Book of Hours News

(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

You know you're in the right place when the top-rated post on your subreddit is:



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' after 'tea'. As it was, if we ate early, say five rather than seven in the evening, it was called 'high tea'.

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, if 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 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-accurate 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!

I've pushed a small update (2024.e.3.14) to the EHSAN patch on beta., repeat ON BETA, this won't show up in the main channel until the 5% of players who live in the beta channel have kicked the tyres. There is one E A R T H S H A K I N G feature that I need to work up to because it's SO EXCITING so let me start with the trivial ones:

(1) I've fixed some nonsense with the sound effects
(2) Steam integration now works again on Apple Silicon builds, and wasn't that a big ball of lovely fun to fix on a Monday morning
(3) you get a rotating news flash thing that we can configure at our end, not just a repeated chunk from the patch notes
(4) Lottie's added an icon on books that shows you which skill they cover

but

[h2]
(5) YOU CAN NOW DECIDE WHAT KIND OF VEGITIBLES IS IN THE SACK!!!![/h2]

Select ONIONs, PUMPKINs, TOMATOIDS LEEKS or a RANDOMLY DRAWN MARROW. This is us, right now, earning our CHOICES MATTER tag.

Anyway though most of the patch is prep for the upcoming HOUSE OF LIGHT expansion (in fact the VEGTIBLES feature is a step towards the cooking, and for the localisations which will land later this year (Chinese, Japanese and Russian in the first batch, maybe more later). There's lots of rewiring and furniture-moving and one of the lessons I learnt the hard way from CULTIST is that when these things roll out they often break the vanilla version. So I'm testing ahead of time.

Anyway there's enough Chinese for Chinese-speakers to be able to get a preview, but because the preview's very unfinished we've locked it away behind some extra config stuff. More below, from the Chinese translators themselves:

"This is the Dove Archive. We are responsible for the simplified Chinese localization of BOOK OF HOURS.

At present, the beta branch of Book of Hours has launched the Chinese localization of the beta version. You can enter the beta branch by the following ways: On the left side of the Steam library interface, right-click Book of Hours, left click "Properties" Then select the "Betas" bar on the left side of the pop-up window. Select "beta - here might be dragons" from the dropdown box, and download possible game updates to enter. On the top of the main page of the game, a button marked "English" will appear. Click it and choose "Chinese (Simplified)", and the Chinese version is all set up.

In addition to the translation of the text and so on, we also provided suggestions for the book title abbreviations. In this test, you can experience the cover and spine localization of the following three books: "Travelling at Night(Vol. 1)", "Travelling at Night(Vol. 2)", "Travelling at Night(Vol. 3)", these pictures are all handmade by Weather Factory! This is done so that the player can distinguish books from pictures. Don't hesitate to leave your feelings about this in the comments.



If the localization button (marked "English" initially) is not appeared, please follow instructions below: Add the line loctest=1 to the end of your config.ini file. You can find config.ini in C:\Users\[YOUR USER NAME]\AppData\LocalLow\Weather Factory\Book of Hours\config.ini

It should be noted that it is still a work in progress and the current translation is not the final product. Due to some game program problems, there are still many problems on the display of the texts, we will actively assist Weather Factory to repair them, please understand. The official translation is expected to go live this summer.

Wish you a new experience in Brancrug, which is full of Chinese."