian (or any other scholar) can pursue. Each of these is associated with three of the traditional Secret Histories aspects, and nine skills. Some of these skills are more familiar than others; nearly every skill appears in more than one Wisdom line. The unnamed Wisdom of Edge, Lantern and Winter above includes the skills of Ouranoscopy, Snow Stories, Serpents & Venoms and Sacra Limiae. Ouranoscopy and Sacra Limiae are also relevant to the Horomachistry Wisdom, and Serpents & Venoms is also of interest to skolekosophists.

You’ll notice there’s overlap between the interests of scholars and adepts, but they tend to do different kinds of things, in the same way that good scholars of game design are not necessarily (honestly, not often) good game designers, and vice versa. Different things can be true about the same thing you look at in a different way, especially if those truths don’t conflict. We’ll come back to that.

How do you advance a Wisdom? In an earlier design draft, you found Insights for the relevant Wisdom in books, and you plugged those into the Wisdom tree, which in turn spat out related skills. This is roughly the way a lot of skill trees in games worked, but in a game about knowledge, it seemed rather backwards. If you read a book on the history of fifteenth century Armenia, you’d learn more general things about History, but you wouldn’t get a History insight which you could plug into a notional Wisdom tree which would spit out a skill relating to the history of twelfth century France.

So now it works like this. You read a book about Ouranoscopy, and that improves your Ouranoscopy skill, and then you can present your Ouranoscopy skill card to the Wisdom map above, and say, O Map of Wisdom, behold that I know some Ouranoscopy. And lo the Wisdoms will answer, did you want to advance along the Horomachistry line, or were you looking to improve that other Wisdom? And you might answer, that other Wisdom, cos it’s something to do with Edge and Lantern and AK won’t tell me what it is yet but it sounds like a gas.

So why advance a Wisdom? Well, first, bragging rights. Who doesn’t want to be a skolekosophist (except those losers who don’t enjoy picking hungry worms out of their ears)? Second, attribute advances. There are two attributes – elements of the soul, usually – associated with each Wisdom. So fet (the part of you which dreams, the part you wear when you visit the Mansus, which of course as you know manifests just below the skin of your navel) is associated with Nyctodromy and Horomachistry, and you can choose to get an extra Fet card by levelling either of those up.

But third, if you want to reach a victory, you’ll need to get one of those Wisdoms to the outermost ring. Maybe you don’t, maybe you just want to chill in a library and dabble in all the Wisdoms… but there’s a single unique book (in some cases, not exactly a book) that, if you master a Wisdom, you can use to help you reach a fundamental conclusion about the world. We’ve already mentioned two of these books in passing elsewhere. Here’s one:

Those last two options are possible conclusions about what has happened, or what will happen. Of course, just because you draw those conclusions, it doesn’t mean they’ll happen, right? Who changes the world by spending years in a library? ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.’

I (Lottie, again) have been working on the Lucid Tarot and The Lady Afterwards while Alexis has been doing insane things with spreadsheets that would make your brains explode with Fascination. I’ll write about the tarot later, but here are some of the updates for TLA. We mentioned that part of the mechanics – the ‘Regard of the Hours’, specifically – require a tarot deck, so in case anyone doesn’t have one we’re including a mini pocket-deck called the Essential Hours. Here’s a mock-up!

Each deck’s a portable A7 size and includes the 23 Hours we know and, possibly, love, from the Moth to the Mare-in-the-Tree. No minor arcana, no messing about, and the only way you can currently get a God-from-Nowhere on a card. Who wouldn’t want a God-from-Nowhere in their pocket?

I’ve also been working with a new supplier on our character pins and have a test run in the works. They’ve told me we have to change the design slightly to cater to ‘reality’ – pfft – but it should still maintain the 1920s feel. I’ll share pictures of the real things when they arrive!

And the biggest part of my sprint’s been on writing the whole Game Runner’s Guide, which I can’t show you at all yet. So in the meantime, as everyone seemed to enjoy the Dancer’s, have another character questionnaire! This time for the BYT.

I’ll leave you with a new Skeleton Songs episode on D&D and TRPGs’ enduring legacy. Listen on our YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you normally listen to people talking into your ears. I genuinely thought that whole bit where Alexis explains Debbie and Elfstar was him ad-libbing a joke, until I looked it up. 😫

First things first: we’re 33% off in GOG’s Summer Sale, and today is Stop Cyberbullying Day. Cyberbullying is a cause close to our hearts,
having been on the wrong side of it once. We’re keen to encourage a better understanding of how even benign-seeming interactions on the
internet can contribute to people having a really rubbish time. So we’re #stopcyberbullyingday sponsors, and we’re donating 100% of
Cultist‘s revenue today to CyberSmile, the internet charity behind it all. Please buy Cultist and support the cause! Or, y’know, just donate if
you already own a copy. ♥

Now, onto bizniz. BOOK OF HOURS? Remember that? Alexis has been getting into some core design work this sprint, and has produced the single most juicy design doc I’ve ever seen him make. I’ll let him talk it through…

Here’s a very early, long-superseded draft of the skills system in BOOK OF HOURS:

(1) my games generally outgrow early design documents and the early docs get cast off chrysalis-wise, but I’ve learnt that it’s useful to hang on to the discarded husks. The design process is often like roaming a semi-wilderness, and you’ll never have a definite map, just a series of explorer’s diaries. Earlier diary entries may describe places you’d thought were unhelpful, but you later want to return to. Pixar used the phrase ‘exploring the neighbourhood’ to describe this incremental quality.

(2) you’ll notice a mixture of hard numbers, fluffy design notes, and extremely fluffy design notes. This ties into the incremental, exploring-the-neighbourhood, exploring-the-forest aspect of the design.

The arrows tend to go one way, but later steps inform previous steps. I might start with something like this:

but a lot of those numbers are obviously just easy multiples of 5 or 10. Most of the time you may as well stick with the easy multiples, because it makes everything more intuitive and you can tweak elsewhere, but often you’ll want to go back and change it. Or as the lore develops, you’ll think, crikey, Winter stuff should work differently, and you’ll go back into the mechanical design to change it.

Back to the skill design.

(3) Some of those skills are very flavourful, some less so. Nyctodromy is an invented word (thanks Matt for Greek etymology help!) which plugs back into the lore of the game. But ‘Horticulture’ is a more traditional top-down way to try to characterise skills – the kind of thing it’s useful in the real world to decide to read a book about, or score an interview candidate on, but not necessarily the kind of thing you’d use to distinguish one interesting character from another in a game. You get a lot of this sort of thing in skill systems (and I know, cos I’ve written a lot of them and done a lot of this sort of thing). It’s not always what you want. Let me move to a concrete example.

All the green-highlighted items are things that would conceivably fit under ‘Horticulture’. But isn’t this more fun? The system goal is to let people learn the world and define their characters (both as librarian and as library), not for us to assess the character’s career suitability as a guardian.

Of course, there’s a fierce complexity cap here. One of the problems with all my games, from Fallen London onwards, has been what you’d expect from an ADHD designer working in an ADHD framework: everything can connect to everything, and that’s sometimes exciting and sometimes a problem. It don’t fit easy in a spreadsheet and it don’t sit easy in a player’s mental model.

As has now passed into Weather Factory legend, Lottie got talking to a man on a train and the man turned out to be Ian Livingstone and Ian, when he saw the Cultist prototype, advised us to put a map in it to show people where to go and so almost at the last minute, we added the Mansus:

and for Exile, we made sure to add this:

and the equivalent for BOOK OF HOURS started as this:

and now Lottie’s turned it into something more coherent and attractive, though still extremely draft, which is this:

If you spotted any resemblances between that and our BOOK OF HOURS road map, you’re paying attention, award yourself a nine-pointed gold star.

See you next time.

Meanwhile, I’ve been hard at work on The Lady Afterwards, which I was delighted to see get a really positive reception! To answer two common questions I’ve seen floating around:

“Will there be a digital edition, too?“

Yes, we fully intend to release the limited edition boxed version along side a cheaper digital download. We just haven’t confirmed how that will work yet, so don’t want to promise it and then have to renege. You won’t get the full experience (e.g. we can’t send you candles in PDF form), but you’ll be able to play TLA whatever your budget.

“I want a boxed edition! But the 100 boxes of the limited edition will sell out really quickly…“

We hope they do! Based on the response so far, we’ll probably produce more copies after the 100 limited edition boxes are sold. They might look slightly different, but they’ll still have everything you need in ’em – just like our follow-up run of the Tarot of the Hours after their limited edition sold out.

Now, some actual updates on the game.

I’ve been working on the all-important character sheets, trying to create something that feels TRPG-ish, doesn’t require anyone to have any experience in TRPGs in the first place, and feels true to Cultist Sim. The above is the character sheet for the Dancer, for instance: double-sided, with personal details and skills on the front, and character details and notes on the back.

Here’s the questionnaire in more detail, for anyone who’d like to create their Dancer character now.

I’ve also been working on the soundtrack for the game, which will be a QR-code-unlocked Spotify playlist (hence the need to pixellate). I’m a massive early jazz / easy listening fan, so this is my opportunity to get some 20s vibes up in everyone’s grills.

I also finished the map of Alexandria, which players will explore in their efforts to hunt down Audrey Leigh Howard. There’ll be a lot of lore here, but the first thing you’ll probably notice is a tentative search area for the elusive Serapeum…

Finally, for Fascination points, I leave you with this trenchant quote from the back of the box. Make of it what you will.

Oh, and a long-awaited revamp of the merch corner happened this sprint! So I’ve finally managed to get rid of all the cardboard boxes scudding around our eyrie and have everything neatly aligned on copper shelves. This is where all orders come from if you buy anything on the Etsy shop. Hush House vibes, eh?

We’re going on holiday in a week’s time, so there’ll likely be another pause in updates while we’re away. But more on BoH, The Lady Afterwards and the tarot soon. 🕯

Let us never forget that while the Biblioteca Joanina in Portugal is not as jaw-droppingly unique as some of the other libraries we’ve named sprints after, it houses colonies of pipistrelle bats who come out at night, eat all the bugs, and help protect its ancient manuscripts from being destroyed by moths or worms or things with too many legs. All hail Joanina!

Last week was Mental Health Awareness Week, something that Alexis and I care very much about. So we published an article about loving someone with depression, and Cultist‘s currently part of Humble’s Deckbuild & Battle Bundle, where you can (should you choose!) give money to whichever mental health charity you like. If you’re looking for inspo, we’re both big fans of the Samaritans.

It’s our mobile-and-Switch-port publisher Playdigious‘s sixth birthday, too, so you can currently get Cultist Sim on the Switch for HALF THE USUAL PRICE. We had to redo the UI entirely, and it was rather interesting designing a card-game control scheme for Joy Cons, but the end result is pretty swish! I can say that, because Playdigious did almost all of the work.

We recorded a new episode of Skeleton Songs, which is our most salacious yet. The brilliantly-titled ‘THIS EPISODE IS ABOUT SEX’ talks about sex in games, why people are weird about it, why it’s so successful, and then Alexis throws in a bit about eighteenth-century literature to make us seem intellectual again. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, YouTube and all the other places you see here. 😘

Cultist turns three at the end of the month, and EXILE turns one! So expect some fun things coming out then. Here’s a teaser…

I leave you with news that we’re working on a shiny new website, which is weird and unusual in all the right ways. But right now Alexis and I are heading to my family’s house for a big Eurovision weekend because I haven’t seen my parents in a YEAR. Back with some announcements next sprint. ‘Til then!

Yesterday we had our FLATNIVERSARY. Yes, this is a thing I have made up to mark the otherwise featureless passage of time in a pandemic world. We’ve been in our new flat – that Cultist bought us, really – a WHOLE YEAR. Cheers!

Cultist hit a milestone this sprint, too: its mobile anniversary! So we ran a giveaway for free copies of the game, USBs and enamel pins. We now have a date for German and Japanese coming to mobile, too: Tuesday 27th April! TIN HATS ON, PEOPLE.

The update will fix our tragically borked Russian translation, along with other minor technical fixes. And speaking of our tragically borked Russian translation… updating Cultist has been a bit of a bore recently, as Alexis is busy taking a hatchet to the CS codebase to chop it into the facsimile of BOOK OF HOURS, so we can’t just push out quick new builds like we used to. That means it’s taking us longer than usual to get bug fixes into the live game, but we’ll be back to normal soon! We’re fixing ’em behind the scenes, at least.

Meanwhile, an update from Alexis… “What is Numa?”

This is what Numa does:

This is who Numa was:

This is what Numa sounds like:

This is how Numa is used:

and this is when Numa happens:

 

 

“Had Janus a kingdom, it would be that city which is yet unbuilt. Had Janus a child, she would be the secret axis of the earth. Had Janus a season, it would be numa.“

– Isidore of Seville, ‘Etymologiae Inemendatae’

…Hope that’s helpful.

Alexis also published some thoughts from his old column on guns and reality, along with the third and final part of his /kəˈbal/ series, while I have another BOOK OF HOURS library to talk about. The Tomb of Lies is home to the Great Hooded Princes – nobody’s quite sure where it is, but it’s presumed to be somewhere in the subcontinent. It contains knowledge on things enigmatic, on the world before, on the Fifth History, and is under the joint, uneasy guardianship of the Mother of Ants and the Horned Axe.

We only have two more libraries to reveal, one of which has typically Alexian art direction like ‘impossible Escherian labyrinths’ and ‘occasionally hexadecihedral inversions’ so… I’ll get back to you on that one.

Finally, I have embarked on a particularly exciting ✨ New Thing ✨ that I’m not going to tell you about – yet. I mentioned that we have something coming up that’ll please Cultist fans, so… What do you make of this?

That’s all for now! Enjoy your sunny/rainy/pyroclastic weekends [ delete as appropriate ]. ♥

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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