Book of Hours News

AK posted this to the subreddit last night:



"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!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

A few things to note:

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, 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!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/718670/Cultist_Simulator

“In the Mansus, the Hours strive one against another. As the struggles are resolved, they iron out the impossible, exalt the possible, tie the fraying braids of what has been into one golden ribbon of future. Everything is resolved. History becomes the past...”

https://store.steampowered.com/app/718670/Cultist_Simulator/

First things first: it's Cultist Simulator's sixth birthday today! This is the game that started the Secret Histories, which BOOK OF HOURS goes on to expand. We take you through a whirlwind tour of its 11-month development over here, if you're interested in game dev. If not, over to AK, to talk HOUSE OF LIGHT.

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 in the other points above. Does Coseley have an address? Is Bancroft actually alive? Can you invite Aunt Mopsy to dinner? I know that when I say ‘no’ 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.

HOUSE OF LIGHT 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 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.

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.”

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

- You can now sometimes find blackberries, rosehips and mushrooms on the Moor
- ESC now closes the detail window (for consistency: it already closed terrain and verb windows)
- You can order a greater variety of things from T.R.N and C&H - though they're of limited use until Cooking becomes possible
- Orders from C&H now arrive quicker - and from T.R.N., even quicker
- On fresh runs: a new tool in the Adept's Cell
- Typo fixes (especially that # in the Mazarine Room)

As ever please let me know at [email protected] about any issues you spot - with log and save files is better, but I have a saved reply that lets me tell you where to find 'em if you don't know

"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!