Book of Hours News

Holmes had Moriarty. Ripley had the Alien. Beowulf had Grendel (and Grendel's mum. And a rando dragon. Go away). Do you know what my nemesis is? CLIFFS. They are impossible to draw, no artist has ever been able to capture them properly, no I am not accepting any counterarguments or 'evidence' to the contrary at this time. I will return once I have located my smelling salts and have another go. (AK adds: writers' nemeses are counterintuitive plural agreement in English.)

That is to say, I've been working on the game's background this week and it's gone from the first to the second image, which suits the game and the way you'll use it much better. I want to parallel the unreal Wes Anderson-inspired symmetry of Hush House on the left, and to lean into the sense that this world is a place where things really do have real-world connections to one another, but aren't trying to represent any sort of visual reality. Plus, I like the spooky storybook vibe - I think it's a perfect page for Alexis' words to shine.



Still stuff to do, but we're getting there! AK and I both have also been working on various different weathers, as we'd like to show different environmental conditions, seasons (including the elusive Numa), and something AK alarmingly refers to as 'incidents'. We want you to feel like you're passing time in an actual, fully-functioning world, cultivating the places you've unlocked over time. Super WIP, but you get the idea below:



Similarly, we're iterating on ways to shroud various parts of the game before the player's progressed far enough to unlock them. Remember, the opening of BOOK OF HOURS is your sorry, amnesiac library washing up on the beach, soggily making their way for help to the village, and finally finding their way to their new gothic home... The answer is clearly groovy lil' clouds on cocktail sticks. Hah, you thought this studio could only do words!



AK, myself and freelance codemaster Chelnoque have all been working on card management, too. This is by far the most 'art heavy' game AK or I have ever worked on, and we need to balance those visuals, lots of gorgeous AK-writing, crafting windows and the numbers of cards you would expect either from late-game Cultist Simulator OR the storage basement of a mad shut-in Magic the Gathering collector. We're going with a drawer system for now, which we think is a good half-way house - but this may change.



AK's found the time to write a bit, too. January will probably be a writing-heavy month (bring on the coffee!) because we're hoping to get a solid, representative game build at the end of the month, but we already have early-game options like:

"I am the Librarian of Hush House. If I write Histories with an encaustum ink, it is no small thing. I'll need to use one of the languages of power, and muster enough of a Principle to support my assertions."

Or, conversely, if you're a reprobate -

"I am the Librarian of Hush House. I probably shouldn't write my Histories directly on the table."

AK adds: one of the temptations in game writing, especially when there's a lot of gaps to fill in, is to treat it like grout. This will do, let's put it in. And some writing is just filler. The introit is 'Move to the next day' and the follow-up is 'A new day dawns.' It could reflect the game state - 'the new day dawns fresh and cold' but that might be redundant if you're showing the weather graphically - which means you're teaching the player that the text is ignorable froth, and also landing yourself with a bit of extra complexity and opportunity for bugs. It could be a gag or image - 'Another day. I'll be useful once I have some coffee in me' or 'Another day. I'll shake the sleep from my limbs' but maybe that conflicts with something else, maybe it sounds repetitive... especially on day 20. It could be one of several random text strings, but that almost never works as well as you might expect - it tends to draw attention to the repetition rather than otherwise - and it then takes several times as long to write.

One approach is to treat it like negative space, and really just go with 'A new day dawns', which takes no time to write and which allows the more interesting text to pop. Sometimes the player just wants a tiny rest. Another approach is to do what you'd do in a song or a poem, which is to have a chorus - something that's intended to be read as repeated. This might mean a rhyme, or a striking image. As a result of Lottie's influence I rather like kennings, which crop up a lot in OE poetry. Kennings for dawn might be 'Day-beacon, sun-herald'. You get these things popping up in relatively trivial text and it might feel fresh and strike your brain at an angle. Or it might feel weirdly stagey, because people don't do that in games. But then BOOK OF HOURS does a lot of things that people don't do in games. We'll see.

Back in art world, Adrien has been beavering away at more Hush House rooms. There's loads more on the blog, or coming shortly in our newsletter, but feast your eyes for now on the abbey atrium, the Map Chamber and the infirmary's recreation suite...



Finally, I thought you'd appreciate a first glimpse at some of the faces who'll assist you in rebuilding your library. Again, there's a bunch more on the blog - but to whet your appetite, meet Rector Timothy and his friend, Mysterious Nun!



Onwards to January, our first playable build and LAUNCH in June. MERRY CHRIMBLETIDE FOR NOW, PEOPLE. AK and I wish you a wonderful holiday, a smashing 2023, and surprise and fluffy cats. 'Til next year! ♥

So sayeth 'Baron Silence', also known as Thomas Dewulf, also known as not the sort of person you'd probably invite round to play Pokemon Violet. He's writing about Ouranoscopy, a Winter-inflected skill of particular interest to Husherists, members of the Haustorium and, probably, magical goths.

This week we have a crunchy BOOK OF HOURS progress report: AK's been working on the start of the game, the end of the game, and the bit in between. Over to you, Alexis...



Most crafting systems are combinations of recipes. Rags + Thread = Bandages, Coal + Iron Ore in Furnace =  Iron Ingot. There's limited room for creativity. In Cultist Simulator I wanted to allow more inventiveness - hence the aspect system. What do you get if you mix a lot of Forge with a little Winter and Knock?

One problem with this is it suggests everything works like a stewpot. You put a lot of Forge and a little Winter and Knock in a pot, you cry out ARISE MY BEAUTY and a Caligine comes out. It doesn't matter if the Forge needs two followers or half a follower and eight lumps of coal. Except it does, because you need a Rite, which limits you to one follower and one lump of coal, or whatever. Rites are the unsung heroes of CS design. They make room for more elaborate and flavourful decisions about how to combine. Except except people quickly converge to the 'best' rites, the ones that don't use up hard-to-obtain resources (like Tools) and do use up easy-to-obtain resources (like Influences). This is why we make experimental games, to figure out this stuff.



In BOOK OF HOURS, I wanted more ways through the narrative crafting maze. Originally I said Workstations (Kitchen Range, Garden Plot, Mirrors, Piano) were like Verbs in Cultist. They are, but they're like verbs with pre-fitted Rites. Guest Beds accept a Visitor and a Beverage. Rest Beds accept an Ability that you want to recover more quickly, and a Beverage. A Piano accepts a Skill card, a Memory card, and up to three Ability cards, one of which has to be Chor. Mirrors accept a Skill, a Memory, an Ability, and a couple of Light Sources. If your Purifications & Exaltations Skill is really high, maybe you can make Inks of Power on the Kitchen Range or even at your Desk, but it's easier to do with Alchemist's Glassware given the limitations on what you can put in it. It's easier to study Hushery at the Pale Desk than it is at Abbess Nonna's Desk. And so on. I'm aiming for a system where resources keep being unexpectedly interesting in unexpected contexts as you unlock more of the game. As ever, we'll see how it goes.

***

You can see a bit of AK's design already in the room art Adrien and I are drawing. Lots of rooms have variations on basic furniture like shelves because, by last count, there's some bananas number like 1,000 books we expect to have in-game. But some rooms also have a specific workstation that will open up new crafting options when you unlock that specific room, making it a strategic and rewarding (we hope!) choice which rooms you unlock in which order. Take the rather alarming gurney-looking thing in the first image - this is the Scrimshawry workstation in the rooms of Natan of Regensburg - which allows you to do all sorts of artisanal things with whalebone and netsuke and (if no authorities are around) bodyparts.

You couldn't craft the same items - or use the same ingredients - with the giant secretary desk in the second image, because if you tried stuffing bodyparts into Thomas Dewulf's desk you'd find yourself in an oubliette faster than you could say 'I regret my previous life choices'.





(To avoid totally spamming this update, I've only included these two pictures - but there's lots more room art available on our blog.)

I can also share a first pass at Hush House itself, perched like a owl above sepulchral hills. Our whole art style is about leaning into the unreality of things, and into theatre- and dolls-house-like flatness and intrigue. So we’re testing out effects like this night-time scene – have a look at a WIP version:



The dark rectangles are, of course, where all the rooms go, and you'll unlock them sequentially by unlocking a room before them. Hush House has been gutted by a fire, so each room will need a specific set of resources to fix them up before you can use, furnish and capitalise on any resources contained within them. AK came up with the truly horrifying idea that in the later game, when you've worked your way through the building to Brancrug Gaol on the left, you could even unlock rooms with people (could they possibly be people?) still walled up inside...

But sunshine flowers kittens springtime this is a NICE GAME remember! Not like mean ol' Cultist Simulator though come on that bit about putting people in the cupboard is still very funny.

Anyhoo, I leave you with a reminder that Cultist is 40% off in the Autumn Sale, and everything in the merch shop (including The Lady Afterwards boxes!) are 20% off for Black Friday. Tune in next week for the Sixth History licence reveal, our subreddit AMA on Thursday, and more BoH work. This game is my favourite game I've ever worked on - I hope we do you proud next year. :)

Recently AK's been working on BOOK OF HOURS' visitor loop - which includes characters you might recognise, like a certain Detective-Illuminate Douglas Moore, but also new faces like Señor Corso Reverte and the notorious Princess Coquille.



Visitors aren't ready to share yet, but I can talk about Brancrug village, your conduit to the outside world beyond Hush House. It's the place you'll visit to find the assistance you need to restore the library to 'not a blackened ruin'.

First up, here are its five major stops: the post office, rectory, carpenter-slash-handywoman, smithy and village pub, The Sweet Bones. (A 'handywoman' is not what it sounds like - look it up!) Sometimes these buildings will be shut - at night, most likely, and perhaps in a particularly cold and impassable winter - but when they're open you'll be able to petition their owners for particular assistance. In The Sweet Bones, you'll also find a rotating roster of specialists who may come in useful: a maverick geologist, a surrealist painter, an occasional convict, or perhaps an unexpected nun.



Here's what it looks like when you put it all together. Remember this is ALL TERRIBLY WORK IN PROGRESS - lots more to do before it looks like the final thing. :)



Annnnd just as a petit digestif at the end of the meal, here's a look at a few new rooms - not all drawn by me this time! We have a modded Librarian's Quarters from our usual element artists Clockwork Cuckoo, the ground floor of the grand staircase by me, and the very first room you unlock in the game - the Lodge of Hush House - by Adrien Deggan, whom you may remember from that lovely concept art of Hush House and Brancrug Isle many yonks ago. He'll be working on a lot more rooms in the future, which makes me both exceedingly excited and relieved...



Hope you're hype about the shape of BOOK OF HOURS' world coming together! If you haven't already, please wishlist the game and tell your friends / familiars / enemies as a cunning double-bluff to wishlist, too. It helps us tackle the mighty beast that is Steam's 'How Successful Do You Want Your Game To Be' algorithm, so you would gain the blessings of the Mother of Ants if you do. 🙏🙏🙏🐜

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1028310/BOOK_OF_HOURS/

Happy Friday, everyone! We've been planning the full BOOK OF HOURS production cycle this week - actually, we planned the whole Weather Factory plan to 2028, which I think you would really like if I could tell you anything about it. But it seemed like a good time to post an update on what we've been up to.



(Also known as the BOOK OF HOURS tarot deck, the successor to Cultist Simulator's Tarot of the Hours.)

Today I've reached an important milestone: all the Major Arcana cards are complete! 🎉

Check out the Lucid Tarot page for a few larger versions of the below, or bask in the joy of seeing pockets of colour appear out of an inky blackness. I intend to go back and zhuz a few of these just before printing, but to give you an idea of the full set:



Each of these cards was designed, drawn and coloured from scratch, because obviously the Hours deserve as much love and attention as they can get. I wanted to put a more human spin on the Hours with this deck, as we already have a lot of gorgeous symbolism in the Tarot of the Hours. But what would you see in the chapel windows of the Church of the Bright Edge, for example? Or what would gaze semi-benevolently down upon the altar of the Temple Unceasing? I'd love for these to actually appear in the windows of Hush House in BOOK OF HOURS, but AK and I spent a lot of time talking production schedules this week and we have quite enough to get on with for that game already...

Minor Arcana cards are more numerous than Major Arcana (56 Minor, 22 Major) but they'll deliberately harken back to cards you've mostly already seen in Cultist Simulator. You've seen the 10 of Swords already, for example:



The 10 of Swords represents martyrdom, victimhood and 'bottoming out' - so the Incursus seemed like a pretty good touchpoint for that. You can expect to see a Lucid Tarot reimagining of your Cultist cards in the next set of these cards you see - anyone want to guess who I've chosen for the Page, Knight, Queen and King of Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles...?

★☽★ ★☾★ ★☽★ ★☾★ ★☽★ ★☾★ ★☽★ ★☾★ ★☽★ ★☾★ ★☽★ ★☾★ ★☽★ ★☾★ ★☽★ ★☾★ ★☽★ ★☾★



Among many other things, AK's been thinking about skills this week. When I turn around, I see the silhouette of his fabulous hair against a terrifying sheet of incomprehensible data, like an adorable kitten slightly obscuring your view of the sun exploding in the sky. It has tabs in it like this



And notes in it like this



AK alleges it is all very well organised and self-explanatory. The game has been through a hell of a lot of reworking and rethinking since we first announced it, so it needs a bit of a monster framework. For example, AK says -

The Illumination Wisdom: “Mystical exercises to purify and illuminate the self and its surroundings.” One of the skills in Illumination (and in Skolekosophy) started out life as the Four Regrets. This was an evocative name for a skill that deals with Edge and Winter. It referenced the ‘Four Regrets’ in an original CS tome, The Skeleton Songs (yes, like the podcast), and it was one of a list of skills (Three Exuberations, Nine Disciplines…) that sounded nicely esoteric. And it fitted into an elegant schema for crafting rarefied things about light and knowledge.

But when I went back to the skills list after some time away, I realised it’s hopelessly confusing to have Four Regrets at level 5, and Nine Disciplines at level 2. I didn’t want to change the whole scheme, so I tried out things like Crossroads Regret and Ninefold Practices. The numbers were still in there but less confusing.

But Secret Histories stuff balances rather carefully between the allusive and the incomprehensible. If I call a skill ‘Flame Enchantments’ that’s boringly on the nose and there’s no exploration to enjoy. But if I call it ‘Articulations of the Laminar Secret’ it sounds great, but it’s bloody hard to work out what the skill actually does. Especially when you’re crafting, like, a Wild Surmise into an Earthquake Intimation, or something.

So I went back again, and I worked it properly into our web of references. So Four Regrets has ended up as Ragged Crossroads (alongside Disciplines of the Scar and Meniscate Reflections). That would still be absurdly bewildering for anything game that isn’t about plumbing occult knowledge in a secret library. Even in BOOK OF HOURS, they’re the most obscurely named skills, compared to Drums & Dances or Lockworks & Clockworks. But anyone who’s dug into the lore – veteran, or newb ten hours in – will be able to guess which Hours they connect to, and once they see the items in the game, they’ll have enough to start figuring out what the hell they actually do.

Happy August, everyone! A juicy BOOK OF HOURS update for you today, as we hit an internal prototype, updated the store page and have a bunch of new lore and design to share. Wishlist the game if you haven't already and receive the blessings of the Sun-in-Splendour, from another History. 🙏



[Written by Mr Lore himself, Alexis.]

We've already intimated that Hush House is one of seven notable libraries, each of a very specific foundation that ensures the attention of the Hours. That foundation is sometimes called the Watchman's Tree (or occasionally, in Britain, the Covenant of the Rood). At one point I wondered whether we might some day release DLC to allow librarians to manage each of the other six. I think now that will never happen. Hush House drips with history. I've drawn on months of research and years of reading around UK history and mythology to make it fit together satisfyingly. The thought of trying to do something like that for a library in China or Indonesia just ain't realistic.

So there's centuries of material available for the librarian to explore, but we want players to be able to enjoy it without feeling like they've been given homework (5% of you want a fifty-page downloadable PDF, but for well-rehearsed reasons, it ain't gonna be that way). It's better, ultimately, for it not to be visible at all than to feel like homework. It still affects the game. An iceberg only just peeks out from under the water; the motive force of a swan is rarely visible; most of the universe is dark energy.

But it is going to be visible. As Reverend Timothy has already intimated, Hush House has grown up in layers, like a coral reef or a complicated personality. The game board reflects this. It's the opposite of the Cultist Simulator board, which begins as a tabula rasa until card arrangements form their own set of layers. With one exception, of course - there is a part of the CS board which isn't a tabula rasa at all.

Lottie tells the story of how she met Ian Livingstone on a train, he advised us to put a map in Cultist Simulator, and that's why the Mansus is in Cultist Simulator as a new screen.



BOOK OF HOURS is all map. Some things go in your hand at the bottom (making that hand usable with potentially dozens of cards is its own challenge, but we'll get back to that). But most things go on the board - for example furnishings, visitors, weather, and, of course, books. Most of the map begins locked and dimly visible. Hush House was, after all, abandoned seven years before the Librarian arrives, in the wake of a mysterious fire. That fire, of course, is part of the history you'll explore.

But the primary board isn't the only map. There's also the Tree of Wisdoms, which we've already shown peeks at. It's one part character upgrade system, one part history crafting workstation, and one part endgame planner. More about that soon.



You saw BOOK OF HOURS' situation window designs in an earlier blog, but we also need a way to manage a CS-number of cards and objects (there're about 700 individual cards in Cultist Simulator, to give you an idea of the scale) with the much more visual approach in BoH. You need to have a clear view of the whole of Hush House while also being able to zoom in and manage individual rooms, be able to open multiple situation and/or information windows, AND be able to easily find and select whatever resources you like from an inventory.

These designs will almost certainly evolve before we actually launch, but it gives you an idea of the mechanics going on behind the scenes if nothing else.

I hope it also gives you the same sense of a hygge little window on a magical world of books and Secret Histories that you control, which is how it feels to me! Also, you can stare at a little Neville portrait all day if you keep inviting him round. Do. His favourite snack is Assam tea and pistachio éclairs, and that is officially canon.





(And yes, Monsieur le Grand-Duc du Jambon is one of the many, many names belonging to Chi, our resident scaredy cat.)



I also have some new room mock-ups to share with you! You may have seen this first one if you're on our mailing listL it's the first chthonic room carved deep in the foundations of Hush House, and shows the Chapel Calcite - the Minoan-inflected sanctuary dedicated to the Red Grail, consecrated centuries ago by the mysterious Sisterhood of the Triple Knot.



The second is our first external 'room' which is, of course, actually a garden - near the pantry and kitchen gardens, but one of the more unusual ways to descend to the underbelly of Hush House through a secret set of stairs within the well itself. Like a sort of jolly reverse-version of The Ring, with Gothic architecture.



Last but not least, this is our first look at Nocturnal Branch's lonely, sea-damp cells. Sparse, cold and infested with things you hope are spiders, but at least you get a jaunty portrait of a certain Mr J. C. to keep you company (or to judge you, implacably, with those icy blue eyes).



Finally, we can also share some new element art from our most excellent freelance artists over at Clockwork Cuckoo, the same team who worked for us on Cultist Sim. This batch are all skills, some of which we've already mentioned in previous updates. Any guesses which images represent skills you've heard of? There's so much MEANING in all of them...





We're now finally in a position to announce a release date for This Damn Library Game. DRUM ROLL PLEASE:

[h2]📚🎉 BOOK OF HOURS will launch in June 2023! 🎉📚[/h2]

We'll confirm a specific date nearer the time, and are now are working towards a public, playable alpha/beta/whateva later this year. More on that in our next update - we really see BoH coming together, and AK and I are incredibly stoked by its future design and improvements.

Oh! And one more thing - WE GOT MARRIED! Finally. [AK adds: we've been together for six years, and trying to get married for three of them. We finally did it, and we did it under a ship. Worth waiting for even if I'd married her under a bin, though.] We're waiting on the professional photos, but here's proof! Anyway - more BOOK OF HOURS soon, Beloveds. It's gonna be swell. ♥