Book of Hours News

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."

Disclaimer: Weather Factory is a two-person husband-and-wife team. In the following guest post, the two localisers translating BOOK OF HOURS into Russian are incredibly kind about AK's writing. Because we are Extremely English we're both touched and slightly embarrassed. Please note we didn't write this ourselves under the pretense of being two other people we just made up.

First, a… warning? This is going to be a series of longish weekly (?) posts with no TL;DR takeaways. But we are confident that the core Alexis Kennedy audience doesn’t mind a bit of reading.

But I seem to be forgetting my manners! An introduction is in order: my name is Boris, and whenever I say we, I mean me and my colleague Mikhail. We are a two-geek team of Alexis Kennedy aficionados dispatched by Riotloc (of Baldur’s Gate 3 fame) to help Weather Factory localise Book of Hours into Russian. (Because OF COURSE a team whose forte is handcrafted localisation of narrative-rich videogames is bound to have its own chapter of the Alexis Kennedy fan club!) 

So, what can I say? Book of Hours is, without a doubt, a unique gig. At a minimum, unique in terms of how we go about localising it. As funny as it may sound, with Alexis’s prose we often find ourselves spending inordinate amounts of time on a single sentence, writing, and rewriting the translation - only to realise a couple of days later (usually during a lunch break or a family dinner) that there is a still better way to phrase it (which we HAVE to write down that very instant!).

I recently asked Alexis whether his writing routine looks like Mozart effortlessly transcribing his music, or like F. Scott Fitzgerald endlessly rewriting his masterpiece until it reads just right. He quoted Hemingway by way of an answer: ‘I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket’.

By the way, it is no random thing that I mentioned Fitzgerald. I vividly recall an episode from my Translation Studies where we were given different translations of The Great Gatsby and told to argue which of them was better. I distinctly remember poring over one such translation genuinely wondering why on Earth did the translator make so many lexical departures from the source material?

The answer is, there are more things to meaning, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your strict literal translation orthodoxy (or something like that; sorry, Shakespeare mate). Things like flow; prosody; visuality; alliteration. The Great Gatsby had them in spades, and, translated literally, would have lost most of what made it so, so beautiful.

Well, thus appropriately humbled, I try to go about reading Alexis’ prose in a more nuanced manner, always on the lookout for things beyond mere literal meaning. And things beyond mere literal meaning there are!

Take the following description:

"There in a smoothed hollow at the altar's foot - something coiled like a serpent, but stiller by far."

Seems straightforward enough, eh? You can probably Google Translate it into another language, and the meaning will be there, right? Right?

How about we arrange the phrase’s presentation a bit differently:

"There in a smoothed hollow at the altar's foot -
something coiled like a serpent,
but stiller by far."

Unless you are a chatbot, by now it should be pretty obvious that this looks suspiciously like poetry. Not strictly haiku verses, no - the same principles apply to things like rhetoric, speeches, etc. This particular technique is called a descending tricolon: when the phrase is arranged in lines of decreasing length.

Here’s a famous example from Churchill:

"(Never in the field of human conflict)
has so much been owed
by so many
to so few."

There is also a reverse, or ascending, tricolon. Churchill once again:

"Now this is not the end.
It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

So, with that in mind, one will probably think twice before treating the following line of Kennedy’s as mere prose:

"Here, impossibly preserved, enfolded in the scars inflicted by the former prisoner's energies."

Let me arrange it for you:

"Here,
impossibly preserved,
enfolded in the scars inflicted
          by the former
                       prisoner's
                                   energies."

And this isn’t us philologists discussing arcane minutiae of the English language. These are incredibly potent tools that help poets, writers, and politicians charm their audience. To lose this aspect of a text would make it powerless, neutered. It simply won’t do.

And this is where we break off. Next time I will continue with my story of the eldritch horrors that lurk beneath Alexis Kennedy’s prose (kidding). Stay tuned!

"To mix the rarest colours, a merciless detachment is required."

Firstly, EHSAN (2024.2.e.11) is now live for everyone on the BOOK OF HOURS main branch. The changes are:



[h2]Conversations in HOUSE OF LIGHT[/h2]

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

AK here, talking about talking.

There’s about twelve thousand words of direct, in-character speech in BOOK OF HOURS – mostly things that Visitors say to you about their business, plus a little bit of villager chat.

"Heist? Oriflamme's? Poppycock. Forgeries? Poppycock. Bureau all over the place arresting everyone though. Worse than Ortucchio. Bloody pardon me pain in my bloody pardon me hinder parts pardon me."

— Dagmar, from The Affair of the Oriflamme Heist

None of it is the Librarian, who, says nothing at all out loud. This is mostly the result of a perennial game-writing problem: there’s a risk when you put words into the player’s mouth that the words aren’t ones they'd choose to say, though there's more leeway with internal monologues, mental asides, and formal contexts like letter-writing.

Some games deal with this by making the words as bland as possible, which is only a solution in games where writing isn’t important.

A second solution is to make the words sufficiently characterful or witty that the player enjoys feeling they said them, which is easier when the PC is a strong character, say, a noir protagonist like Disco Elysium's.

A third solution is writing several different lines for the PC to choose and hoping at least one lands, which you almost always have to do in a trad CRPG, and which at least diffuses the problem, though you’ll still often find (e.g.) you’re offered Haughty, Direct or Cheery when what you really wanted was Professional, or whatever. (Owlcat’s latest offering did this well, partly because the protag’s attitude to their exalted position naturally breaks one of several ways - partly by throwing a lot of text at the problem – partly because the writing was, by and large unusually good).

And a fourth common solution, one that I usually favour, is the silent protagonist. This is a natural fit anyway for a game where the most likely line of dialogue for the protagonist is shh! It's put me in a slightly odd place with salons, though - the social events you're holding for Visitors in HOUSE OF LIGHT. Various Visitors are probably going to be subject to occasional outbreaks of direct speech, but the host will likely keep their mouth shut - the current (TBC!) design is that you can sometimes intervene by adding a Soul card, but more along the lines of directing conversation than holding forth. I guess this makes the Librarian a better host, though. I did start worrying that it was odd that you serve food for your guests and don't cater for yourself. I briefly fiddled with adding it to the design. But then I thought, is anyone really going to complain if I make salons require 20% less canned ham? Probably yes. But then that's more canned ham for the rest of us.

[h2]Colouring book out now[/h2]

Lottie here again, and I'll sign off with the news that the limited edition Lucid Tarot colouring book is now live in the Etsy shop.



This is your first opportunity to look at all 78 cards of the Lucid Tarot deck in detail, and/or an excuse to spend hours and hours relaxing with an adult colouring book and your pens / pencils / crayons / pots of Porphyrine. It's 172 pages of the Hours (and their Minor Arcana friends) as you've never seen them before - because YOU haven't decided what Principles to associate with them. Well, now's your chance! Scandalise the community by colouring the Hermit in flaming hues of Forge-y orange. Give the Stymphling a makeover in Nectar green. Each Hour has its colour, but maybe you disagree...

- All bookshelf plaques are now invisible until they have text

There were just a handful of plaques that were invisible even when blank

- 'De Bellis Murorum' is now considered a Curia period not Dawn period book

There are a few others that are arguably miscatalogued, and a few more that are debatable (is 'Ettery After' actually Baronial or Curia? It depends partly on whether Eva actually wrote it or not) but I'm cautious about changing them because it's easy to break implied continuity, and easier still to break people's saves

- It's no longer possible to repeat unique book interactions with visitors

You can't farm Peel anymore

- It's no longer possible to clone a village resident by hiring them twice

Mrs Kille is not twins

By popular demand, added period marker aspects to books; no in-game effect, just helps with scholarship

It does crowd the visuals a bit, and there'll be another aspect on each book coming in the free release alongside HOUSE OF LIGHT, so this may not stick

- MacOS: now includes binaries to run natively on Apple Silicon

Happy perf day

- That last window shelf in the Windlit Gallery is now a bookshelf

It was upsetting peopley

- Fixed an anomaly where you could dump a language card from a window and the aspects display didn't update

Man, this was complicated. It's always the little things

- Analysing a craftable item will usually now give you hints on how to craft it

I've been working on some new revolutionary (!) UI for our upcoming BOOK OF HOURS expansion, but I can't show you it yet because it's not final functionality, and we don't want people misconstruing an early mock-up of an eight-slot situation window devoted entirely to teacakes as a promise that HOUSE OF LIGHT will feature, at minimum, 400 different types of bun. But I am very excited to show it to you when we're more certain of the direction: it makes a lot of our upcoming expansion functionality much clearer.

What I can share, though, are some juicy new details: because the HOUSE OF LIGHT Steam page is now live! If you can, please head over and wishlist it, even if you're a lucky Perpetual Edition holder who'll get the expansion for free when it launches. (Wishlists make Steam think we'll make them £££ which means they're more likely to promote HoL / BOOK OF HOURS. Cf the algorithm section on this page from history.) It also means you'll receive an email the moment the expansion is live, so you can dive in and start playing lickety-split. Thank you!

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

Here's a gloss on the main points you'll see on the HoL Steam page, to explain where we're taking things...

[h2]Social Events[/h2]

Host influential dinner parties in the crumbling splendour of Hush House. Choose a location that suits you - the Hall of Division, the Chapter House, or the Physic Garden, perhaps? - and send out invitations. Become tastemaker of the occult demimonde, or curate an exclusive society of only the most select adepts. Get to know the great and the good, introduce topics for discussion around the table, and observe the chemistry - or animus - between your guests. You'll need food, drink, ambience, entertainment and more, but a successful soirée will influence the world in subtle ways, sending ripples far beyond your walls.

NB: AK is still working on the design and this is TBC, but it might be possible to to invite Visitors AND named Assistants - which means you could sit Reverend Timothy down next to Aunt Mopsy and see whether Good triumphs over Evil, or sandwich Denzil between Franklin Bancroft and Daymare to torture his saturnine soul.


[h2]Cooking[/h2]

Your guests will grow hungry, and it's up to you to cater to their interesting palates. Bake honey sandwich cakes and pair with port. Perfect beef suet pudding. Serve veal and cucumber, dark-smelling 'garden nectar', or a simple bowl of tinned peaches and cream. Dive into the dangerous world of 1930s European recipes and influence your attendees with your choice of spices, sweetmeats and dainties.

NB: like my teacake point above, PLEASE NOTE that we do not guarantee the presence of honey sandwich cakes, port, beef suet pudding, veal and/or cucumber, or tinned peaches and cream. We haven't yet confirmed exactly what recipes you'll be able to cook in the game, though we will update the description to reflect specific recipes nearer the time if they change from this list. If it makes you feel better, 'garden nectar' was actually a thing in 1930s English cuisine, apparently 'an elegant variation of borscht' which AK will undoubtedly turn into something horrible like Mondays broiled in the blood of the Thunderskin or something. In hindsight, maybe that doesn't make you feel better.


[h2]Advanced Visitor Stories[/h2]

You've dabbled in the Affair of the Oriflamme Heist. You've guessed what lies in the Messenger's Casket. Now help your Visitors delve deeper. Encourage alliances between strangers, or convince an ally to help you stymie a foe. Using an innovative new system, influence the wider world with in-depth Visitor stories and see the results between the branches of the Wisdom Tree. Where now does the dappled rose flourish? What did Zuthi hear at the Roost? What is the deeper connection between Rowena, Yvette, and Ys?

Once you've met someone, you'll also be able to add them to your address book and invite them to Hush House to pursue their business at a time of your choosing. When the Librarian calls, the invisible world listens.

NB: take particular note of 'innovative new system' and 'see the results between the branches of the Wisdom Tree'. Again, this is more UI I can't show you yet but it is a new format for storytelling in BOOK OF HOURS that a) looks significantly different from stories played out elsewhere in situation windows and b) connects more closely with the Wisdom Tree. More on that later, with pictures.


[h2]The Lighthouse Institute[/h2]

You've wined, dined and appraised your chosen guests - now decide who's worthy to form the board of the Lighthouse Institute. Who should be Treasurer? Who might suit Secretary Vigilant? Does your group all share the same agenda, or does one boardmember sympathise with the Chandler, while another fears his coming Dawn?

Your selection will found the influential Lighthouse Institute and set its course through the world. So take your time, and choose wisely.





On another news-y note, we announced earlier this week that the Lucid Tarot colouring book - showcasing all 78 cards from our upcoming transparent stained-glass PVC deck - will launch on the merch shop on Wednesday 28th February. As with all our new merch, this is an experiment so it's initially a limited edition: there're only 500 copies of this colouring book, to get a sense of appetite for the item in question. They're really lovely, though - so if you fancy a quiet night in with a glass of wine, or a sunlit afternoon watching YouTube and doodling or something - I think you might like them. :)