Book of Hours News

"Al-Adim and Agdistis are gossipping, quietly, about al-Adim's patroness. 'Not a hundred legs,' says al-Adim, 'but more than you'd think…'"

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. 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 setting notes and 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 glask 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...



https://store.steampowered.com/app/2834350/BOOK_OF_HOURS_HOUSE_OF_LIGHT/

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...

Aaand we’re back! The previous article had us rambling about the structure of Alexis Kennedy’s prose, something that makes translating it akin to translating poetry.

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!

(Everyone of a certain age understands the importance of knowing where one's towel is)

Spoilers ahead. Skip to the food pictures if you don't want spoilers...

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.

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:

This is no longer a viable strategy.

So currently, instead, individual guests have some basic dietary requirements - usually based on their traditional interests (Arthur likes a food item present with Lantern in it) 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 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, which 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.

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 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!


(Right-click + 'Open image in new tab' for a larger version.)

You can see in the header image of this 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.

- Fix for on occasional crash on the menu screen
- Fix for a bug where unlocking the village but not the bridge, and then reloading, would LOCK THE BRIDGE FOREVER