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!

This sprint we only went and launched a gosh darn Switch port. ✨ Cultist Simulator‘s now out on Nintendo Switch, along with all DLC! ✨ The new interface does some of the work for you in terms of card-slot options, so it’s probably a slightly easier experience than the PC – but there’s also a ridiculous bug where the game spawns infinite Subtle Flaws, so I think that evens things out.

In other PSAs, I should mention that PC!CS is on sale in GOG’s Valentine’s sale (an excuse to post underappreciated bums) and Steam’s Lunar New Year sale (an excuse to draw an ox). ENJOY!

Over to Alexis, on his work this sprint!

80% of my time is currently on BOOK OF HOURS code and 20% on creative work. Most of the BoH code I’m writing still lives inside the Cultist framework, which slows me down but is also bloody good disciplne, because –

A historical digression.
I used to run the web dev team for a small price comparison company. They’d only just brought the dev function in house – the site had been built and expanded and rebuilt and re-expanded by an external agency over five years, who’d hired a series of contractors who’d kept adding their own quirks and layers to it. I used to go home and dream about that site. It was a wonderful half-organic artifact like a coral reef or an ancient city’s plumbing system, full of half-finished reworks with optimistic notes along the lines of

//everything here is nonsense, but it’s super temporary, until we’ve finished the refactoring

or

//all the database access will go through here now soon someday eventually

possibly even

//LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR

A year or so into my time there, I went to a local tech meetup. A colleague and I got chatting to a nice gent whose face dropped when he heard our employer’s name. ‘Wait, you guys are from [company}? …I worked for [agency who built the site.] I’m so sorry. I can’t believe you’ve kept it running.’ <– exact words, I swear to God.

Obviously I laughed and clapped him on the shoulder (spilling his coffee in the process, cos I’m an oaf) and told him I could imagine the circumstances, no one is proud of the code they wrote five years ago, all that stuff one says. But I still think about that conversation, and what I’d say to him now is, dude, that experience was one of the most useful ones of my life. Seeing and understanding why choices were made, and seeing when they turned out badly – that’s not an opportunity you get very often. As Bismarck possibly wrote, ‘Any fool can learn from their mistakes; the trick is to learn from someone else’s.’

So getting to go back and pick apart a legacy codebase, written in a tearing hurry by a series of four developers working each one after the other, one of whom (me) hadn’t done any real coding for seven years and was learning Unity as he went – seeing why we made the decisions and mistakes we did, what were useful insights and what didn’t work out – I can highly recommend it. AK of twenty years ago, like a lot of novice programmers, would have thrown away the whole thing and rewritten it from scratch… and made a completely different set of mistakes. As Fred Brooks definitely wrote, ‘The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a “big pile.”‘

Anyway, that’s why any WIP stuff you see in the next few weeks will look like it’s from Cultist Classic. Like this one: 

I’ve been peppering the socials with some of the coolest libraries I know about in the actual world, in honour of BOOK OF HOURS and National Library Lovers’ Month. Have a selection of my favourites so far, and stay tuned for more bibliodreams every day for the rest of February…

Speaking of libraries, I’ve also been working on some concept art for the places you’ll interact with in BOOK OF HOURS that aren’t Hush House. We haven’t entirely decided yet whether you’ll send a librarian out to visit or whether they’ll function more as a quest- and story-generators. But here’s a taste of what we do know.

• The Invisible Serapeum in the region of the Sands has survived the long decline of its parent library under the protection of the Forge of Days. The Forge does not usually favour libraries…
  
  
• The Nameless Library is maintained in a labyrinth-fortress in the lands once ruled by the Shadowless Kings. It specialises in daimonography, and in the First History the greatest strategists and warriors travelled there to study.
  
  
• The Tomb of Lies is the library of the Great Hooded Princes. It contains knowledge on things enigmatic, on the world before, and on the Fifth History. The Princes do not say ‘Knowledge is Power’, but rather, ‘Power is Knowledge.’
  
  
• Crossrow, in a garden city of the far West, is an establishment of uncertain age. It’s a gloriously decaying garden-mansion that specialises in nyctodromy, patronised by Sunset Celia.
  
  
• The Grove of the Green Immortals is a mountain-monastery of renegade Taoists. They specialise in horticulture and medicine, under the hand of the Applebright. It is supposed to be safe.
  
  
• The Haustorium, an enclave beyond the Evening Isles established by an alliance of Catholic friars with Incan magicians. It preserves those things it is thought unwise to preserve, and is in no way safe.

Our third sprint of the year – alphabetically, natch – is the CURIA, the governing body of Hush House. It has seven members, only one of whom we’ve revealed so far. So I wanted to repost Serena Blackwood’s caustic letter to an unfortunate member of the Suppression Bureau, for old time’s sake…

Have a wonderful weekend, Believers! If any of you are celebrating Valentine’s, may the Velvet drop secrets of love upon thy tabletop. For anyone who wishes they were celebrating Valentine’s but aren’t, there’s this great, addictive game where you can forget your broken heart and bring the apocalypse… ♥♥♥

🎉 CULTIST SIMULATOR‘S OUT NOW ON THE NINTENDO SWITCH! 🎉

Cultist Simulator: Initiate Edition bundles the main game with the Dancer, Priest and Ghoul DLCs as standard. It usually costs $19.99 / €19.99 but there’s a 30% launch discount to whet your appetites (and, potentially, sacrificial knives).

It launches alongside the EXILE DLC, which costs $6.99 / €6.99, and is the closest any of us are going to get to international travel right now. SOB.

Tell your friends! Eat your enemies! Call upon the Thunderskin to give us a good launch! The Nintendo Switch is uncharted territory for us, and is apparently quite a difficult platform to do well on. But faint heart never won fair lady! And the Mother-of-Ants promised it’d go well…

Hey everyone! LESS THAN A WEEK TO GO ‘TIL CULTIST IS OUT ON SWITCH. Thumbs at the ready, people!

To wit, you might have seen the amazing Nintendo Switch giveaway organised by porting buds Playdigious. The extremely talented Oskunk has painted a one-of-a-kind Cultist-themed Switch for someone to win. All you gotta do is follow this link and click what takes your fancy. Good luck! I am genuinely grumps that neither Alexis nor myself can have this unique artefact. 😭

Alexis has been doing some vital but unshareable work setting up some of the basic code for BOOK OF HOURS. Loading and saving, for example, really make you think about the underlying structure of a game – what are the main game objects, what states can they be in, what activity loops the player goes through, etc – even though it sounds odd to set up loading and saving for a game that doesn’t yet exist. In his own words…

When you’re working in the spark-stinking undercellars of a codebase, it’s hard to talk about it to a general audience without sounding (a) glibly general or (b) quasi-Enochian. So I guess let’s get quasi-Enochian.

Those Spheres which the Wise name Thresholds, into which Elements may most easily enter and depart through Mortal Action, are most prone to Angelic attention. But any Sphere may possess an angel; Indeed, each Angel hath its Sphere over which it must watch, but one Sphere may have many Angels, which we name then a Flock. The Angel-Consuming and the Angel-Avid are long known, but now we uncover also the Angel-Regulant, the Angel-Habitant, the Angel-Confamiliar, the Angel-Propulsive. Each Element, and indeed Any Thing which may enter a Sphere, hath its Timeshadow, which determineth the Remaining Courses of its Life. But Angels do not dwell within their Spheres, nor may they enter nor leave; so they are not similarly subject to Time, though it maketh certain Demands upon their Services. I’ve also renamed Registry to Watchman and made it more of an actual service locator.

………Alexis is doing fine.

I’ve been focused on UI and concept art for the variety of other libraries in BOOK OF HOURS‘ melancholy world: the thousand shadows in the Tomb of Lies, the chirrup and buzz of the lush gardens around Crossrow, the blasted Haustorium, silent and cold… Expeditions will likely work differently in BOOK OF HOURS than they did in Cultist Simulator, but there’s more to the world than the peaceful stronghold of Hush House.

And, of course, Maribeth our tame Canadian composer continues with the early feels for music. So in the obligatory Hush House rose window update, we’re now roughly…

This sprint we also revived the dusty bones of Skeleton Songs! Season two focuses more on games, with the aim of taking commonly-discussed topics and talking about them in ways you haven’t heard before. We begin with the topic of genre and quickly devolve to D&D, cyberpunk and rotten sheep. Listen on all the usual places: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, YouTube, or all the other ones on this page.

Next month is – I am reliably informed – National Library Lovers’ Month. Yes, that is a thing. So we’re sharing one amazing library each day throughout February to slake all your bibliophilic desires. Woot! How attractive did I make that sound?

Of course, next month is also Cultist‘s debut on the Switch, so we’re releasing a new trailer with a VOICE ACTOR. We’ve never worked with voice actors before! So get ready for the mellifluous tones of the one only known as………………………… SEAN.

Get hype, Believers! And help us spread the word if you can. The Switch is a difficult platform to succeed on – so everything you can do to help us is a goblet of wine before someone who’s been doing dry January. Which, god help me, we have. 😫

Happy 2021, everyone! This year is the Year of the Ox, the Year That COVID Might Go Away, and the second year in a row that we’re likely to have to put off our wedding. BUT LO! It’s also the year we get to properly share ongoing BOOK OF HOURS development with you, so I’m feeling pretty chipper about that.

Welcome to the first sprint of the rest of your life, “APELLICON”. He’s a real boy, and basically what you’d get if you crossed a nerdy bookworm with the EXILE DLC. Apellicon was a rich first-century Greek bibliophile and thief who amassed a wonderful library by a) spending lots of money and b) nicking things. He loved his collection and painstakingly restored his manuscripts – badly. He filled in lacunae with (wrong) guesswork and published the works of people like Aristotle full of errata and stuff he’d just, er, made up. But the rogue really did love books, so we forgive him.

Let us never hate people who try their best, even when they bugger it up. Like the 18th-century Swedish taxidermist who’d never seen a big cat and made the infamous Lion of Gripsholm Castle. Uh o.

Anyway! On to BOOK OF HOURS. We reached an important moment in the life of any game’s development, also known as the First Time You Have A Main Menu Screen. The below is janky and seriously placeholder (we plan to rework a remote, saudade Hush House version later down the line), but it already makes BoH feel more like a real game. Exciting!

As well as the menu, Alexis has been patching Cultist Simulator (updated loc and a few bug fixes) and continuing his refactoring work on the CS codebase. As a team of two – with only one coder – the idea’s to set up BOOK OF HOURS‘s code to run as close to CS as possible, meaning Alexis can switch with minimal effort between the two. This approach does increase the risk of fixing a bug in one game and creating one in the other, but HEY! Self-created tech issues are the spice of life, as Shakespeare said.

This means we can make our first update to the BoH roadmap’s rose window! Dun dun duuuhhhh…

BoH aside, I’ve been focused on the upcoming Cultist Simulator Switch port, coming out in just over TWO WEEKS on Tuesday 2nd Feb. We have a functioning Nintendo eShop store page now (Eeee! Wishlist it now!) and I’ve been co-opting Brian Blessed into our launch preparations. You’ll see what I mean when it’s live.

This being the first sprint of the year, we also reopened the Church o’ Merch and gave it a suitably BoH-y make-over, as well as integrating something the youth call a ‘Facebook shop’. We’ll see how that pans out, and in the meantime I will continue to swear viciously at the new Dadaesque poetry of post-Brexit shipping labels. 💂

Next sprint sees the return of Skeleton Songs, where we’ll be focusing the second season on things more game-adjacent, if not actual games. SO LOOK OUT FOR THEM IN YOUR EARBALLS SOON!