Light Is Always The Answer
"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.
What now?
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!
The Lucid Tarot
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.