Book of Hours News

Just a short update, introducing a new library to the BOOK OF HOURS universe: Crossrow, the New Orleans hideout for musicians, nyctodromists and followers of the Laughingthrush. Click for a larger version!



More general BOOK OF HOURS updates in the latest blog. ♥

Picking out the BOOK OF HOURS updates from our latest blog, I wanted to introduce some new locations we haven't talked about before. Along with some (WIP!) concept art...

Speaking of libraries, I’ve also been working on some concept art for the places you’ll interact with in BOOK OF HOURS that aren’t Hush House. We haven’t entirely decided yet whether you’ll send a librarian out to visit or whether they’ll function more as a quest- and story-generators. But here’s a taste of what we do know.

• The Invisible Serapeum in the region of the Sands has survived the long decline of its parent library under the protection of the Forge of Days. The Forge does not usually favour libraries…
  
• The Nameless Library is maintained in a labyrinth-fortress in the lands once ruled by the Shadowless Kings. It specialises in daimonography, and in the First History the greatest strategists and warriors travelled there to study.
  
• The Tomb of Lies is the library of the Great Hooded Princes. It contains knowledge on things enigmatic, on the world before, and on the Fifth History. The Princes do not say ‘Knowledge is Power’, but rather, ‘Power is Knowledge.’
  
• Crossrow, in a garden city of the far West, is an establishment of uncertain age. It’s a gloriously decaying garden-mansion that specialises in nyctodromy, patronised by Sunset Celia.
  
• The Grove of the Green Immortals is a mountain-monastery of renegade Taoists. They specialise in horticulture and medicine, under the hand of the Applebright. It is supposed to be safe.
  
• The Haustorium, an enclave beyond the Evening Isles established by an alliance of Catholic friars with Incan magicians. It preserves those things it is thought unwise to preserve, and is in no way safe.
  

We'll share the final images when they're ready, but for now, here're the ones we're working on...!









This sprint's name, Curia, refers to the Curia of Hush House, the governing body of the library at the centre of BOOK OF HOURS. It has seven members, only one of whom we’ve revealed so far. Here's a letter from that one, a Dr Serena Blackwood who has little time for the Suppression Bureau's nonsense...





You might also want to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and/or Instagram for our daily library posts this month, celebrating National Library Lovers' Month. I've collected a bunch of the most beautiful libraries that actually exist in the actual real world, and am sharing one a day. Enjoy!

Happy 2021, librarians! A quick update for you on the first sprint of the year.

Alexis has been refactoring Cultist Simulator's code to form BOOK OF HOURS's foundation, and as a seasoned indie dev knows that there are two very early and very unimportant-sounding things you need to do early in development. These are saving/loading (in progress) and a game's main menu, which forces you to think about things early on that you wouldn't otherwise. It also makes a game feel alive for the first time - so here's the janky, placeholdery menu for BoH! IT'S A REAL GAME NOW, MA!



This means we can update the BOOK OF HOURS rose window for the first time! (For those of you who, inexplicably, don't follow every single update of mine, this is the TLDR image we're using to track BoH's development progress.) Dun dun duuuuh...



More over on the blog, including first-century book thieves, terribly taxidermied lions and the Cultist Simulator Nintendo Switch page now live and open for wishlisty biz. Woot!

Happy 2021, everyone! A quick update to show you our new BOOK OF HOURS roadmap, charting our development plan over the next year. You can pick out particular features you're interested in - furniture? Item organisation? PETS? - and watch an indie game's progress as it happens.

To keep things simple, we're also going to update this image...



...as we go, showing the various parts of the game and their progress. It don't look much now, but keep watching to see it bloom.

There's more info about BOOK OF HOURS's development in our last sprint update, XENOPHON. We already have our first musical feels back from Maribeth our wonderful composer, so you can expect some atmospheric tunes in the near future too.

More updates soon!

Alexis and I talked a lot about BOOK OF HOURS this sprint. We even started talking music with our Canadian maestro Maribeth Solomon, saying things like “The Ivory Dove remembers everything” and “IT’S ALL GOING TERRIBLY WRONG” and “can you make a song for the deep and secret murky fecundities of the sea”. Getting the first musical feelies back is always a real cornerstone in development, so I can’t wait to hear what Maribeth comes up with!

Meanwhile: Alexis has been building BOOK OF HOURS, but he’s doing it inside Cultist Simulator. This might sound like a long way to go about things, considering that BOH will look almost nothing like Cultist, but we want to reuse as much of Cultist‘s genetic material as we can. It’s very tempting, when you’re making a new game, to start over with a FRESH CLEAN code base in which you end up making weirdly parallel mistakes. We want to take advantage of the lessons we learnt making Cultist.

As Alexis puts it: consider BOOK OF HOURS a butterfly. Better: a moth. A Madagascan sunset moth:



(This gorgeous beast has a wingspan of nine centimetres. Local tradition has it that the souls of the dead take this form. Its colour comes from optical interference effects on the wings, not pigment. Its Wikipedia article claims that consumption of Its caterpillars’ silk causes a euphoric high; there’s a suspicious lack of citations on that, but, well, you never know.)

As you know, holometabolous metamorphosis is one of the most ghastly things in nature. (Can you tell this is Alexis yet?) The larva is driven by chemical imperatives to entomb itself alive in its own final skin. Then the absence of a protective juvenile hormone permits the activation of the imaginal discs embedded in its infant flesh. (Oh my god.) These spew forth a torrent of enzymes which tear apart most of its cells in a sort of quasi-digestive self-immolation, leaving it as basically a shiny bulging sac of goo in which the discs float, spinning new arts and organs round themselves out of the dissolved ex-caterpillar. When they’ve finished, the imago will explode out of its old skin like a John Carpenter special effect. Its wings at this point are still soft and soggy, with the consistency of used kitchen paper, so it’ll have to hang upside down, dry off and pump hemolymph into its wing-veins before it can take off and make innocent humans coo over its beautiful colours.

Anyway, so the point we’re at is that I’ve spun a cocoon round Cultist Simulator and I’ve pumped enough liquefying enzymes into it that it’s more goo than game at this point. This is progress.

AREN'T YOU GLAD YOU'RE WAITING FOR THIS LOVELY RELAXING LIBRARY GAME ABOUT PHAGOCYTOSIC LEPIDOPTERA? More on the blog, and our season one finale of the Skeleton Songs podcast, all about apocalypse. Enjoy!