Hi all! This is Hannah, Weather Factory’s resident UI focused Unity developer, here to give you some fresh info on the freshest BOOK OF HOURS tech out of Weather Factory’s R&D department. This post is gonna be about some of the technical “how does this actually work” of our current prototype.

A whole new dimension?!

The more astute of you may have noticed our universe recently turned 3D. Incredible! This is because, to deliver a truly authentic book based experience, we’ve invented a third dimension. You’re all very welcome.

While Cultist Simulator looked kinda 3D, with cards visibly moving higher when you picked them up, the entire game happened on the top of a table. It’s a distinctly flat, two dimensional table; you can move cards up and down, or left and right on it. You can’t move up and down on the table, and the cards are all infinitely thin, and therefore likely to give you papercuts.

BOOK OF HOURS has had a third dimension since square one, but mechanically, you could make the case it’s actually still 2D. Or rather, it’s a bunch of 2D interfaces, scattered around a 3D world.

Not too dissimilar from how some early 3D games such as DOOM didn’t have 3D models for enemies – rather it had a bunch of 2D sprites, scattered around a 3D world. DOOM is still flat pixel art, much like Megaman games, but you’d be hard pressed to describe it as a 2D game.

Consider the occult desk where everything happens in Cultist. In BOOK OF HOURS, we retain the desk, but we add special sideways desks (or “shelves”, as I’m told they’re called). But really, when you break it down, we have a whole load of desks, only some of them have different rules as to how you can stack items on them.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Surface

All these desk variations are internally known as “Surfaces”. A surface is defined as “a thing you can put other things on”, and has some basic behaviour around this, such as detecting where on the Surface the mouse is pointing, or stopping you from placing items off the edge of the Surface. Whenever you’re holding a Book or Card, the game will detect which Surface you’re probably trying to put it on, and will let the Surface decide where upon it your item goes – or if that item is even allowed on.

Tables and Shelves are both special kinds of Surface (and actually, right now the basic unmodified Surface isn’t used anywhere in the game). Tables are Surfaces that snap items to a grid. They let you stack Items on top of any other items already on the Table. When you grab an Item off the Table, the Table will check if that Item is lying under any other Items, and if so, make the upper Item drop down, and the removed Item does a jolly little swish to the side to escape.

Shelves are another variation of Surfaces. They forbid you from placing anything but Books upon them (for now). They tell Books to spin around when on a shelf, so their pages can face the wall. They tell Books to lean on each other, and when placed together they should part the existing books like they were an old powerful man and the other books were a salty body of water.

Choo choo

But again, these two dimensional shelves and tables exist in a three dimensional world. And how do you get from one to another? I quite like the tactile feel of dragging the table around in Cultist Simulator, and I kinda wanted to make it so if you dragged your way off the edge of the Table, you found yourself facing the Shelves, but there’s a slight problem with that.

How do you drag a book to a Shelf, while also dragging your way off the Table? This is a messy question, where the correct answer so far has been “give up and make the camera side scroll instead”. So now you can side scroll off the edge of the table, and in front of a bookshelf. From the shelves, you can side scroll back to your table, over to the otherside, and face a bunch of shelves.

This is a highly technical diagram showing how the camera works. Basically, think of the camera as sitting on a Minecraft minecart. Moving your mouse to the edge of the screen pushes the cart in that direction. At the edge of your table is an upward slope – if you climb it a bit and give up, your camera snaps back to the edge of the table. If you go far enough, you fall back down on the other side, facing the shelves.

Gee Fuchsia! How Come Your Mom Lets You Have Two Bookshelves?

The camera system as it stands actually stems from a visit to a lovely library in Oxford that both myself and Alexis had the absolute pleasure of visiting: the Old Merton. Anyone who’s been seeing the gifs I sporadically post to Twitter may be used to the bookshelf being right in front of the table, with both visible at the same time. But it turns out that’s not how bookshelves tend to coexist with desks. It took a trip to the Merton for me to notice the shelves in my own room were actually not right in front of me. In front of me is where I put my window, in a feeble attempt to get some Vitamin D.

Given what real actual legit libraries do, it seemed only fair to bring that real legitness to BOOK OF HOURS. Alexis and I agreed that “two shelves is better than one”, which in turn spawned the camera system as it stands, which in itself drove me to start thinking of the game as “a bunch of 2D tables in a 3D world”. Which in turn has highlighted that I’ve told you this entire story backwards.

It’s an… uhm… narrative trick thing.
Art. Yeah.

“2D thing in a 3D world” has shown itself to be a repeated theme in all kinds of decisions I’ve had to go through for BOOK OF HOURS. It’s even managed to squeeze its way into discussions around shaders and art direction, but that’s straying into territories I’d rather cover in another post.

So March has been an exciting month which will culminate in London Game Festival kicking off the month of April.

As part of International Women’s Day and supporting women within the games industry, Splash Damage studios hosted an event focusing on career advice and culture in the workplace. Splash Damage are a great UK based studio, who recently announced they’re handling the PC version of Halo: The Master Chief Collection wooo!

The event was organised by Brand Manager Max Downton and Live Ops Manager Cinzia Musio. Then M.C’d by the lovely Senior Narrative Designer, Ayesha Khan. Ayesha was also at GDC, giving a talk entitled “Transitioning into Narrative Design from Other Disciplines“. This is pretty nifty given that our contribution to the event was partly discussing entering the games industry through indirect and unconventional means.

Lottie, as usual, gave a shiny arty gif ridden presentation, discussing her career so far and learnings that have come from the good and the bad times.

Lottie has been a producer on several extremely successful games, such as Sunless Seas, to co-founding Weather Factory (have you folks heard of this company at all?). Her insight was particularly handy for the producers, team leaders and women that keep Splash Damage booming.

Claire, as in me typing these words yet describing myself in the 3rd person like a weirdo, discussed her…my path into the gaming sector. From becoming a ruff ‘n’ tuff builder woman, to falling into marketing and honing those skills to make them applicable and useful to the world of digital interactive entertainment sports.

The final talk came from Shay Thompson, Production Runner at Attention Seekers, who honestly blew us away by free styling her talk with a whole heap of admirable inspiration and charm. We got a hot bite quote from Shay about her thoughts on the event as a whole:

“Too often we speak about wanting to improve the issue of diversity/inclusion within our industry with very little action. The folks at Splash Damage certainly went out of their way to change that. Not only did they provide us with a safe space for women on International Women’s Day but they were warm, inviting and encouraging. There was also prosecco. I hope that more companies take heed and actually listen to us, as opposed to merely paying lip service. Thanks Splash Damage!”

Shay is part of the Level Up Link team, who have an event coming up in April. You can find the details here.

So did we enjoy the Splash Damage Women in Games event? Um that’s a fricking heck yeah. These events don’t just follow a standard “talk, applaud and take a brief few queries from the audience” format. They’re inclusive and offer a space for people with genuine concerns or interest in progression, to feel comfortable to ask and to learn. Also the audience at this particular event offered great points and thoughts to us the speakers, that we took with us.

Events like these serve a great purpose and a Weather Factory Hot Take I think we can all agree on is that they should be a reoccurring element in any industry. Both externally inviting guests in and internal events, inclusive to all in the workplace, so all can feel that their status and opinions are heard. If we want to progress, we need to listen, include and apply.

Thank you again Splash Damage for hosting this and for the million bottles of prosecco. BIG SHOUT OUT TO THE PROSECCO!

The merits of community to the success of any art project – especially in the indie space – are obvious. This post is meant for anyone that would like some general insight into what I believe are the intentions needed when creating a community for your game. I apologise in advance for how many times I say “community”. I’d replace that with “cults” but we don’t want to get on a watch-list…

Communities serve a plethora of purposes (isn’t plethora a great word). They help spread the word and are essential to the long-term evolution of a gaming company. For the purpose of this post, communities will be represented by all these damn cats!

The value of community is traversal and size should never be indicative of future success. I’d advise anyone looking to expand their user base, to take steps that also help improve the industry as a whole. If your peers thrive, you thrive and it’s all one big happy squishy affair. For example Weather Factory offer a mentoring programme to help support up and coming indie game creators and those in need of advice.

One of the recent success stories from this have been Spinnortality, by James Patton

In an ideal world, communities offer feedback, either in respectful formal manners or brutal but fairly critiquing dialogue and devs will be receptive to it. Then the studio decide, what can be implemented for the betterment of the game while acknowledging fan insight that they don’t agree with. Also remember that budgets and time are a constant master. What I’ve noticed so far about the community built around Weather Factory is that they are an ideal example of what you’d hope for.

Engaged thoroughly in the content, supportive to those joining and in need of aid and almost as importantly, the memes relating to Cultist Simulator are so spicy and on point, we have to share them on our social platforms. But not all of them…not all of them. Also the fan artwork is ridiculously good!

That said, I’m going to potentially break a lot of Cultist Simulator hearts with the following game references but please bear with and forgive, thank you. Think of the relationship of a gaming company and its community, like the standard role options in a multiplayer game such as…Overwatch.

The games company is the hulking (yet tender) tank – replace absorbing attacks for creativity, goals of investors and their colleagues- and the community as support, for example, offering much-needed feedback to boost the morale of game creators and helping them spot weaknesses in time. In some cases, like Mercy, they can even completely revive a game.

That reference is over now, you can come back!

So what are the basic tips for a wholesome (I’m going to regret using that word aren’t I) community to thrive?

Interaction and Exposure – The decent kind of both please! These are the two main rudimentary goals when running a community.

Transparency – Be honest from the beginning until the end. If you’ve made a promise and can’t fulfil it be forthright and prove you will replace or strive to make your game the best version it can be. I value transparency in a lot of factors of my life, in terms of working for a company you can’t always have a say in that and their methods may not entirely align with yours but with Weather Factory, I can honestly say that Alexis and Lottie need no schooling in this area.

Lottie needs to be schooled in classics like the Golden Girls though.

Think outside the box – Try to be personable in your communications, take non-offensive risks in community events and game showcasing. Your community will value your need to experiment.

Geo-consideration – Mmmm marketing buzzwords. Reach out to those fans across the globe. If you have a massive budget when it comes to events, try to not stick to just capital cities that are rampant with events as it is and see where your player base are and do something locally. This will mean a lot to your community especially those that don’t live as close to capital cities.

Do not jump the gun. Take time to investigate issues and identify fact from blatant hearsay.

So in short, but not really because I waffled on a bit, your gaming creation will likely be discovered thanks to the power of the internet, but how far it reaches and its ability to retain growth, will be rocketed by your community. The symbiosis between both, handled well, can lead to everyone being happy or at least less grumpy.