There is never any escape from Christmas. So you might as well embrace this year’s edition of the BOOK OF HOURS advent calendar!

What is this so-called advent calendar?

It’s a set of small daily Secret Histories treats, because we love Christmas. You can redeem each item every day either in BOOK OF HOURS or in the real world. The calendar runs from 1st – 25th December.

What’s *in* the advent calendar?

A mix of in-game items and little real-world treats. We’ll announce what’s behind every day’s door at noon on our social channels (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram), and update this post with a megalist of everything released so far.

How do I get it?

Make sure you have the latest version (2024.12.m.3) on Steam and/or GOG. You’ll see Christmas decorations appear throughout Hush House when in-game winter rolls around, and will be able to redeem any in-game gifts from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree next to his Rectory in Brancrug Village.

Please note: you can’t get advent calendar gifts during spring, summer or autumn. You have to wait for in-game winter to appear (or start in winter) to receive any in-game items. When playing at x6 speed, the longest you’ll have to wait is a maximum of ~6 minutes.

What if I miss a day?

Any in-game items will remain available on Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree until midnight on New Year’s Eve. The advent calendar ‘ends’ on Christmas Day, but you have an extra week to collect any missed items after then!

Real-world gifts are either only usable on that day, or will be available in perpetuity. Check the megalist of advent gifts below to see what they are (or were).

What if I *hate* it?

You can turn off any and all seasonal art in the Settings menu. Sob.

The advent calendar megalist

• Sunday 1st — [IN-GAME] Christmas decorations! These appear in several places in Hush House, as well as across Brancrug Village. Also, Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree appears. 🎄
  
  
• Monday 2nd — [IN-GAME] Something smooth as an egg and frosted like a winter window. Collect it from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.
  
  
• Tuesday 3rd — [REAL WORLD] 50% off the Notebook of the Hours, in single and bundle form. For 24hrs only!
  
  
• Wednesday 4th — [IN-GAME] Something fiendishly simple and wretchedly fragile. Collect it from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.
  
  
• Thursday 5th — [REAL WORLD] Announcing a live AMA with Alexis and Lottie on Friday 13th December on the Weather Factory subreddit. Something may arrive.
  
  
• Friday 6th — [IN-GAME] Something hard for mortal men to dig. Collect it from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.
  
  
• Saturday 7th — [REAL WORLD] 50% off The Lady Afterwards, the luxury Cultist Simulator TRPG. For 24hrs only!
  
  
• Sunday 8th — [IN-GAME] Something salty and savoury. Collect it from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.
  
  
• Monday 9th — [REAL WORLD] New Lucid Tarot in the shop! It’s the last batch before Christmas, and ships worldwide.
  
  
• Tuesday 10th — [IN-GAME] Something healthful and slippery. Collect it from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.
  
  
• Wednesday 11th — ???
  
  
• Thursday 12th — ???
  
  
• Friday 13th — ???
  
  
• Saturday 14th — ???
  
  
• Sunday 15th — ???
  
  
• Monday 16th — ???
  
  
• Tuesday 17th — ???
  
  
• Wednesday 18th — ???
  
  
• Thursday 19th — ???
  
  
• Friday 20th — ???
  
  
• Saturday 21st — ???
  
  
• Sunday 22nd — ???
  
  
• Monday 23rd — ???
  
  
• Tuesday 24th — ???
  
  
• Wednesday 25th — ???

You can see the fruits of his labours here:

and you can enjoy them in a passworded branch (perf_alpha) on Steam. I’ll tell you the password in a minute, but I’m making it slightly more obscure  than usual, as a gentle filter, because I’m going on holiday next week and I don’t want to come back to too alarming a support queue!

Chel or I might write up something in the mode of this post or this one, because people are often surprisingly invested in the details, but here’s one representative example of the Knuthian rule that optimisation is rarely about what you expect: one of the problems turned out to be a quirk of some earlier optimisation code. There’s some manual culling code that ensures the game doesn’t render objects that aren’t on screen (we needed to go further than Unity’s built-in culling, for reasons) and this used an additional probably-superfluous RectMask2D component, which was disproportionately hammering perfomance for reasons neither of us particularly understand.

Anyway, none of these problems were at GPU level, which is why fancy graphics cards made no difference: this is all about Unity’s decisions about which rectangles to render, and how, before it passes draw calls up (down? off? out? in?) to the GPU, and we just have an extraordinary number of rectangles in Hush House. But there are things we’ve done about them and those things are done in the ‘perf_alpha’ branch which you can access with the password ‘thedorgeoffays’. It is considerably smoother. Your saves should pass happily between perf_alpha and either the beta or the main branch. Like swans, or the jet setters in that Mad Men episode.

These things may have unexpected consequences in the UI, like sort order being a bit odd, or some things not being clickable that should be, because Chel really had to go into the walls and move some of the wiring: metaphorically speaking you may happen across a lightbulb that only glows when you open the garage door. So please let us know (support@weatherfactory.biz) anything you see, along with a save game so we can easily reproduce it! and I’ll take a look when I’m back from Norway on the 18th. If you’re not reckless enough to try out something with ‘alpha’ in the name, and who can blame you, then you can expect the improvements to arrive on beta before Christmas if you’re lucky.

In the meantime, here is some firmly pre-alpha UI and even more firmly pre-alpha writing from the Game Three prototype which has been occupying my time lately. Dream furiously, people.

We’ve been a bit quiet recently, but we haven’t been idle! Today is a long-awaited LAUNCH DAY, but it’s also a good time to update everyone on what we’ve been up to. First up:

✨ The Lucid Tarot is out now! ✨

The first 500 decks of the Lucid Tarot are now available on the Etsy shop. They’re unique collectors’ decks because they come with a signed certificate of authenticity along with their embroidered velvet tarot bag and quick start guide to reading the cards. If you’d like one, get in quick! We expect them to go pretty fast.

To remind you, these cards are a reimagining of Secret Histories lore (you’ll see Hours represented in new ways to highlight parts of them we didn’t foreground in the Tarot of the Hours, e.g.) and inspired by the otherworldly beauty of stained-glass windows. The Major Arcana features all Hours from the Moth to the enigmatic twenty-first Hour sometimes called ‘Giribrago’, but with traditional Rider-Waite names (‘The Fool’; ‘The World’) rather than their Secret Histories counterparts.

I’ve also tried to reflect the Rider-Waite symbology more clearly in the Minor Arcana, but with familiar skills and companions from BOOK OF HOURS. You’ll find Arun Peel the Knight of Pentacles, for instance, or Wolf Stories the Seven of Swords. I hope this adds new meaning on top of the gorgeously rich Rider-Waite deck, as well as giving you a good game of Hey, I Recognise That Thing From Somewhere Else! Anyway, I’m very happy where it’s all ended up, especially considering how derpy some of the original drawings are:

Forgive me, Elegiast.

If anyone misses out on a deck, don’t worry. We’ll be relisting another batch of ~400+ tarots this year, as soon as we can facilitate it. Christmas is coming, after all. I just need time to manage the backlog of orders. I don’t think I could ship 1,000 decks without turning into A Poor Lunatic.

Thank you extremely much for being patient with me while this project went on and on and on. If I make another deck for Game Three, maybe I won’t try to engineer an entirely new way to make cards before I can distribute them? Just a thought, Lottie. Just a thought.

A voice from the other side

AK here. It still tickles me how few people realise Weather Factory is literally just two people (plus, ofc, trusted freelancers). I answer support emails every week addressed to ‘Dear Support Team’. We get speculative applications from people who want to intern with us and don’t realise we work out of a flat. Microstudios composed of couples are more common than they used to be, but it’s still mildly unusual. We like it, but it does make it harder to take holidays, and it does mean we don’t hire.

I mentioned recently that we’ve been working on BOOK OF HOURS, on and off, for five years now. Some of that was pre-production, some of that was the HOUSE OF LIGHT expansion, but it’s a long old time. A undergraduate degree and a master’s degree. A newborn infant grown enough to go to school. If you planted an apple pip five years ago, you could be eating its fruit today.

Or to put it another way, I was 47 when we started making BH and I’m 52 now. And it occurred to me that I’ve made about four games over fifteen years, and in another fifteen years I’ll be 67. So Lottie and I had a chat about whether and how we want to spend the next fifteen years doing this – both making games, and making games as a microstudio with just the two of us.

If you like our games, you’ll be glad to hear that the answer is, broadly speaking, yes. Maybe we’ll do more physical goods, maybe I’ll take a couple of years out for that MA I keep threatening, but we like working together and we like the artisanal nature of the whole thing. I don’t actually get up on a Monday and think, yay, support mails, Lottie doesn’t get excited about answering Etsy merch queries, but we do like handling this stuff personally: the people who own the company and make the games are the same people you’re talking to. It also stops us from getting too up ourselves.

We’ve talked about Weather Factory being a bit like a band or an artistic partnership but most days it feels more like a family-run cafe that happens to sell coffee through Steam.

And we like making things for you lot – for our audience, I mean. I said as long ago as Fallen London that there is something to be said for making games that work like reading comprehension tests. It brings in a calmer class of customer.

We’ve got ideas, then, for at least another couple of games before we turn in our Dev Guild hat feathers and go off to roast coffee in the hills. Over to Lottie to talk about the next one.

What now? 

We’re still working on BOOK OF HOURS localisation (in case you missed it, HOUSE OF LIGHT’s now fully playable in Simplified Chinese) and various important but not terribly scintillating tech and bug support issues. But as AK says above, we took some time to take stock of where the studio is and what we want to do next. We’ve decided that, while we might come back to BOOK OF HOURS later, we’ve said what we wanted to say with it through HOUSE OF LIGHT. We’d like to leave it there – for now.

Currently, we’re Fascinated by an idea for Game Three. We’ve spent some of the past couple of months prototyping the underlying tech system and art direction so we can share something that’s reasonably likely to look like the final game. We need to do a bit more work before we can announce, but here are some tidbits we can share:

• • • The game is set in the Secret Histories… but another decade on. The world has changed and keeps on changing.

    • It may appeal to AK’s older audiences – from Fallen London and Sunless Sea – as well as Weather Factory fans.

    • It’s a new genre we haven’t developed before. It’s a natural fit for the kind of stuff we do, though.

    • It’s ambitious. And…

    • …who’s this?

It’s finally here! HOUSE OF LIGHT is now available on Steam and GOG – don’t keep reading this! Go play it! That honey-haunted pumpkin pie ain’t gonna bake itself!

Play on Steam   //   Play on GOG

HOUSE OF LIGHT adds a novel’s worth of content to BOOK OF HOURS. It’s free to anyone with Perpetual Edition and 10% off for everyone in the first week of sale. It’s also purchasable as a new Anthology Edition bundle (including BOOK OF HOURS, HOUSE OF LIGHT and the soundtrack) all with an extra 15% off everything – just like the Anthology Edition of Cultist Simulator. This is the best value and most definitive version of the game you can buy.

Once purchased (or if you’re a PE owner, once you update to the latest version of the game), you should see a new HOUSE OF LIGHT button on the bottom left-hand corner of the main menu screen. Clicking it will open a ‘spoiler-light’ introduction to the new content (and how to get it) in-game, but I’ll reproduce it here to whet your appetite:

FOOD

Combine Ingredients, Sustenance, and Kitchenware items at the three Kitchen workstations to create nearly a hundred new dishes. TIP: The Spice Scales, and the Spices & Savours skill, will substitute for each other.

A WRITING-CASE

Once you’ve received this gift, you can record addresses from the calling-cards left by satisfied visitors; and write to these visitors to invite them back to the House. TIP: Visitors don’t arrive instantly; visitors don’t leave calling cards until you’ve helped them; and some visitors are easier to summon than others.

SALONS

Place food and drink in one of the six Salon rooms, and then use the bell to begin a Salon. Do it right and you’ll be rewarded with sparkling conversation… and Lessons. TIP: Visitors usually prefer food and drink which matches their primary Interest, but some have additional requirements.

MANUSCRIPTS

Use Paper, Ink, and a Skill to write a Manuscript based on that skill. These Manuscripts may be necessary to satisfy thirsts for specific knowledge in FURTHER STORIES. Lessons from Salons will help you improve those Skills and write more useful Manuscripts. TIP: You can’t reliably control what Visitors will discuss – it’s a party, not an interrogation – but they’ll usually provide lessons related to their shared Interests.

FURTHER STORIES

Once you’ve completed an Incident, follow it up in the Tree of Wisdoms. Visitors will need more specific help here – perhaps a book on a specific topic, or a specific book. TIP: An Affair opens to Further Stories once all interested Visitors have had the opportunity to ask you for help with it. Be aware in some Further Stories, it can make a difference who you originally helped. Be careful. This is the one part of the game where choices can sometimes have permanent consequences.

THE INSTITUTE

Look for the lighthouse, out at sea. When your Visitors are ready, use it to establish the true heirs to the Curia of the Isle. TIP: Further Stories outcomes can inspire your Visitors to support the Institute – for their own reasons. Their nature is constant, but some story outcomes can make them decide to emphasise one agenda over another.

Please leave a review if you like it 

Recent events have made us even more aware of the fragility of Steam review scores – and how important they are to our ability to do our jobs. So if you like HOUSE OF LIGHT, please leave it a positive review! People tend not to leave reviews for expansions / DLC, but you might be the thing standing between us and a Dreadful Red rating for this sweet, polished bit of content about hosting friends for tea. So if you can, please give us a nice blue thumbs up! ✨👍✨

Excuse me this expansion appears to be only in English

HOUSE OF LIGHT is currently being translated into Russian and Simplified Chinese, to match the tip-top localisations of the base game. Please be patient with us while our wonderful localisers complete their work. We expect to launch the Simplified Chinese beta next week, though – so it shouldn’t be too long before we have full translations ready to go.

Japanese is coming for the full game and the beta ASAP. More news on that when we have confirmed dates.

We’re still considering translating BOOK OF HOURS into other languages. We’ll let everyone know if we decide to go ahead with any additional localisations, just as soon as they’re confirmed in studio.

Anything else?

Everyone’s favourite Canadian (OK, after Benton Fraser from Due South), Systemchalk, is livestreaming BOOK OF HOURS on the Steam page right now. If you’d like to experience the sensation of pouring warm maple syrup into your ear while you drowse by a library fireplace, tune in.

Also, all our merch is currently 25% off in the shop to celebrate HOUSE OF LIGHT’s launch, so go nuts with all the things you’ve had your eye on but were cannily waiting for a good deal (here’s looking at you, Lady Afterwards).

Fingers crossed you enjoy all the love we put into HOUSE OF LIGHT. Thanks so much for playing, and happy hosting in Hush House!

HOUSE OF LIGHT is done*, and anyone who’s ever worked on anything creative will instinctively know what that asterisk means. Done* means I have a task list of about sixty items from my own testing and that of our invaluable beta testers, some of them as trivial as ‘lol forgot to put in a recipe for Batter’, some as annoying as ‘I need to rework saves a bit so players don’t occasionally get lorem ipsum text on a reload’. Done* means the novel-sized narrative material is all written, but I’ll keep fiddling with it until and after launch. ‘ Done* means there are things I’ve missed, but perhaps I can still spot some of them.

But ‘Done*’ also means, by crikey, it’s come together. Remember this? ‘The knee-bone’s connected to the thigh-bone?’ There are a half-dozen different systems in HOUSE OF LIGHT (Cooking, Salons, Further Stories, Invitations, Manuscripts, and the Lighthouse Institute endgame) and now they’ve been in beta for a while, I can see that the ecosystem works. It’s an ecosystem, not a machine, because part of the philosophy of BoH was always that there’s more than one way to do something. So you don’t need to write manuscripts to satisfy Further Story requirements, but it will fill some useful gaps; you don’t need to hold Salons to improve your skills, but it’s another way to improve your Manuscripts; you don’t even need to experiment with Cooking to hold Salons – if you really hate kitchens, you can just put everyone in the garden and feed them blackberries – but it’s a lot more fun if you do.

Which reminds me of something else: we’ve had a clutch of emails recently asking for invites to the closed beta. Sorry – those were all gone months ago! This time round, we invited beta testers for HOUSE OF LIGHT  from a larger pool of people who’ve sent us helpful bug reports in the past, and where we didn’t get a reply to the invite, we pulled some more names out of the hat. This has worked well, and we’re likely to take that approach in the future – so the upside is, if you’re hoping to get selected for future betas, sending us helpful bug reports will improve your chances. But most people who sent us helpful bug reports didn’t get randomly selected, so please don’t think you’ve been judged wanting if that’s you, it’s just the nature of maths. Every bug report, whether actioned or not, helps make the game better for you and for everyone else, and I’m grateful to everyone who makes the effort.

Anyway ‘Done‘ finally means that I’ve been able to focus on the Chinese and Russian localisation of BoH, which is out now, and which has also been ‘Done‘ for a couple of weeks now, but once that’s out the gate I can focus on smoothing the last wrinkles out of HOUSE OF LIGHT for a release next month.

Lottie rounding off this post! The art version of AK’s bit above is that I will be randomly called upon for LAST-MINUTE VEGETABLE STEW or create a button to show people they’ve bought HOUSE OF LIGHT on the main menu, but that it’s not translated into their language yet, or add Steam and GOG achievements (which we are! Anyone want to guess how you unlock ‘Stress Cannot Exist In The Presence Of A Pie’? It is not to simply bake a pie).

I should mention that there’s currently 25% off everything in the merch shop to make space for the Lucid Tarot’s arrival next month (cue AK having conniptions, understandably, about living in a warehouse full of boxes that was once our flat), and that Russian and Simplified Chinese are NOW LIVE on Steam and GOG, and we would extremely appreciate your help getting the word out about the game if you have any Russian- or Chinese-speaking friends. ‘Many pebbles, one Beach’ is the motto of the Institute founded under the ambition of ‘Stone Consumed’ – thank you for being a pebble on the beach with us.

— Mervyn Bunter, Clouds of Witness (1926)

Facts are the bricks of life, but they need a few licks of paint before you want to look at them. Mr Gradgrind of Hard Times said: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” And he turned out to be the villain of the piece! So today I am giving you facts, but coated in glorious technicolour.

HOUSE OF LIGHT

You all know that HOUSE OF LIGHT is launching on Steam and GOG on Thursday 26th September at 6PM BST. I can now confirm that it will cost $14.99 / £12.99 / €13.99 with a 10% launch discount in the first week of sale (except if you’re a Perpetual Edition owner, in which case it’s free). We’ll also be adding a new BOOK OF HOURS: Anthology Edition bundle, just like Cultist Simulator, which includes the base game, the soundtrack and HOUSE OF LIGHT with a 15%-off-everything discount (making it about $43.32 / £35.67 / €41.21 in total). This should make it easy for first-time buyers to get the definitive edition of the game with one click, and for existing fans to force gentle occult librarianship on all their friends by buying it as a gift for someone else.

AK has already mentioned this in a few places, but it’s worth reiterating that HOUSE OF LIGHT is roughly comparable in size to all Cultist‘s DLCs wrapped up in one. Cultist had lots of smaller expansions, but we tried something different with BOOK OF HOURS and spent much longer making one really chunky expansion rather than lots of little pieces. So just in case anyone was worried about the value of Perpetual Edition dropping, it hasn’t! It’s all just coming at once this time.

Depending on how HOUSE OF LIGHT goes, and how pre-production on our Mysterious Game Three goes, we’ll make a decision in the first half of 2025 about whether we come back to BOOK OF HOURS and release additional expansions like HOUSE OF HUES. More on that as/when we have updates.

Now, for some long-awaited news…

The Lucid Tarot

It finally has a release date! That release date is:

🎴🎃🦇 HALLOWEEN 🦇🎃🎴

(Thursday 31st October 2024)

We’ll be releasing it on our Etsy shop at 6PM GMT, it’ll cost £70 + shipping, and we’ll be starting with 500 signed, limited edition copies. Every deck comes with a velvet tarot bag and quick start guide, but the first 500 decks will also contain a certificate of authenticity, signed and numbered by ‘the artist’. Once these are gone, they’re gone – so if the Tarot of the Hours and the Lady Afterwards launches are anything to go by, I’d suggest camping out on the Etsy shop at this time on Halloween and grabbing a copy while they’re still there.

If you miss out on the first 500, don’t worry. Like we did with the Tarot of the Hours – to make sure everyone in all time zones had a fair chance of getting a deck – we’ll release another 500 Lucid Tarots over November / December. If we sell out, we’ll restock for 2025. So everyone who wants a deck will be able to get one – we just have to take it slow so I (and my mum and dad, who have been unceremoniously roped in for packing duty) can manage demand.

Right. See you on the other side of Simplified Chinese and Russian release, which is happening next week on Thursday 29th August. Wish us luck!

On August 17th 2023, just before six o’clock in the evening, nervous glasses of wine in our trembling hands, cats winding demandingly round our trembling ankles, Lottie and I clicked the big green LAUNCH button for BOOK OF HOURS. (I believe we placed both our hands on the mouse.) In the great tradition of software launches everywhere, nothing at all happened.

The BOOK OF HOURS Steam forum went berserk. The Weather Factory subreddit went insane. Our social media accounts were instantly submerged in a battering vortex of good-natured but anguished queries. Meanwhile Lottie and I tried every channel we knew to contact our Steam rep and find out why our game hadn’t launched. (The GOG version had launched on time, but you probably know that the bulk of a small dev’s PC sales usually come through Steam, and that’s where the vortex was centred.)

The thing is – and this is absolutely central to the indie dev experience – all this vortex and berserkness business manifested as me and Lottie sitting in our living room typing quickly and saying things like ‘erk’. There wasn’t even any background music, unless you count the cats complaining about our lack of attention. My job is this: all day I sit in front of a screen in a room with my wife and I type (if I’m on a writing break, I sit somewhere sunnier with nicer coffee and type on my own). Then occasionally I type something different from usual, and that immediately causes tens of thousands of people to play our game, and/or send me emails about how our game isn’t working. Any software developer will be familiar with this. Even when I worked at bigger companies, launches were often anticlimactic. You make a deal of it with bunting and countdowns and sparkling drinks in flimsy plastic cups, and then it goes quiet and someone comes back from the toilet and says ‘oh did we launch?’ But all over the world there is a ripple of change.

The launch was fine in the end. Our Perpetual Edition offer (any and all expansions free if you buy at launch) meant we had to do something a bit non-standard, the non-standard thing gunged up the launch process, and our famously affable Steam rep, though theoretically away at the time, got back in contact to sort it out. We launched, a not quite half an hour late. By then, the degree of desperate enthusiasm showed us that the launch was likely to go okay.

And lo, it was so. BOOK OF HOURS has been the most successful game of both our careers. Not in a dramatic and overwhelming sort of way – what we do is, and will always be, too niche – but it’s sold a little more than Cultist Simulator, which itself sold a little more than SUNLESS SEA, and the Steam review % is much than either of those. This makes sense – if you build a following, and get better at making games, you do a little better each time – but it’s never something you can count on, especially in the fervid rainforest which is game development.

So if you bought a copy – whether you’ve been following us since the early days, or you just stumbled across us last week – then thank you! Without your support, Weather Factory would be a rain-haunted shell. And thanks to your support, we likely have the resources to make a third game… of which more shortly.

SO THE MOST SUCCESSFUL GAME OF YOUR CAREER IS… THE NICE ONE

Remember the origin story of BOOK OF HOURS? Back in 2019, I was working on the GHOUL and PRIEST expansions for Cultist Simulator.  At that point I’d already been working for two years on this cult-themed body-horror-heavy game where you play a manipulative monomaniac, and both those expansions are particularly gruesome. So in a melancholy moment I tweeted this:

idea: extremely relaxed Cultist Simulator expandalone

you’re a librarian

books arrive in your occult library and you just examine, catalogue and arrange them, then provide them to visitors

very low challenge, lots of careful board organisation

— Alexis Kennedy 🕯 (@alexiskennedy) January 16, 2019

It got a lot more engagement than I’d expected and before we knew it we found we’d sort of announced our next game before we’d known what it was ourselves. But we went ahead and for the first time in my career I made a game which contained no cannibalism nor allied trades. It was a bit of a departure and I’m relieved it worked out so well.

HOURS is not quite a certified horror-free game. You can find manskin parchment if you poke around the house, there were some pretty nasty things going on with the Cucurbit Prison, and of course some of the occult books were written by people who these days would merit their own soberly narrated Netflix documentary. But it’s clearly the kindest game of my career. The tone throughout is eerie rather than grisly, and the worst thing you-as-protagonist can do is ‘forget to feed the cat for a bit’. (Well yes there are the endings where you can unleash theomachic conflict or convince the Sun to start drinking blood again, but that’s all another History.)

I’ve really enjoyed the quieter tone, and it’s been good discipline for me as a writer to work without some of my habitual tools. But I don’t want to leave those tools in the box forever. So Cultist was sour, Hours was sweet, Game Three will be sweet and sour. More on that, as I said, in a bit.

SO WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO IN THE YEAR SINCE LAUNCH?

The first few months were post-launch support. BOOK OF HOURS was in better shape coming out of the gate than Cultist Simulator. This was as I hoped – we had a nice long beta period and a shared codebase – but HOURS is quite an intricate machine and there were lots of things that needed tidying up. And we’ve added a lot of stuff too: the crafting helper panel, the zoom-to-cursor feature that I finally got working properly, the order form system, layers and layers of optimisation, all that good stuff. The secret panels in a few rooms of the house that you can find only with a sharp eye or a lucky click. And the feature almost no-one has discovered, where whatever you put in the thirteenth niche will appear in the next game. And the weird sub-feature of that which I think no-one at all has discovered yet.

Oh and the Hush House Advent Calendar, which I put together very hastily because I wanted to do something nice for my Christmas-obsessed wife, and which as a result was a little buggy and in particular contained perhaps the most notorious bug ever to haunt these halls:

(if you’re interested, I did a whole post on the cause of that and of another dozen hauntings, here.)

Anyway since then, it’s been localisation and the GIGANTIC EXPANSION.

TELL US FUN HORROR STORIES ABOUT LOCALISATION, AK

We’re about to release full Russian and Chinese localisation (they’ve been in beta a few months now), which is – you know Hofstadter’s Law? ‘It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law’. Localisation is always more work than we think. Obviously the translators do the bulk of the work, but some of that work means asking me questions which take, um, considerable attention…

Now, not all the questions are this complicated, but there are literally hundreds of questions in all, and few were questions you’d want to answer before a second cup of coffee. My hat is off to Dove Archive and Riotloc (our Chinese and Russian translators respectively) for the intense and sophisticated effort they put into navigating the labyrinth of lore.

And then there’s the technical and the UI side: the problems of presenting Chinese characters in a way that works with the logo on the menu screen, the many Russian texts that tend to be longer than English labels and creep over the edges of things, the dozens of items I accidentally hardcoded and had to rip out and dynami…fy..icise, the week Lottie spent just putting together book covers for Russian and Chinese characters, and the Gordian mare that resulted from keeping card ordering rules semi-consistent across all three languages…

We’re tidying up now, finally. Japanese should be along later; depending on all the usual boring business reasons we’ll make a decision on what other languages to localise into; and we do plan to release Steam Workshop / localisation modding support for people to do their own translations.

OOH, MODDING?

Don’t get excited. My answer on game modding support remains ‘maybe, someday, but not a priority right now.’ But we do want to offer, specifically, modding support for languages, so that will be along in a while.

WHAT ABOUT THAT EXPANSION?

Okay, now we’re talking. HOUSE OF LIGHT, the expansion I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year, is nearly out. It’s an absolute chonker. Here are the headline features:

FOOD: Combine Sustenance and Cooking Ingredients at the three Kitchen workstations to create dozens of new dishes. You’ll need Kitchenware items to find all the recipes.

WRITING-CASE: You’ll receive this at the end of the first Spring season after you’ve replied to St Rhonwen. You’ll be able to use the calling-cards left by satisfied visitors to invite those visitors back to the House.

SALONS: Place food and drink in one of the six Salon rooms, and then use the bell to begin a Salon. Do it right and you’ll be rewarded with sparkling conversation… and lessons.

MANUSCRIPTS: Use Paper, Ink, and a Skill to write a Manuscript based on that skills, and satisfy your Visitors’ needs for more specific knowledge. Lessons from Salons will help you improve those Skills and write more useful Manuscripts.

FURTHER STORIES: Once you’ve completed an Incident, follow it up in the Tree of Wisdoms. Visitors will need more specific help here – perhaps a book on a specific topic, or a specific book.

THE INSTITUTE: Look for the lighthouse, out at sea. When your Visitors are ready, use it to establish the true heirs to the Curia of the Isle, unlocking a new kind of ending.

The Salons, Further Stories and Institute are, as a one-time lawyer of mine would say, ‘compendious’; and honestly even the Food absorbed a frankly insane larder-load of effort. So there’s more content (and new art) in HOUSE OF LIGHT than in all the Cultist Simulator expansions put together.

Because it’s such an absolute beast, and because I’ve now been working on BOOK OF HOURS, on and off, for five years, there won’t be another expansion any time soon. I think we will probably go back and do at least one more (working name HOUSE OF HUES) but if so it’ll be after a break. And when I say ‘break’, I mean a few months of pre-production on Game Three.

OBVIOUSLY YOU CAN’T TELL US ABOUT GAME THREE.

Reverse psychology huh. Well you got me. Here’s a little.

• • • Three will be set in the Secret Histories world again. There are clues about it in the Lighthouse Institute endings in HOUSE OF LIGHT.
    • It is unmistakably the most ambitious thing Lottie and I have yet done. It’s also the most traditional thing we’ve done, although it’s really not very traditional.
    • It’s something that many players, over many years, have vocally hoped for.
    • At least two characters in Three are among the most beloved, or most provoking, fan favourites.
    • At least two other characters in Three are fervently discussed Secret Histories characters who have made at most fleeting in-game appearances. One of those characters is located in the first person in Three.
    • The working title of Game Three is the name of a beloved book from the Secret Histories.
    • It contains at least one carnival.

Once we’re through the support aftermath of localisation and HOUSE OF LIGHT, we’ll begin pre-production: the process of answering questions like ‘what will this look like’, ‘will it actually work’ and ‘do we have enough money to make it’. And when we come out of the other end of that, we’ll have more to tell you.

OK, this quote from Cultist Simulator is possibly one of the grimmest things AK ever wrote in the game (the ‘Marinette ending’ from The Dancer DLC. IYKYK). But I am repurposing it to herald to a good thing and that good thing is some secret Cultist Simulator news! Namely:

Cultist Simulator… on console?!

Screenshots from the PlayStation dev kit

This is not a drill! Cultist Simulator is coming to Xbox and Playstation on 8th August 2024.  We partnered with Polish publishers Klabater because a) they clearly know what’s what and b) we love the Poles. (I used to date one and AK used to live there. One winter’s day his hair literally froze into icicles.)

Cultist Simulator‘s console UI is heavily based on Playdigious’s excellent rework for the Nintendo Switch, which we think is the best way to transform a fundamentally clicky PC-first game to a controller-friendly game. So here are the key details to know:

• Launch date: Thursday 8th August 2024
• Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
• Versions and prices:
  • Initiate Edition (game plus mini DLC: Cultist Simulator + Dancer, Priest and Ghoul DLC) – $24.99 / €24.99
  • The Exile DLC – $9.99 / €9.99
  • Anthology Edition (everything together: Cultist Simulator + Dancer, Priest, Ghoul and Exile DLC) – $29.99 / €29.99

Wishlist the game today if you’re interested! Click to wishlist on….

Perhaps some people reading this have had enough of being nice and homey in BOOK OF HOURS and want to start a new run of hubristic Lovecraftian fun. Maybe you want to go through the game to find something AK wrote that’s even more upsetting than Marinette’s story. Perhaps you just want the colours beneath the skin of the world. Whatever your motivation, I hope you pick Cultist Simulator up on your platform of choice next month. It’s the first time we’ve ever released any game on console (including any of our work on Fallen London or Sunless Sea) so we are excited! Excite alongside us, if you like.

Where in a month of Sundays is the Lucid Tarot?

Click for larger versions.

It has taken a preposterously long time to make this a reality. I’ll spare you the tedious details, but some highlights include £44,000 quotes from local suppliers, another supplier running off with our money, and having to come up with an entirely new production process for printing double-sided opaque-but-also-transparent tarot cards. I literally couldn’t find anyone who’d made cards like this before, anywhere in the world. I even tried to contact the people who made the Gloom deck – one of the key inspirations – but no dice. Fortunately, I found a wonderful factory producer and we’re now on our sixth or seventh iteration of the deck. To give you an idea of the problems encountered, here’s a comparison of the first prototype we produced (which I loved) with the first production-ready deck:

The production-ready deck is smooth and scratch resistant and gorgeously made. But the production process significantly darkened the deck from the prototype (which was a manual, not production-viable first pass).

You might think the difference isn’t terribly significant – you might actually prefer the darker version – but problems became particularly apparent when you held the cards up to the light:

Bearing in mind the whole point of the deck is for them to be actually usable as tarot cards – so you can place them face down and then reveal them – this really wasn’t cricket. But thanks to brilliant work from Emma, my contact at the factory, we’ve now come up with a totally new method which involves printing multiple middle-levels of white ink and then splicing those layers with a layer of iridescent ink. This necessitates using specialist ink and materials I hadn’t heard of, but now we have nice opaque cards which also have gently silvered iridescent edges (this is the version featured in the gallery at the top of this section). I love them! There are some minor imperfections – I think they add charm, Emma thinks they can be improved upon – so we’re trying one last improvement before greenlighting full production. As a result, I still can’t confirm a specific release date yet, but I can at least tell you we are very close, and have an MVP (minimum viable product) as a beautiful worst-case fallback.

I appreciate that from the outside it all probably looks like this:

BUT TRUST ME! People are excited about the deck, it’s been a much more complex physical production process than expected, and I don’t want to sell anything I can’t enthusastically and truthfully endorse. Here’s what I can confirm at this stage:

• The Lucid Tarot is almost certainly launching on our Etsy shop this year
• We’ll offer an initial, limited run of 500 signed and numbered decks which will come with a signed certificate of authenticity
• We’ll then move to staggered runs of 100 (or so!) of unnumbered decks, so people in different time zones have a fair chance or getting them when they go on sale
• Every deck – both the 500 limited edition and the unnumbered version – comes swaddled in a rich velvet tarot bag and ‘quick read’ summary of each card’s meaning, so you can get strated tout suite.

BOOK OF HOURS

[MAJOR HOUSE OF LIGHT SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT]

AK is away currently on a mysterious writing trip – his last before HOUSE OF LIGHT launches – to finish up the Lighthouse Institute. You’ve probably noticed that our teasers up until this point about the Lighthouse Institute have been, er, here is a lighthouse! Here are some aspects! Be excited! Well, soon we will have some more specifics to share. People in the HOUSE OF LIGHT beta seem to really enjoy the interactions between visitors – for example, surprising revelations about the hobbies of well-known occultists:

“Douglas and Serena discuss a shared, concealed, but evidently profound passion for knitting. Douglas: ‘If you tell anyone outside this room, I’ll have you locked up.’ Serena: ‘If you tell anyone outside this room, I’ll give King Crucible your address.'”

Or subtle yet pivotal decisions in other occultists’ lives:

“Morgen and Arun return to their conversation about the Obliviates, who once were called the House of Lethe. She playfully accuses him of being a member, and asks him where he keeps his three chains. He parries by asking her where she keeps her notorious key of black sapphire. Morgen crosses her legs and asks Arun silkily if he would like to search her. After a moment, he says very definitely that no, he would not.”

AK is writing even more to cover the most likely potential outcomes of the Lighthouse board. As there are six positions available and 1-3 people (I think!) who are eligible for that position, there’re a lot of different possibilities here. It’s actually a great illustration of the danger of hidden multipliers in game development. To take an art pipeline example: ‘I will add two vases of flowers to each room in Hush House, which will take 5 minutes each. That’s quick! OK, so there are 107 rooms, multiplied by 10 minutes, which gives me a task list that will take… realistically three full days’ work to complete. Maybe I won’t add those flowers then.’ This is why AK has to basically rent a room and lock himself inside it when it comes to these big writing tasks in BOOK OF HOURS. It’s on us for making such a complicated, baroque game, but hey!

What I can share at this stage is that AK is doing a lot of work on endings, making them truly reflective of your choices and your specific Lighthouse Board. Here’s our new Lighthouse-specific ending page, for example (please note this is a mock-up, and may change before we launch):

You’ll be able to click on each of the Lighthouse Institute roles (‘Secretary Vigilant’, etc) to see what that specific person did in that specific role, or whether they’re still sulking because the Institute decided to be friends with the bug people instead of the year wranglers. So you should have a really good sense at the end of a HOUSE OF LIGHT playthrough of the effect your choices had on the world, and what the personalities you put in power went on to achieve. Hopefully that will feel crunchy and rewarding, like a fresh slice of Amber Pumpkin Pie. But more news on this soon, when AK returns!

For no particular reason, I’ve been reading about the punk and post-punk scene in Leeds in the late 70s. The nascent legends and the stillborn ones; the rumours, the quibbles, the descendant anecdote (did one of the members of goth band YOU really work in the mortuary of Leeds General Infirmary? Or did he, as Mark Andrews reports in Paint My Name In Black And Gold, actually work in the haematology department? which one would be goth-er?); the sense that one had to have been there and in many cases the relief that one wasn’t – it reminds me of the ceremonial magic scene in London in the late nineteenth century, with Mathers and Waite and Crowley et al. There are differences. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its splinter satellites favoured hashish over amphetamines. The F Club in Leeds had much stickier carpets than the Horus Temple in Bradford. But there is the same sense of giant egos and flawed but considerable talents clashing like stags (funnily enough, it’s mostly men) over projects that most of the world has no interest in.

And of course the turn-of-the-century occult context in Britain was part of the inspiration for Cultist Simulator. You can see it in the way Coseley and Hersault fell out over creative differences, in Galmier’s origin story working a day job in Camden Lock, and of course with My Deeds, My Powers, My Achievements and the Injustices Perpetrated Against Me. (You know Crowley got so petty about Arthur Waite, as in the Rider-Waite deck, so much that the antagonist in Moonchild was called ‘Arthwaite’?)

It’s less of an inspiration for BOOK OF HOURS. Partly this is because it’s just a nicer game, and most of the people who turn up at Hush House are people you might want to spend time with, so the feuds are less vicious. Partly it’s because mythology naturally extends upwards and outwards, and that tends to mean characters get more powerful and deeds get grander. But most of it still happens off-stage; which is the whole point about the Brancrug and the Librarian, that you’re the hermit in the forest and not the adventurer. Some of it is (in the HOUSE OF LIGHT Further Visitor Stories) pretty significant offstage events. The sabotage of a synthetic Name; the seduction of St Lucia the Eyeless; the dread, epic, Mansus-rocking scheme that Douglas calls the ‘Wangle’; these still manifest mostly through people coming to your house and asking you politely if they can borrow a book. Although sometimes deciding who you’ll lend the book to can determine what gets blowed up, in at least one case which book you lend might determine who betrays what, and now and then your decisions might haunt the House. Like maybe if you let magic bees move in under your stairs.

Lottie interjecting at this point. Did someone mention Further Visitor Stories? We’re trying something new in the upcoming expansion, incorporating a more ‘direct’ way of reading and advancing Advanced Visitor Stories (new UI!) and a visual representation of where each story is on your Wisdom Tree. People who buy HOUSE OF LIGHT – or the lucky so-and-sos who have Perpetual Edition and get it automatically for free – will notice some dark, delicious additions to their Wisdom Tree. Each one represents a different visitor story, and is placed somewhere appropriate on this occult map: the Affair of the Friar’s Tapestry, for instance, sits between Bosk and Skolekosophy, whereas you’ll find the Unfinished Lark between Horomachistry and Ithastry. Once you’ve finished a story from the base game, you’ll unlock a starry constellation which you can interact with to take that story further through HOUSE OF LIGHT, turning your Wisdom Tree over the course of the expansion into an arcane narrative star-chart.

Here’s a mock-up of the effect, along with some of the transitional states:

The inspiration is all very beautiful here – zodiac and astrology come to mind – but then of course HOUSE OF LIGHT also introduces you to this guy:

His name is POOR WISP and he will absolutely steal your hearts. Especially when you hear what sound he makes in-game… OK, so he might be a bit Worm-y. Nothing a good vet can’t fix! Probably! If any of you take him to the Foundry (AK has inexplicably made this an option) I will know and so will the gods. “The wisp begins to wriggle, pulling away from the heat, mewing like a broken-winged gull…”

I’m sorry. There must be something in my eye. Next week we should have new stock of the Tarot of the Hours in the shop, a second Weather Forecast, and if it so pleases the Flowermaker, I might even receive my final test deck of the Lucid Tarot. More intel as we receive it. Now go hug a Wisp.

“Celebrating the completion of the Further Visitor Stories in HOUSE OF LIGHT. That means we’re at 80% done, which means in turn that I should be sending out a handful of beta keys to the lucky few end of next week (sorry, if you haven’t already heard, you didn’t get your name drawn from the Clutches). HOUSE OF LIGHT is a chonker: already the same word count that the whole of Cultist Simulator was at launch.”

So that means we hope you’ll really like HOUSE OF LIGHT, and we should have a suitably chonky blog post with updates for you soon!

In the meantime, we’re also trying something new. We’ve just uploaded the first episode of what we hope will become a fortnightly communal attempt to predict the future! This is the Weather Forecast. This is the Weather Forecast. We love games – you love games too, probably. We talk about games all the time – you have actual lives, and maybe only talk about games a bit. So we thought it would be fun to pull back the curtain on professional game development and take a look at the week’s top ten most popular upcoming games on Steam. Using publicly accessible data and a bit of Google-fu, we then each try to estimate that game’s Week 1 review score, which is a general indicator of a game’s ‘success’ at launch. One developer’s success criterion is different from another’s, of course – a first-time solo dev could be rightfully delighted by 50 reviews in the first week, but 50 reviews in the first week for an Electronic Arts launch would probably cause heads to roll. So this isn’t about judging games as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or even ‘successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’ – it’s about seeing whether we can reliably predict the fortunes of a game just before launch, because that would be really useful for all our future Weather Factory games. And we happen to think it’s pretty interesting, too.

So take a look at the first episode, join in with a YouTube comment if you like, and come back in a fortnight for us to see if we got any of the numbers right!

A few things to note:

1. 1. All data we’re using is publicly available. We don’t have any insider knowledge, other than experience making games ourselves!
   2. The ‘Popular Upcoming’ list on Steam is region-specific, so if you’re not in the UK you may see a different list. There are loads of games in ‘Popular Upcoming’ that are never mentioned by traditional games press or streamers. Hopefully you’ll discover some games you’ve never heard of that you actually quite fancy playing.
   3. We’d love you to join in if you’d like to. If you want to guess any Week 1 review numbers, just leave a comment on the video. You can be smug in the next video when we recap what actually happened against our predicted numbers.
   4. This isn’t a value judgement on any of the featured games. We’re just looking at data and talking about what it might mean.

Good luck to all games mentioned! We hope your launches – which are by far the scariest part of game dev – go brilliantly.

Now, I leave you with news that Cultist Simulator is today’s Daily Deal on Steam, at a deepest-ever (and frankly insane) 75% off. Check it out, and watch the ever-marvellous Systemchalk Broadcasting live on the store page now. Oh! And all our merch is 25% off for the weekend, to celebrate Cultist being culty and the Weather Forecast probably being embarrassingly wrong. Happy Friday, everyone!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to Lottie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If a videogame is a wall, what do you think – is writing more like the bricks, or more like the mortar? My answer would be usually the mortar… though it depends which game. They’re ‘video games’ not ‘letter games’, after all. The writing serves mostly to locate and direct the gameplay or to explain and contextualise the visuals. One of the reasons that writing in games is not always good is that writers in games sometimes forget this and stuff words into a scene like an panicked upholsterer frantically stuffing goose-feathers into a cushion. Or an overenthusiastic bricklayer adding so much mortar that it squelches out of the sides and leaves the bricks awry. Arrive late, leave early and all that.

Of course some games use the writing as a central feature. In these, the writing is more like the bricks. And of course this is so in Weather Factory games – and in most of my work as far back as Fallen London (née Echo Bazaar). But this isn’t a licence to write long! Even in a writing-centric game, you never want the writing to outstay its welcome. As soon as the player stops reading, it becomes pointless. The bigger the bricks in a wall, the crookeder the courses.

The very first design of Fallen London, from way back in 2009

This brings us to salons. I mentioned last time that the Salon feature in HOUSE OF LIGHT needed a lot of lines. The game benefit of Salons is that they generate Lessons – and you have some limited control over what Lessons they generate. (This is why you can only have one Salon a season, cos otherwise it would be tempting to turn Hush House into Party House so you can rush the Tree of Wisdoms.) But the actual reason that Salons are in the game at all is to extend the fantasy of having a huge occult mansion as your playground – here, by enlarging on the experience of running salons for this kaleidoscope of occult demi-monde types. I could have had the game print out “The conversation dwelt on Herbs & Infusions…” (in fact this remains the backup for when you’ve exhausted everything else) but that would have missed the whole point of the experience. Instead I spent a solid two weeks poring over and comparing tome text and the setting notes and the room descriptions, hammering out things like this:

“Stanislav and Arthur argue happily about which herbal tisane tastes the most disgusting, and hence is most useful to speed lingering guests on their way. [Lesson: Herbs & Infusions]”

“Al-Adim describes his memories of Thirza Blake, and her work, in his time as Secretary Nunciant of the House. He is clearly caught between affection and annoyance. Stanislav shakes his head: ‘I wish I had known her. I think we’d have got on.’ [Lesson: Herbs & Infusions]”

“Douglas has been looking into the six-centuries-past death of Abbess Nonna. He’s questioned sources he doesn’t share with Stanislav, and concludes that she was possessed by a Name of the Blackbone and ‘put down’ by her sistren – ‘nasty business, but best thing for it.’ He and Stanislav discuss the herb-mixtures that might have laid her open to that possession. [Lesson: Herbs & Infusions]”

Have you noticed how much longer the third is than the first? That doesn’t make it better. I mean it’s fine, and it’s a fun bit of backstory, but it’s also a bit of a lumpy brick. This is likely because I wrote it at the end of the day when I was tired (Mark Twain: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”) If you can get as much effect for 29 words as for 64, you’ll want to go for 29. The player will thank you. And I’m conscious that when the Salon actually runs, the player will see several of these in a row, like bricks in a wall.  And it’s no more effort to write that 64 words than the 29 words, if anything the reverse – I mean 64 words imply a little more wear on the old distal phalanges, but the effortful bit is reviewing all the details, keeping the lore straight, and then coming up with ten to fifteen decent ideas an hour, for seven hours a day, for five days a week. (Lottie still chortles at me angrily pouring myself a glass of whisky towards the end of a rough writing day and grumbling ‘how many interesting things can you even say about pumpkin pie?’)

No pumpkin pie anywhere in this salon.

Any writer talking about their job eventually ends up complains about how tough writing is, boo hoo, get a real job then, so let’s bring down a merciful curtain and say: about four hundred Salon lines are written, and I’ll need another couple of hundred at least but how many there are depends on the old triage, deadline, cutting-room biz. And now that the essential work is done, I’m enjoying seating Coquille next to Morgen and having Yvette argue Jung with al-Adim. Some of these characters have been knocking around my head for the a good few years now, but they don’t often get to talk to each other, and you see more and different angles on them when that happens. Even Hokobald has a bit more light and shade now. Not to mention poor Zachary.

Lottie here, just rounding out the end of this post. I’ll leave you with two things: first, a round of Guess That Aspect. Can you work out what they represent in HOUSE OF LIGHT? Obviously my favourite is the SUDDEN FISH, becuase I am yin to AK’s yang, and where he drinks whisky while morosely contemplating the nature of pie, I am trying to sneak anarchic Pokémon into his very srs game.

More significantly, we’re finally ready to tell you when all this food, fraternity and occult demimondering will come out. HOUSE OF LIGHT will release on Steam and GOG on…

Thursday 26th September 2024

Wishlist it and mark your calendars! We’ll be running a closed beta for it ahead of time – more on that in the next few weeks, for those interested in helping test it out – and we’ll announce price points and more info as we get closer to launch. It’ll be free to anyone with Perpetual Edition (thanks again, early adopters!), and we can’t wait for you to get stuck in, like Hokobald into aglaophotis soufflé.

While you’re waiting, we’ll also be releasing full translations of BOOK OF HOURS into Simplified Chinese and Russian on Thursday 29th August (Japanese TBC), and we’ll even have some smol Cultist Simulator news this year for you all too. Dream furiously, friend. The Lighthouse awaits…

Today I am going to talk some more about linguistic treasures hidden in seemingly ordinary texts. Let’s start where we left off when illustrating the matter of rhythm:

“Here,
impossibly preserved,
enfolded in the scars inflicted
        by the former
                   prisoner’s
                               energies.”

Have you, perchance, noticed anything extra? Alright, I’ll spoil you the fun:

“Here,
impossibly preserved,
enfolded in the scars inflicted
        by the former
                   prisoner’s
                               energies.”

Hidden in plain sight, eh? This technique, when one or several letters (sounds, really) are cunningly repeated throughout the phrase, is called alliteration. And this, too, is a very powerful tool. (The ancient Brits, or Icelanders, would even have said magical. No, seriously: in ancient Iceland a properly written alliterative verse was universally taken to hold magical power.) Anyway, this is an aspect that definitely must not be lost in translation.

Funny thing is, a lot of such examples can, theoretically, be chalked up to coincidence. We even had a minor argument with another colleague of mine over this line:

“Elucidate Enlightenment from an Earlier Era”

‘Oh come on,’ she said, ‘The letter E is just statistically the most widely used letter in the English language!’ Alright. Possibly. (Especially given the fact that the actual sounds here aren’t all the same.) Just possibly.

But there comes a point where you can’t ignore it anymore: Alexis Kennedy really loves his alliteration, and that’s a fact.

“I could curl up in the cold beneath the silent statue’s shadow, and see what surfaces in sleep.”

There’s just no way this can be a mere coincidence!

By the way, the desire to preserve these alliterations had been one of the driving forces behind that Great Gatsby translation that I at first found so unorthodox. The book’s translator did their best to preserve these precious phonetic treasures – and it often meant choosing a specific-sounding word (say, a ‘seismograph’, rather than a generalized ‘machine’) over a correct one.

And, needless to say, no machine-translating generative AI is savvy enough to spot and preserve alliteration. It really does require handcrafted translation!

But now – a fly in the ointment. Turns out, different languages have varying degrees of tolerance for alliteration. The English language loves alliteration. Be it marketing slogans, politicians’ speeches, or titles of Jane Austen novels, English is full of these consonances. Not quite so in Russian. Here the effect is usually regarded as sounding funny, and relegated to children’s books. So an aspiring skald must temper their love for alliteration with prudence and temperance.

Thanslating Alexis Kennedy really is a balancing act!

And with this… see you next week for more tales from localisers’ crypt!

HOUSE OF LIGHT is a good-sized expansion with an unusual congeries of different features, which I’ve been assiduously altering from a congeries into a constellation, and I’ll talk about that, but UP FRONT let me say that absolutely nothing here is 100% confirmed or promised, everything may change up until release day, and if I get any grouchy emails complaining there are ‘only’ seventy cooking recipes then I’ll… well I’ll sigh, mark them spam and get on with my day. It’s not much of a threat. [edit: there were just under a hundred in the end]

The foot bone’s connected to the leg bone…

I really wanted cooking in the launch version of BOOK OF HOURS, but it was one of the half-dozen things that didn’t make the cut (a very casual way of describing the late-development triage process, which fails to evoke all the weeping forlornly at spreadsheets and bank statements). This makes it hard to connect meaningfully to the skill system. The risk with ancillary systems added later is that they can be disconnected from anything meaningful, so they just roll around under the surface of the game like one of those horrible oil globules under a steroid user’s skin.

Fortunately we have a natural use for them: salons! Which is to say, picnics, elevenses, supper, etc, where you invite visitors to chat about the invisible arts. Of course that basic outline immediately poses half a dozen questions, each of which has a couple of misleading answers before you get to a workable one, and then where the workable ones create further questions.

The leg bone’s connected to the knee bone…

For example: how  many slots do you need in a Salon verb? Ooh probably about ten, we need to revamp the verb window no that becomes wildly impractical, so instead let’s allow the Salon to respond to food placed in the room. This feels much more immersive for the Librarian, but also means reworking (a) some quite central code and (b) some of the room art – all those neatly placed chairs on the viewer side of the table made it impossible to arrange food on the table. (When I was testing the refectory I had to stack food on the mantelpiece.)

Okay then, how do food Aspects tie into the Salon process? Obviously if you want a good conversation about Resurgences & Emergences you stack the salon with as many Grail and Moth dishes this doesn’t work because much of the reason for the slot system back as far as Cultist was to make it impossible just to stack up twenty identical objects to power through an Aspect requirement. And we don’t want people maxing out Grail numbers by filling the room with cake:

So currently, instead, individual guests have some basic dietary requirements – usually based on their traditional interests (Arthur wants a meal with at least one Lantern-aspected dish) but with some variations (al-Adim doesn’t drink, Yvette isn’t fussy). This immediately throws up some silly preferences (Dagmar won’t eat much besides Aglaophotis Soufflé, Agdistis will eat basically anything because most foods contain Heart) which will entail a final brow-furrowed tuning session and probably some post-beta tweaks, but much of which will stand because it’s basically a game and because the alternative – hand-assigning a hundred-plus food preferences to twenty-plus guests with no particular mnemonic structure – is no fun for anyone, least of all me.

So you set up your Salon in one of the five or six rooms where you can hold it (it’s nice to make more use of the Hall of Voices), you invite your guests and.. wait invite guests? Visitors show up once a season. We need to do something about that, too. So in HOUSE OF LIGHT (and this feature may migrate back to the vanilla game) you can get someone’s address once you’ve helped them out at least once (though Hokobald, paranoid as ever, will basically only give you the general location of a manhole behind a pub where he might sometimes check for correspondence). You can then write ’em an invite, send it via the Postmistress, and they turn up. If you like you can write a number of invitations in advance for your big do. Or you can actually summon them so you can push through the Visitor stories to get to the new late-game Visitor Further Stories (all the systems connect! more on this anon).

And this brings us to the winnowing phase of design, after answering a lot of these questions:

al-Adim travels a lot, do we worry about him turning up after sixty seconds while Yvette who lives in London also turns up after sixty seconds? No. It adds nothing and it makes people think too hard about exactly where everyone is; anyway a lot of our visitors have Uncanny Means of travelling. (Travelling at Night, even.)

What if you keep spamming invitations? do people stop turning up? No. This would be hassle to code, hassle to signal, and would punish people who accidentally invite the wrong guests. There is a rationale (‘when the Librarian asks, the invisible world listens’) and there is a nod to the requirement to put some effort into invitations (there’s a low-ish Aspect requirement that you can satisfy with Soul cards and the right ink, and of course Hokobald will only turn up if he gets an invitation written in Orpiment Exultant). But as with the order forms there is a hazy line between making the invitations feel like some business, so you’re not just clicking buttons on a spreadsheet, and making players jump through hoops – a line that for some people we’re already on the wrong side of.

Do you get unique Salon responses from guests for relevant food and drink? Now we’re really in the meat of it (olol). I would like visitors to have unique lines because other visitors are present. I would like people to comment on the wine. I would like people to comment on paintings hanging in the room. I would like people to have conversations that reference ongoing stories. But that right there is a requirement for – well the maths depends on how you work it, but we can easily get up to ten or twenty thousand unique lines. Or a madlibs approach like the CK3 feast system – which is fine for what it is, I like CK3, but it’s a lot of work and it’s the opposite of the handcrafted Hush House feel. And we’re not even at the headline feature for HOUSE OF LIGHT story content – the Further Stories for Visitors / Lighthouse Institute stuff – and I’d quite like to get the expansion out this year. So the answer is ‘some much smaller subset of some of the above’.

I haven’t even talked about how the cooking system works. Or Thirza’s Knife. OK so briefly: making food is much more like a traditional crafting system, though you get a little bit of potential input from Spices & Savours. Milk plus flour with a mixing bowl (CAKE TIME) is dough, dough plus eggs is cake batter, cake batter plus honey is Cornish Honey Cake (never, never to be confused with Devonshire Honey Cake). Some of the recipes require knives. We don’t actually have a kitchen knife in the game, so if you want to chop onions you might need to bring down Sebastian’s swords from the Hall of Division. Or find Thirza’s Knife, which has probably never been used to cut up anything lamentable, probably.

The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone…

Wait AK what are salons for? apart from ‘deciding not to invite Hokobald’? And what’s the difference between elevenses and a picnic? and why can you only hold salons once a season? For that you’ll have to wait until my wife wrestles me back to the blog to write another update. Right now I have aspects to assign to cake.

Did somebody say cake? LB here, and I have been made very hungry over the last week as I drew all the delectably 1930s dainties that AK’s requested so far for HOUSE OF LIGHT. It requires quite a bit of research – what is the history of Pyrex? What the hell is fish ‘Monte Carlo’ style? – but I hope the consistency will really create an unusual, European historical sense of reality and you can all enjoy making prune whip for people you don’t like. The below isn’t exhaustive – I already have a host of new food to draw, from mushrooms on toast to something alarmingly called ‘Walls-of-Ys’ – but you can already pick a pretty nice meal for yourself from what we have!

You can see in the header image of this blog post how rich, joyful and tasty a full spread of food looks, and how much life it adds to Hush House. AK’s mentioned we had to adjust some rooms to facilitate soirées, but the end result can have surprisingly sweet outcomes. The Refectory looks warm and inviting, like a welcome-home banquet for a long-travelled friend – but how suitably melancholy and sweet is a tea-party in winter in the Physic Garden? I feel like Valentine Dewulf would have been much the better for one of these.

In other news of things that hopefully brighten your life, we have another MERCH LAUNCH to announce – our limited edition Hours notebooks, now available in the shop. I tried to make them classy and BOOK OF HOURS-y, and I’m delighted with how they’ve turned out. If you have need of a gently occult notebook in your life – to write your hopes, your dreams, reminders of BoH recipes, etc – these guys are for you.

Finally, we’re moving offices next month so are running a major 40% off sale off almost everything else in the shop (the one other exception is the newly-restocked Wisdom Tree pendants, which I’ve just relisted. People selfishly bought them all, but other people also wanted them and were sad, and we can’t have that). So along with the new notebooks, go nuts on our biggest ever merch sale, and help us save our ancient backs by not having to lug 10,000 Lady Afterwards up some stairs.

The real hot topic from this week, though, is what comes after vegetables. I’ll let AK explain:

“You probably know the George Bernard Shaw crack about the US and the UK being ‘two countries separated by a common language’ (GBS, like many Irish writers, did well out of snarking accurately at British English). BOOK OF HOURS evoked horror and disgust from our American readers with its unsparingly explicit depiction of pre-decimal British currency. But you might not know about pudding.

‘Pudding’, as all her late Majesty’s subjects know, is the correct word for ‘dessert’, at least in traditional English upper class dialect, just as ‘supper’ is the correct word for ‘dinner’. I was brought up middle-middle-class but my mother had upper-middle-class aspirations, so I learnt that we ate ‘pudding’ after ‘supper’ in the evening. If I’d been lower-middle-class or she’d hung around slightly less posh people, we’d have had ‘dessert’ and ‘tea’ (not to be confused with tea, the drink). As it was, if we ate early, say five rather than seven in the evening, the meal was was called ‘high tea’ (which didn’t include the drink ‘tea’, unlike ‘afternoon tea’ for which the drink ‘tea’ would be a central feature).

That was the 1980s, and ‘pudding’ has been largely been driven to the margins by ‘dessert’ now, partly cos America and France, partly cos it sounds stodgy, but you’ll still find it on the menu in very traditional restaurants. And that ‘very traditional’ vibe, heavily flavoured with ‘English country house’ is what we’re going for in the cooking update in HOUSE OF LIGHT. The 20s and the 30s were something of a lost era in English cooking, when we got a bit more experimental and informal. (Then of course the Second World War, and food rationing in its aftermath, helped develop a rep for stodgy monotonous food that isn’t really deserved any more but I grew up in the 70s and 80s and Jesus Christ it was then.) So some of the dishes won’t look English at all, while some of them are so English they’ll make your teeth spin.

tl:dr; pudding is what you call dessert. But Yorkshire pudding is a savoury dish, duh, that you have alongside the main course. And meanwhile, also, when you put sausages in Yorkshire pud, you get toad-in-the-hole. (No, not bangers, sausages are generally only bangers if you put them in mash.) And black pudding is also sausage-related but isn’t something you should google if you plan on sleeping soundly tonight. Alright?”

…You can’t get this sort of #gamedev #content anywhere else, now, can you? It might sound a bit petty that we’re spending weeks of development time deciding on the most historically-plausible menu for a cast of fictional characters who may or may not be invited to dine at a made-up library on a made-up cliff, but this is actually the stuff Weather Factory games are made of! AK’s particular brand of bizarre but internally consistent period RPGs underpinned by a complex Aspect system means we not only have to research period-appropriate foodstuffs, but they have to make sense of people’s systemic affiliations too. For example, DI Douglas Moore feels like someone who’s more likely to want a simple, manly sandwich than some fancy French nonsense, but is there a manly sandwich that evokes his Principles of Heart and Lantern?

Speaking of Aspects, they’re also a good way to show the sorts of things we’ve been working on without spoilering anyone. So here’s a selection of new Aspects going into HOUSE OF LIGHT:

They range from aspects for all 63 non-language Skills in game to Agendas, Fears and Sympathies (feelings and intentions Visitors have which will affect their work if you add them to the Lighthouse Institute board). How many of them can you identify, do you think…?

ANYWAY. I hope to have some HOUSE OF LIGHT screenshots for you soon, but AK will be working on his lonesome next week as I have been called for a mysterious life event that I can’t talk about until afterwards. Until then!

First, a… warning? This is going to be a series of longish weekly (?) posts with no TL;DR takeaways. But we are confident that the core Alexis Kennedy audience doesn’t mind a bit of reading.

But I seem to be forgetting my manners! An introduction is in order: my name is Boris, and whenever I say we, I mean me and my colleague Mikhail. We are a two-geek team of Alexis Kennedy aficionados dispatched by Riotloc (of Baldur’s Gate 3 fame) to help Weather Factory localise Book of Hours into Russian. (Because OF COURSE a team whose forte is handcrafted localisation of narrative-rich videogames is bound to have its own chapter of the Alexis Kennedy fan club!) 

So, what can I say? Book of Hours is, without a doubt, a unique gig. At a minimum, unique in terms of how we go about localising it. As funny as it may sound, with Alexis’s prose we often find ourselves spending inordinate amounts of time on a single sentence, writing, and rewriting the translation – only to realise a couple of days later (usually during a lunch break or a family dinner) that there is a still better way to phrase it (which we HAVE to write down that very instant!).

I recently asked Alexis whether his writing routine looks like Mozart effortlessly transcribing his music, or like F. Scott Fitzgerald endlessly rewriting his masterpiece until it reads just right. He quoted Hemingway by way of an answer: ‘I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket’.

By the way, it is no random thing that I mentioned Fitzgerald. I vividly recall an episode from my Translation Studies where we were given different translations of The Great Gatsby and told to argue which of them was better. I distinctly remember poring over one such translation genuinely wondering why on Earth did the translator make so many lexical departures from the source material?

The answer is, there are more things to meaning, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your strict literal translation orthodoxy (or something like that; sorry, Shakespeare mate). Things like flow; prosody; visuality; alliteration. The Great Gatsby had them in spades, and, translated literally, would have lost most of what made it so, so beautiful.

Well, thus appropriately humbled, I try to go about reading Alexis’ prose in a more nuanced manner, always on the lookout for things beyond mere literal meaning. And things beyond mere literal meaning there are!

Take the following description:

“There in a smoothed hollow at the altar’s foot – something coiled like a serpent, but stiller by far.”

Seems straightforward enough, eh? You can probably Google Translate it into another language, and the meaning will be there, right? Right?

How about we arrange the phrase’s presentation a bit differently:

“There in a smoothed hollow at the altar’s foot –
something coiled like a serpent,
but stiller by far.”

Unless you are a chatbot, by now it should be pretty obvious that this looks suspiciously like poetry. Not strictly haiku verses, no – the same principles apply to things like rhetoric, speeches, etc. This particular technique is called a descending tricolon: when the phrase is arranged in lines of decreasing length.

Here’s a famous example from Churchill:

“(Never in the field of human conflict)
has so much been owed
by so many
to so few.”

There is also a reverse, or ascending, tricolon. Churchill once again:

“Now this is not the end.
It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

So, with that in mind, one will probably think twice before treating the following line of Kennedy’s as mere prose:

“Here, impossibly preserved, enfolded in the scars inflicted by the former prisoner’s energies.”

Let me arrange it for you:

“Here,
impossibly preserved,
enfolded in the scars inflicted
          by the former
                       prisoner’s
                                   energies.”

And this isn’t us philologists discussing arcane minutiae of the English language. These are incredibly potent tools that help poets, writers, and politicians charm their audience. To lose this aspect of a text would make it powerless, neutered. It simply won’t do.

And this is where we break off. Next time I will continue with my story of the eldritch horrors that lurk beneath Alexis Kennedy’s prose (kidding). Stay tuned!

Launch news first! The Lucid Tarot colouring book is NOW AVAILABLE on the Etsy shop. This is our first foray in to big, juicy art books – it’s only A5, but it’s nice and chunky because the pages are thick (so they can absorb whatever colouring’s applied to them without bleeding through the page). Check it out!

This is your first opportunity to look at all 78 cards of the Lucid Tarot deck in detail, and/or an excuse to spend hours and hours relaxing with an adult colouring book and your pens / pencils / crayons / pots of Porphyrine. It’s 172 pages of the Hours (and their Minor Arcana friends) as you’ve never seen them before – because YOU haven’t decided what Principles to associate with them. Well, now’s your chance! Scandalise the community by colouring the Hermit in flaming hues of Forge-y orange. Give the Stymphling a makeover in Nectar green. Each Hour has its colour, but maybe you disagree…

Aside from new merch, we’ve also been hard at work on HOUSE OF LIGHT. We’re not ready to share screenshots or release dates yet (though both of those are coming soon), but here’s a glance at some of the game writing and design decisions AK’s been wrangling with in the expansion.

AK here, talking about talking.

There’s about twelve thousand words of direct, in-character speech in BOOK OF HOURS – mostly things that Visitors say to you about their business, plus a little bit of villager chat.

“Heist? Oriflamme’s? Poppycock. Forgeries? Poppycock. Bureau all over the place arresting everyone though. Worse than Ortucchio. Bloody pardon me pain in my bloody pardon me hinder parts pardon me.”

— Dagmar, from The Affair of the Oriflamme Heist

None of it is the Librarian, who, says nothing at all out loud. This is mostly the result of a perennial game-writing problem: there’s a risk when you put words into the player’s mouth that the words aren’t ones they’d choose to say, though there’s more leeway with internal monologues, mental asides, and formal contexts like letter-writing.

Some games deal with this by making the words as bland as possible, which is only a solution in games where writing isn’t important.

A second solution is to make the words sufficiently characterful or witty that the player enjoys feeling they said them, which is easier when the PC is a strong character, say, a noir protagonist like Disco Elysium’s.

A third solution is writing several different lines for the PC to choose and hoping at least one lands, which you almost always have to do in a trad CRPG, and which at least diffuses the problem, though you’ll still often find (e.g.) you’re offered Haughty, Direct or Cheery when what you really wanted was Professional, or whatever. (Owlcat’s latest offering did this well, partly because the protag’s attitude to their exalted position naturally breaks one of several ways – partly by throwing a lot of text at the problem – partly because the writing was, by and large unusually good).

And a fourth common solution, one that I usually favour, is the silent protagonist. This is a natural fit anyway for a game where the most likely line of dialogue for the protagonist is shh! It’s put me in a slightly odd place with salons, though – the social events you’re holding for Visitors in HOUSE OF LIGHT. Various Visitors are probably going to be subject to occasional outbreaks of direct speech, but the host will likely keep their mouth shut – the current (TBC!) design is that you can sometimes intervene by adding a Soul card, but more along the lines of directing conversation than holding forth. I guess this makes the Librarian a better host, though. I did start worrying that it was odd that you serve food for your guests and don’t cater for yourself. I briefly fiddled with adding it to the design. But then I thought, is anyone really going to complain if I make salons require 20% less canned ham? Probably yes. But then that’s more canned ham for the rest of us.

What I can share, though, are some juicy new details: because the HOUSE OF LIGHT Steam page is now live! If you can, please head over and wishlist it, even if you’re a lucky Perpetual Edition holder who’ll get the expansion for free when it launches. (Wishlists make Steam think we’ll make them £££ which means they’re more likely to promote HoL / BOOK OF HOURS. Cf the algorithm section on this page from history.) It also means you’ll receive an email the moment the expansion is live, so you can dive in and start playing lickety-split. Thank you!

Here’s a gloss on the main points you’ll see on the HoL Steam page, to explain where we’re taking things…

Social Events

Host influential dinner parties in the crumbling splendour of Hush House. Choose a location that suits you – the Hall of Division, the Chapter House, or the Physic Garden, perhaps? – and send out invitations. Become tastemaker of the occult demimonde, or curate an exclusive society of only the most select adepts. Get to know the great and the good, introduce topics for discussion around the table, and observe the chemistry – or animus – between your guests. You’ll need food, drink, ambience, entertainment and more, but a successful soirée will influence the world in subtle ways, sending ripples far beyond your walls.

NB: AK is still working on the design and this is TBC, but it might be possible to to invite Visitors AND named Assistants – which means you could sit Reverend Timothy down next to Aunt Mopsy and see whether Good triumphs over Evil, or sandwich Denzil between Franklin Bancroft and Daymare to torture his saturnine soul.

Cooking

Your guests will grow hungry, and it’s up to you to cater to their interesting palates. Bake honey sandwich cakes and pair with port. Perfect beef suet pudding. Serve veal and cucumber, dark-smelling ‘garden nectar’, or a simple bowl of tinned peaches and cream. Dive into the dangerous world of 1930s European recipes and influence your attendees with your choice of spices, sweetmeats and dainties.

NB: like my teacake point above, PLEASE NOTE that we do not guarantee the presence of honey sandwich cakes, port, beef suet pudding, veal and/or cucumber, or tinned peaches and cream. We haven’t yet confirmed exactly what recipes you’ll be able to cook in the game, though we will update the description to reflect specific recipes nearer the time if they change from this list. If it makes you feel better, ‘garden nectar’ was actually a thing in 1930s English cuisine, apparently ‘an elegant variation of borscht’ which AK will undoubtedly turn into something horrible like Mondays broiled in the blood of the Thunderskin or something. In hindsight, maybe that doesn’t make you feel better.

Advanced Visitor Stories

You’ve dabbled in the Affair of the Oriflamme Heist. You’ve guessed what lies in the Messenger’s Casket. Now help your Visitors delve deeper. Encourage alliances between strangers, or convince an ally to help you stymie a foe. Using an innovative new system, influence the wider world with in-depth Visitor stories and see the results between the branches of the Wisdom Tree. Where now does the dappled rose flourish? What did Zuthi hear at the Roost? What is the deeper connection between Rowena, Yvette, and Ys?

Once you’ve met someone, you’ll also be able to add them to your address book and invite them to Hush House to pursue their business at a time of your choosing. When the Librarian calls, the invisible world listens.

NB: take particular note of ‘innovative new system’ and ‘see the results between the branches of the Wisdom Tree’. Again, this is more UI I can’t show you yet but it is a new format for storytelling in BOOK OF HOURS that a) looks significantly different from stories played out elsewhere in situation windows and b) connects more closely with the Wisdom Tree. More on that later, with pictures.

The Lighthouse Institute

You’ve wined, dined and appraised your chosen guests – now decide who’s worthy to form the board of the Lighthouse Institute. Who should be Treasurer? Who might suit Secretary Vigilant? Does your group all share the same agenda, or does one boardmember sympathise with the Chandler, while another fears his coming Dawn?

Your selection will found the influential Lighthouse Institute and set its course through the world. So take your time, and choose wisely.

Lucid Tarot colouring book

On another news-y note, we announced earlier this week that the Lucid Tarot colouring book – showcasing all 78 cards from our upcoming transparent stained-glass PVC deck – will launch on the merch shop on Wednesday 28th February. As with all our new merch, this is an experiment so it’s initially a limited edition: there’re only 500 copies of this colouring book, to get a sense of appetite for the item in question. They’re really lovely, though – so if you fancy a quiet night in with a glass of wine, or a sunlit afternoon watching YouTube and doodling or something – I think you might like them. 🙂