Book of Hours News

Merry Christmas, everyone! We're rounding off the year with a live AMA on the Weather Factory subreddit, starting in about half an hour. Come talk to us about anything BOOK OF HOURS, Secret Histories, why you should never leave the Stymphling alone with small children, etc.

In case you missed it, we announced our third and final entry into the Secret Histories universe yesterday: Travelling At Night, a dialogue-driven choices-matter combat-free CRPG in the tradition of isometric greats like Disco Elysium, Planescape: Torment and Fallout 1+2. So there will probably be a lot of questions about where the Histories that started in 1920s Cultist Simulator is going to end up. But we would be just as delighted to discuss subjects like our favourite Visitors, what goes on behind the scenes of game dev or why Hokobald is such a big pain in the bum. Go nuts.

(We reserve the right not to answer any lore questions, but anything we can answer, we will.)

The AMA starts at 6PM GMT / 10AM PDT. Hope to see you there!

Bring snacks.

Major news! We're announcing our next game, set in - and probably our last in - the Secret Histories universe. Meet Travelling At Night, a dialogue-driven choices-matter combat-free CRPG in the tradition of isometric greats like Disco Elysium, Planescape: Torment, and Fallout 1+2.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2915730/Travelling_at_Night

"Europe, 1948: myth-scarred ruins, night-sky abysses. Chitinous cities embrace the Change, or struggle against plagues of leaf and amber. The golden Incorporates of the US wage a cold war against the star-touched Ministries of the USSR. And there you are, guiding a carnival of wry, bold, complex characters through seaside sanitarium, Alpine castle, grave, hive, lignified cityscape."

It stars the ex-Suppression Bureau investigator Spencer Hobson, whom you first tried to kill in Cultist Simulator and then fed sandwiches to in BOOK OF HOURS. Spencer has, as you know, been recently hollowed out by the Worms from under the world, and in Travelling he's found himself with an unusual role to play in the reweaving of the Histories after the catastrophe of the Second World War. (There is, as ever, more to it. You could call him Spencer+.)

Expect forty-plus hours of notably replayable noir-myth narrative while you guide an occult carnival on a pilgrimage to locate buried power that could alter the balance of the Cold War. Assign that power as you see fit.



Travelling At Night is *really* early in production, so everything you see on the store page may change. Anyone who saw the Steam page for BOOK OF HOURS back in 2019 knows what I mean. But we think it's indicative of where the game is going: it'll be an isometric narrative-driven Disco-like CRPG. You walk around in it. At some point Alexis makes you make a horrible decision about the true nature of Grail or the origin of the Snub-Nosed Cat or whether to wear a hat given to you by a Ligeian that has a faintly gammony smell. Fascination ensues.

Wishlist the game if you'd like to follow Travelling's progress from nascent pre-alpha to swole full launch, and/or follow our developer page to keep up with all the Secret Histories at once. We're really excited about this one: we think it could be our best work yet. Join us while we attempt this grand ambition! That never went wrong in any game of ours, right?

You can also read a bit more about the thought behind it in a blog post Alexis has just published, and we'd love to see you to talk Travelling - or anything else - at our live AMA tomorrow on the Weather Factory subreddit. See you at 6PM GMT if you're free. ♥

"Reverend Timothy, having secured the attention of an attractive woman prepared to listen to his sermons, is now elucidating his previous *and* his next intended Christmas sermon. Coquille fastens her smile more charmingly on her face. Her eyes travel the room from end to end. There is no escape.”

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



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 blog post with a megalist of everything released so far.



Make sure you have the latest version (2024.12.m.3). 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.



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).



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

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Finally, there's quite a big reveal behind one of these doors, so you may want to susbcribe to our newsletter to make sure you don't miss anything. I think you'll like it.

From beta to live!

* Chel's performance improvements are in this patch
* Bug fixes for things the perf improvements did that needed fixing
* Russian localisation
* The usual straggler round-up of typos and tweaks

The later stages of BOOK OF HOURS get a little stuttery, and I get a mail every couple of weeks from someone who’s dismayed that their high end rig built around a 4090 RTX isn’t running BH with the buttery smoothness that it can manage for Cyberpunk 2077. We’ve tinkered over the last year and improved it since launch, but after we’d picked all the low-hanging and indeed medium-height fruit, there were still some stubborn rendering bottlenecks that just needed someone to spend a week sitting down with the Unity profiler and do some meticulous testing. I finally asked Chelnoque, our orbiting contractor, to do that, because it’s hard to carve out a week of my time and he’s better at that stuff than me anyway (I have occasional virtues, but ‘meticulousness’ is not among them).

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 ([email protected]) 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.