Book of Hours News

(and finally the bookshelf labelling system supports Chinese characters)

ladies germs and others, hello!

Most of this patch is prep work for HOUSE OF LIGHT (out next month) and for Russian and Chinese localisation (out next week, available now if you add loctest=1 to your config.ini). But some of it will interest those of you who (a) exist, like me, in the narrow span of now (b) also like me don't speak Russian or Chinese.

There are now hotkeys for expand/contract trays - F1-F4 by default

A few months back a very polite lady with arthritis wrote to me and asked if I could add this, so once I'd mostly wrapped HOUSE OF LIGHT, I found some time to do it. And I'm glad - I hadn't realised how much difference it makes even to those of us without especially disabled fingers.

SHIFT-TAB (or SHIFT-other-assigned-sort-key) now undoes card sorting

Likewise. That Undo button really is titchy.

Apples are sometimes found on the moor

So once HOUSE OF LIGHT is out, you can make Apple as well as Mushroom Meringue. yw. Although also once you have HoL, Timothy will sometimes bring apples to dinner from the Rectory orchard, as a thank you gift. (Mr Kille is your man for marrows.)

Raw pheasant and beef can now be fed to your cat (or other carnivorous pet). Cats, and vipers, now drink milk

And carnivores eat pilchards and mackerel and things. This was absurdly hard to do, because of knots about Sustenance, Raw, Ingredients, Remains that I'd tied myself in, and may have quirks.

The Bronze Knife is now a Tool

The main reason I put this unfathomable Thirzan athame in the game is to make sandwiches, so I forgot to add the tool aspect.

Typewriters, and the Chronsicord, can now be used as Inks - and Typewriters won't be exhausted.

Of course typewriters have much lower Aspect levels than most inks. It's balanced out rather nicely.

Numerous fixes for Russian and Chinese loc. ...like, settings tooltips now expand dowwards and no longer uses small caps, for intricate font reasons...and, like, tweaking card sorting order so we can support multiple alphabets! Let me know at support@ about any anomalies.

So many. And you'll probably see more bullet points in LEVINSEN and MATILDA saying 'still more loc fixes, also Japanese'

ESC now leaves photo / HUD hidden mode

I only put photo mode in originally when we were getting Trailer Farm to make our trailer, and they wanted UI-less screenshots. I'd forgotten it was there. But a helpful soul pointed out that if you hit F11 without knowing what you'd hit, the experience could be traumatic.

Scrolling in the Wisdom Tree now disabled while you have Settings open. Finally set the Wisdom Tree to right-click-drag only. (I didn't realise left-click-drag even worked, and it didn't work well, so it confused people.)

Next game (you read the teasers about the next game, didn't you?) will be a bit less experimental, so we'll make up less of the UI as we go along.

Thanks all! Enjoy your F1-F4ing.

[ We published this at 6.27PM (har har, Alexis) on Saturday 17th August on our website - but we wanted to share the feels and what's next on Steam, too! Happy anniversary, BOOK OF HOURS. ]





On August 17th 2023, just before six o’clock in the evening, nervous glasses of wine in our trembling hands, cats winding demandingly round our trembling ankles, Lottie and I clicked the big green LAUNCH button for BOOK OF HOURS. (I believe we placed both our hands on the mouse.) In the great tradition of software launches everywhere, nothing at all happened.

The BOOK OF HOURS Steam forum went berserk. The Weather Factory subreddit went insane. Our social media accounts were instantly submerged in a battering vortex of good-natured but anguished queries. Meanwhile Lottie and I tried every channel we knew to contact our Steam rep and find out why our game hadn’t launched. (The GOG version had launched on time, but you probably know that the bulk of a small dev’s PC sales usually come through Steam, and that’s where the vortex was centred.)

The thing is – and this is absolutely central to the indie dev experience – all this vortex and berserkness business manifested as me and Lottie sitting in our living room typing quickly and saying things like ‘erk’. There wasn’t even any background music, unless you count the cats complaining about our lack of attention. My job is this: all day I sit in front of a screen in a room with my wife and I type (if I’m on a writing break, I sit somewhere sunnier with nicer coffee and type on my own). Then occasionally I type something different from usual, and that immediately causes tens of thousands of people to play our game, and/or send me emails about how our game isn’t working. Any software developer will be familiar with this. Even when I worked at bigger companies, launches were often anticlimactic. You make a deal of it with bunting and countdowns and sparkling drinks in flimsy plastic cups, and then it goes quiet and someone comes back from the toilet and says ‘oh did we launch?’ But all over the world there is a ripple of change.

The launch was fine in the end. Our Perpetual Edition offer (any and all expansions free if you buy at launch) meant we had to do something a bit non-standard, the non-standard thing gunged up the launch process, and our famously affable Steam rep, though theoretically away at the time, got back in contact to sort it out. We launched, a not quite half an hour late. By then, the degree of desperate enthusiasm showed us that the launch was likely to go okay.



And lo, it was so. BOOK OF HOURS has been the most successful game of both our careers. Not in a dramatic and overwhelming sort of way – what we do is, and will always be, too niche – but it’s sold a little more than Cultist Simulator, which itself sold a little more than SUNLESS SEA, and the Steam review % is much than either of those. This makes sense – if you build a following, and get better at making games, you do a little better each time – but it’s never something you can count on, especially in the fervid rainforest which is game development.

So if you bought a copy – whether you’ve been following us since the early days, or you just stumbled across us last week – then thank you! Without your support, Weather Factory would be a rain-haunted shell. And thanks to your support, we likely have the resources to make a third game… of which more shortly.





Remember the origin story of BOOK OF HOURS? Back in 2019, I was working on the GHOUL and PRIEST expansions for Cultist Simulator. At that point I’d already been working for two years on this cult-themed body-horror-heavy game where you play a manipulative monomaniac, and both those expansions are particularly gruesome. So in a melancholy moment I tweeted this:



It got a lot more engagement than I’d expected and before we knew it we found we’d sort of announced our next game before we’d known what it was ourselves. But we went ahead and for the first time in my career I made a game which contained no cannibalism nor allied trades. It was a bit of a departure and I’m relieved it worked out so well.

HOURS is not quite a certified horror-free game. You can find manskin parchment if you poke around the house, there were some pretty nasty things going on with the Cucurbit Prison, and of course some of the occult books were written by people who these days would merit their own soberly narrated Netflix documentary. But it’s clearly the kindest game of my career. The tone throughout is eerie rather than grisly, and the worst thing you-as-protagonist can do is ‘forget to feed the cat for a bit’. (Well yes there are the endings where you can unleash theomachic conflict or convince the Sun to start drinking blood again, but that’s all another History.)

I’ve really enjoyed the quieter tone, and it’s been good discipline for me as a writer to work without some of my habitual tools. But I don’t want to leave those tools in the box forever. So Cultist was sour, HOURS was sweet, Game Three will be sweet and sour. More on that, as I said, in a bit.





The first few months were post-launch support. BOOK OF HOURS was in better shape coming out of the gate than Cultist Simulator. This was as I hoped – we had a nice long beta period and a shared codebase – but HOURS is quite an intricate machine and there were lots of things that needed tidying up. And we’ve added a lot of stuff too: the crafting helper panel, the zoom-to-cursor feature that I finally got working properly, the order form system, layers and layers of optimisation, all that good stuff. The secret panels in a few rooms of the house that you can find only with a sharp eye or a lucky click. And the feature almost no-one has discovered, where whatever you put in the thirteenth niche will appear in the next game. And the weird sub-feature of that which I think no-one at all has discovered yet.

Oh and the Hush House Advent Calendar, which I put together very hastily because I wanted to do something nice for my Christmas-obsessed wife, and which as a result was a little buggy and in particular contained perhaps the most notorious bug ever to haunt these halls:



(if you’re interested, I did a whole post on the cause of that and of another dozen hauntings, here.)

Anyway since then, it’s been localisation and the GIGANTIC EXPANSION.





We’re about to release full Russian and Chinese localisation (they’ve been in beta a few months now), which is – you know Hofstadter’s Law? ‘It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law’. Localisation is always more work than we think. Obviously the translators do the bulk of the work, but some of that work means asking me questions which take, um, considerable attention…



Now, not all the questions are this complicated, but there are literally hundreds of questions in all, and few were questions you’d want to answer before a second cup of coffee. My hat is off to Dove Archive and Riotloc (our Chinese and Russian translators respectively) for the intense and sophisticated effort they put into navigating the labyrinth of lore.

And then there’s the technical and the UI side: the problems of presenting Chinese characters in a way that works with the logo on the menu screen, the many Russian texts that tend to be longer than English labels and creep over the edges of things, the dozens of items I accidentally hardcoded and had to rip out and dynami…fy..icise, the week Lottie spent just putting together book covers for Russian and Chinese characters, and the Gordian mare that resulted from keeping card ordering rules semi-consistent across all three languages…



We’re tidying up now, finally. Japanese should be along later; depending on all the usual boring business reasons we’ll make a decision on what other languages to localise into; and we do plan to release Steam Workshop / localisation modding support for people to do their own translations.





Don’t get excited. My answer on game modding support remains ‘maybe, someday, but not a priority right now.’ But we do want to offer, specifically, modding support for languages, so that will be along in a while.





Okay, now we’re talking. HOUSE OF LIGHT, the expansion I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year, is nearly out. It’s an absolute chonker. Here are the headline features:

FOOD: Combine Sustenance and Cooking Ingredients at the three Kitchen workstations to create dozens of new dishes. You’ll need Kitchenware items to find all the recipes.

WRITING-CASE: You’ll receive this at the end of the first Spring season after you’ve replied to St Rhonwen. You’ll be able to use the calling-cards left by satisfied visitors to invite those visitors back to the House.

SALONS: Place food and drink in one of the six Salon rooms, and then use the bell to begin a Salon. Do it right and you’ll be rewarded with sparkling conversation… and lessons.

MANUSCRIPTS: Use Paper, Ink, and a Skill to write a Manuscript based on that skills, and satisfy your Visitors’ needs for more specific knowledge. Lessons from Salons will help you improve those Skills and write more useful Manuscripts.

FURTHER STORIES: Once you’ve completed an Incident, follow it up in the Tree of Wisdoms. Visitors will need more specific help here – perhaps a book on a specific topic, or a specific book.

THE INSTITUTE: Look for the lighthouse, out at sea. When your Visitors are ready, use it to establish the true heirs to the Curia of the Isle, unlocking a new kind of ending.

The Salons, Further Stories and Institute are, as a one-time lawyer of mine would say, ‘compendious’; and honestly even the Food absorbed a frankly insane larder-load of effort. So there’s more content (and new art) in HOUSE OF LIGHT than in all the Cultist Simulator expansions put together.



Because it’s such an absolute beast, and because I’ve now been working on BOOK OF HOURS, on and off, for five years, there won’t be another expansion any time soon. I think we will probably go back and do at least one more (working name HOUSE OF HUES) but if so it’ll be after a break. And when I say ‘break’, I mean a few months of pre-production on Game Three.





Reverse psychology huh. Well you got me. Here’s a little.

• Three will be set in the Secret Histories world again. There are clues about it in the Lighthouse Institute endings in HOUSE OF LIGHT.
  
• It is unmistakably the most ambitious thing Lottie and I have yet done. It’s also the most traditional thing we’ve done, although it’s really not very traditional.
  
• It’s something that many players, over many years, have vocally hoped for.
  
• At least two characters in Three are among the most beloved, or most provoking, fan favourites.
  
• At least two other characters in Three are fervently discussed Secret Histories characters who have made at most fleeting in-game appearances. One of those characters is located in the first person in Three.
  
• The working title of Game Three is the name of a beloved book from the Secret Histories.
  
• It contains at least one carnival.
  

Once we’re through the support aftermath of localisation and HOUSE OF LIGHT, we’ll begin pre-production: the process of answering questions like ‘what will this look like’, ‘will it actually work’ and ‘do we have enough money to make it’. And when we come out of the other end of that, we’ll have more to tell you.

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

AK is away currently on a mysterious writing trip - his last before HOUSE OF LIGHT launches - to finish up the Lighthouse Institute. You've probably noticed that our teasers up until this point about the Lighthouse Institute have been, er, here is a lighthouse! Here are some aspects! Be excited! Well, soon we will have some more specifics to share. People in the HOUSE OF LIGHT beta seem to really enjoy the interactions between visitors - for example, surprising revelations about the hobbies of well-known occultists:

"Douglas and Serena discuss a shared, concealed, but evidently profound passion for knitting. Douglas: 'If you tell anyone outside this room, I'll have you locked up.' Serena: 'If you tell anyone outside this room, I'll give King Crucible your address.'"

Or subtle yet pivotal decisions in other occultists' lives:

"Morgen and Arun return to their conversation about the Obliviates, who once were called the House of Lethe. She playfully accuses him of being a member, and asks him where he keeps his three chains. He parries by asking her where she keeps her notorious key of black sapphire. Morgen crosses her legs and asks Arun silkily if he would like to search her. After a moment, he says very definitely that no, he would not."

AK is writing even more to cover all the potential interactions of the Lighthouse board. As there are six positions available and 1-3 people (I think!) who are eligible for that position, there're a lot of different possibilities here. It's actually a great illustration of the danger of hidden multipliers in game development. To take an art pipeline example: 'I will add two vases of flowers to each room in Hush House, which will take 5 minutes each. That's quick! OK, so there are 107 rooms, multiplied by 10 minutes, which gives me a task list that will take... realistically three full days' work to complete. Maybe I won't add those flowers then.' This is why AK has to basically rent a room and lock himself inside it when it comes to these big writing tasks in BOOK OF HOURS. It's on us for making such a complicated, baroque game, but hey!

What I can share at this stage is that AK is doing a lot of work on endings, making them truly reflective of your choices and your specific Lighthouse Board. Here's our new Lighthouse-specific ending page, for example (please note this is a mock-up, and may change before we launch):



You'll be able to click on each of the Lighthouse Institute roles ('Secretary Vigilant', etc) to see what that specific person did in that specific role. So you should have a really good sense at the end of a HOUSE OF LIGHT playthrough of the effect your choices had on the world, and what the personalities you put in power went on to achieve. Hopefully that will feel crunchy and rewarding, like a fresh slice of Amber Pumpkin Pie. But more news on this soon, when AK returns!

(Also, more news on the Lucid Tarot and Cultist Simulator coming to consoles on the blog, if you're interested in other Weather Factory news.)

"Lucia the Eyeless will parley with the Chandler. Perhaps she'll alter her loyalties; perhaps the Chandler will free poor Ghirbi..."

For no particular reason, I've been reading about the punk and post-punk scene in Leeds in the late 70s. The nascent legends and the stillborn ones; the rumours, the quibbles, the descendant anecdote (did one of the members of goth band YOU really work in the mortuary of Leeds General Infirmary? Or did he, as Mark Andrews reports in Paint My Name In Black And Gold, actually work in the haematology department? which one would be goth-er?); the sense that one had to have been there and in many cases the relief that one wasn't - it reminds me of the ceremonial magic scene in London in the late nineteenth century, with Mathers and Waite and Crowley et al. There are differences. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its splinter satellites favoured hashish over amphetamines. The F Club in Leeds had much stickier carpets than the Horus Temple in Bradford. But there is the same sense of giant egos and flawed but considerable talents clashing like stags (funnily enough, it's mostly men) over projects that most of the world has no interest in.

And of course the turn-of-the-century occult context in Britain was part of the inspiration for Cultist Simulator. You can see it in the way Coseley and Hersault fell out over creative differences, in Galmier's origin story working a day job in Camden Lock, and of course with My Deeds, My Powers, My Achievements and the Injustices Perpetrated Against Me. (You know Crowley got so petty about Arthur Waite, as in the Rider-Waite deck, so much that the antagonist in Moonchild was called 'Arthwaite'?)

It's less of an inspiration for BOOK OF HOURS. Partly this is because it's just a nicer game, and most of the people who turn up at Hush House are people you might want to spend time with, so the feuds are less vicious. Partly it's because mythology naturally extends upwards and outwards, and that tends to mean characters get more powerful and deeds get grander. But most of it still happens off-stage; which is the whole point about the Brancrug and the Librarian, that you're the hermit in the forest and not the adventurer. Some of it is (in the HOUSE OF LIGHT Further Visitor Stories) pretty significant offstage events. The sabotage of a synthetic Name; the seduction of St Lucia the Eyeless; the dread, epic, Mansus-rocking scheme that Douglas calls the 'Wangle'; these still manifest mostly through people coming to your house and asking you politely if they can borrow a book. Although sometimes deciding who you'll lend the book to can determine what gets blowed up, in at least one case which book you lend might determine who betrays what, and now and then your decisions might haunt the House. Like maybe if you let magic bees move in under your stairs.

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

Lottie interjecting at this point. Did someone mention Further Visitor Stories? We're trying something new in the upcoming expansion, incorporating a more 'direct' way of reading and advancing Advanced Visitor Stories (new UI!) and a visual representation of where each story is on your Wisdom Tree. People who buy HOUSE OF LIGHT - or the lucky so-and-sos who have Perpetual Edition and get it automatically for free - will notice some dark, delicious additions to their Wisdom Tree. Each one represents a different visitor story, and is placed somewhere appropriate on this occult map: the Affair of the Friar's Tapestry, for instance, sits between Bosk and Skolekosophy, whereas you'll find the Unfinished Lark between Horomachistry and Ithastry. Once you've finished a story from the base game, you'll unlock a starry constellation which you can interact with to take that story further through HOUSE OF LIGHT, turning your Wisdom Tree over the course of the expansion into an arcane narrative star-chart.

Here's a mock-up of the effect, along with some of the transitional states:



The inspiration is all very beautiful here - zodiac and astrology come to mind - but then of course HOUSE OF LIGHT also introduces you to this guy:



His name is POOR WISP and he will absolutely steal your hearts. Especially when you hear what sound he makes in-game... OK, so he might be a bit Worm-y. Nothing a good vet can't fix! Probably! If any of you take him to the Foundry (AK has inexplicably made this an option) I will know and so will the gods. "The wisp begins to wriggle, pulling away from the heat, mewing like a broken-winged gull..."

I'm sorry. There must be something in my eye. Next week we should have new stock of the Tarot of the Hours in the shop, a second Weather Forecast, and if it so pleases the Flowermaker, I might even receive my final test deck of the Lucid Tarot. More intel as we receive it. Now go hug a Wisp.