Book of Hours News

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.

"Chitinous cities embrace the Change, or struggle against plagues of leaf and amber..."

AK here. It still tickles me how few people realise Weather Factory is literally just two people (plus, ofc, trusted freelancers). I answer support emails every week addressed to 'Dear Support Team'. We get speculative applications from people who want to intern with us and don't realise we work out of a flat. Microstudios composed of couples are more common than they used to be, but it's still mildly unusual. We like it, but it does make it harder to take holidays, and it does mean we don't hire.

I mentioned recently that we've been working on BOOK OF HOURS, on and off, for five years now. Some of that was pre-production, some of that was the HOUSE OF LIGHT expansion, but it's a long old time. A undergraduate degree and a master's degree. A newborn infant grown enough to go to school. If you planted an apple pip five years ago, you could be eating its fruit today.

Or to put it another way, I was 47 when we started making BH and I'm 52 now. And it occurred to me that I've made about four games over fifteen years, and in another fifteen years I'll be 67. So Lottie and I had a chat about whether and how we want to spend the next fifteen years doing this - both making games, and making games as a microstudio with just the two of us.

If you like our games, you'll be glad to hear that the answer is, broadly speaking, yes. Maybe we'll do more physical goods, maybe I'll take a couple of years out for that MA I keep threatening, but we like working together and we like the artisanal nature of the whole thing. I don't actually get up on a Monday and think, yay, support mails, Lottie doesn't get excited about answering Etsy merch queries, but we do like handling this stuff personally: the people who own the company and make the games are the same people you're talking to, and it also stops us from getting too up ourselves.

We've talked about Weather Factory being a bit like a band or an artistic partnership but most days it feels more like a family-run cafe that happens to sell coffee through Steam.

And we like making things for you lot - for our audience, I mean. I said as long ago as Fallen London that there is something to be said for making games that work like reading comprehension tests. It brings in a calmer class of customer.

We've got ideas, then, for at least another couple of games before we turn in our Dev Guild hat feathers and go off to roast coffee in the hills. Over to Lottie to talk about the next one.



We're still working on BOOK OF HOURS localisation (in case you missed it, HOUSE OF LIGHT's now fully playable in Simplified Chinese) and various important but not terribly scintillating tech and bug support issues. But as AK says above, we took some time to take stock of where the studio is and what we want to do next. We've decided that, while we might come back to BOOK OF HOURS later, we've said what we wanted to say with it through HOUSE OF LIGHT. We'd like to leave it there - for now.

Currently, we're Fascinated by an idea for Game Three. We've spent some of the past couple of months prototyping the underlying tech system and art direction so we can share something that's reasonably likely to look like the final game. We need to do a bit more work before we can announce, but here are some tidbits we can share:

• The game is set in the Secret Histories... but another decade on. The world has changed and keeps on changing.
  
• It may appeal to AK's older audiences - from Fallen London and Sunless Sea - as well as Weather Factory fans.
  
• It's a new genre we haven't developed before. It's a natural fit for the kind of stuff we do, though.
  
• It's ambitious. And...
  
• ...who's this?

We don't have a Steam page we can send you to (YET), but if you like what you see, follow our developer page on Steam and you'll be pinged when we announce it!



In other Secret-Histories-but-not-video-games news, our long awaited Lucid Tarot is finally out now on the Etsy shop.



Check out the store page, or read more about the intent behind the deck - and see a derpy Elegiast sketch - over on the blog.

An update for all our Chinese players: HOUSE OF LIGHT is now fully playable in Simplified Chinese! This means all 270,000 words of BOOK OF HOURS + HOUSE OF LIGHT are translated in beautiful Simplified Chinese, and you can play the whole game including the expansion from start to finish.

If you find any bugs with the Chinese translation, please email them to [email protected]. Otherwise, enjoy!

We think we'll be releasing a Russian beta for HOUSE OF LIGHT some time next month, and Japanese beta for BOOK OF HOURS by the end of the year. More info on that when we have confirmed dates.

For now, thanks for being patient. Stay classy, Brancrug!

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

In other news, a reminder that we're launching our long-awaited Lucid Tarot on the shop next Thursday (31st October) at 6PM GMT, should you wish to see the Secret Histories gods represented in new and interesting ways, and that our next big announcement will be what AK and I are moving onto now HOUSE OF LIGHT is complete (apart from localisation, of course).

Fans of Cultist Simulator or BOOK OF HOURS will, I think, be pleased...

- The Wonderful Shape is now a Dawn book
- Rest at Sweet Bones: Winter message now only displays in Winter
- Tooltip on first-day ticker no longer flickers
- Tuned some of the sounds in the Wisdom Tree
- If you've completed a standard ending more than once, it will no longer display twice in the endings screen. (If you've created a complex Lighthouse ending, with different values, more than once, it'll still display multiple times.)
- Chinese and Russian versions of the *closed* village buildings now display correct highlight images.
- Added some guard/logging code that might help with that bloody High Contrast Settings crash.

- HOUSE OF LIGHT: Fixed an issue with the Unfettered Eye where Hokobald would sometimes be Inspired under the wrong circumstances.
- HOUSE OF LIGHT: Olympe's Heist option is available even without a fiddly Memory trick
- HOUSE OF LIGHT: The beehive won't offer the upgraded beehive recipes by default any more.
- HOUSE OF LIGHT: St Tentreto's Altar is consistent about its requirements after a change.
- HOUSE OF LIGHT: Spencer no longer confuses Down for Out
- HOUSE OF LIGHT: Mushroom Meringue now correctly causes Regret
- HOUSE OF LIGHT: Avenues of Enquiry have a less misleading 'no Incident just now' message (and in new games that message will occur only when there are no Incidents at all)
- HOUSE OF LIGHT: The endless struggle against typos remains endless, but it proceeds
- HOUSE OF LIGHT: A slight tweak to Arthur's request for one of the De Horis versions to make it clearer which version he wants.
- HOUSE OF LIGHT: Rowena's Burden will no longer cause the Convene action to loop frighteningly.
- HOUSE OF LIGHT: Some work to make founder names localisable in complex ending screens, which happily also put a correct hyphen in al-Adim.
- HOUSE OF LIGHT: Echidna is now blocked from attending Salons in both of her modes.