Cultist Simulator News

Chel's patch notes:

Fixed an Apostle legacy bug that made it impossible to heal followers wounded by an enemy Long - but only if you were playing a localized (non-English) version of the game. No words enough to convey how hard the Devil worked to make this bug possible.

- Some sounds - namely, a card dropping in a slot, and a game speed being changed via a hotkefy - were not playing since god knows when.

- Improved performance in Exile when arriving in a new city with a lot of cash.

- Fixed a rare bug that broke the main menu if you were mashing buttons too eagerly during the splash screen.

- Fixed an erroneous text display in various escaped spirit hauntings.

- There was a missing colon in a substantial Edge commission's label. Could this be the very last typo in the entire game ?! Will you be able, oh dear players, to spot more ?!

- MODDING: IDs of entities are now completely case-insensitive for all purposes (in-game access, modifying, inheriting, localizing etc).

- MODDING: (super nerdy) Console autocomplete suggestions are now only displayed if there's more than 3 characters typed in - this way you aren't presented to choose from every entity in the game that starts with a letter E.

- HOTFIX A.2: Translation is correctly applied to verbs' initial slots.

First things first: Cultist Simulator is today's Daily Deal, at a deepest-ever (and frankly insane) 75% off. Check it out, and watch the ever-marvellous Systemchalk Broadcasting live on the store page now.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/718670/Cultist_Simulator

Oh! And all our merch is 25% off for the weekend, to celebrate Cultist being culty. Happy Friday, everyone!

In other news, AK posted this to the subreddit last night:



"Celebrating the completion of the Further Visitor Stories in HOUSE OF LIGHT. That means we're at 80% done, which means in turn that I should be sending out a handful of beta keys to the lucky few end of next week (sorry, if you haven't already heard, you didn't get your name drawn from the Clutches). HOUSE OF LIGHT is a chonker: already the same word count that the whole of Cultist Simulator was at launch."

So that means we hope you'll really like the upcoming expansion to BOOK OF HOURS, HOUSE OF LIGHT, and we should have a suitably chonky blog post with updates for you soon!

In the meantime, we're also trying something new. We've just uploaded the first episode of what we hope will become a fortnightly communal attempt to predict the future! This is the Weather Forecast. This is the Weather Forecast. We love games - you love games too, probably. We talk about games all the time - you have actual lives, and maybe only talk about games a bit. So we thought it would be fun to pull back the curtain on professional game development and take a look at the week's top ten most popular upcoming games on Steam. Using publicly accessible data and a bit of Google-fu, we then each try to estimate that game's Week 1 review score, which is a general indicator of a game's 'success' at launch. One developer's success criterion is different from another's, of course - a first-time solo dev could be rightfully delighted by 50 reviews in the first week, but 50 reviews in the first week for an Electronic Arts launch would probably cause heads to roll. So this isn't about judging games as 'good' or 'bad' or even 'successful' or 'unsuccessful' - it's about seeing whether we can reliably predict the fortunes of a game just before launch, because that would be really useful for all our future Weather Factory games. And we happen to think it's pretty interesting, too.

So take a look at the first episode, join in with a YouTube comment if you like, and come back in a fortnight for us to see if we got any of the numbers right!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

A few things to note:

• All data we're using is publicly available. We don't have any insider knowledge, other than experience making games ourselves!
  
• The 'Popular Upcoming' list on Steam is region-specific, so if you're not in the UK you may see a different list. There are loads of games in 'Popular Upcoming' that are never mentioned by traditional games press or streamers. Hopefully you'll discover some games you've never heard of that you actually quite fancy playing.
  
• We'd love you to join in if you'd like to. If you want to guess any Week 1 review numbers, just leave a comment on the video. You can be smug in the next video when we recap what actually happened against our predicted numbers.
  
• This isn't a value judgement on any of the featured games. We're just looking at data and talking about what it might mean.
  

Good luck to all games mentioned! We hope your launches - which are by far the scariest part of game dev - go brilliantly. And happy culting, everyone else!

“In the Mansus, the Hours strive one against another. As the struggles are resolved, they iron out the impossible, exalt the possible, tie the fraying braids of what has been into one golden ribbon of future. Everything is resolved. History becomes the past…”

“…There are, however, exceptions.” It’s Cultist Simulator‘s sixth birthday today, so let’s make an exception for her. This quote is from a high-level Secret Histories fragment called ‘Unresolved Ambiguity’, and it could absolutely be a metaphor for game development in general. Cultist could have been a hundred different games, but it ended up consolidated in the one it became (and the one it evolved into, after years of post-lauch DLC and updates). You may remember that we made Cultist Simulator in 11 months, with a budget of around £150,000. It’s now reached somewhere between 850,000 to a million people, making some serious allowances for chaotic data like Humble Bundles and Amazon Prime. So in honour of her birthday here’s a whirlwind tour of just under a year’s game development, starting with the most important part of all: the What Even Is This Javascript Greybox Prototype.



People who’ve played Cultist Simulator will recognise a surprising amount in these early prototypes. The art direction isn’t there – AK is definitely theme and mechanics first, ‘colours’ second – but the game’s Cookie Clicker influence is particularly apparent, as are important other factes of the final game like verbs (Study, Dream, Work…), timers (45s countdown for ‘The body has its needs…’) and resource-based storytelling (Secret Histories 1 + Occult Scrap 1 = Recruit an Aficionado of Conspiracies). I’ve worked with AK since 2015, when we met at his previous studio, and he always has a weirdly clear idea of what the game will be at the start. It’s just difficult for him to explain it and for anyone else to see inside his head. I’m now well-versed in the two to six months of trust where I have no idea what this game is that we’re apparently making, before it all falls into place. That moment for Cultist was this updated prototype, where you could first see the basic card interface:



I get it now! I see what all those grey buttons on their grey backgrounds represented! This gives me a lot to work with – I can now see what needs to be artified – while being flexible enough for AK to still be able to play with basic mechanics and the all-important recipes at the heart of the final game. Looks recognisable now, right? But where it really comes to life is when AK and Catherine Unger, our brilliant freelance artist, settled on a suitable art style:



It now looks so much like the real Cultist Simulator, but with enough difference, to trigger a bit of sense of the uncanny valley. I still mourn those stick-timers on the verb tokens, for instance! But this was where people really started to sit up and take notice of the game we were about four months out from completing. So with a bunch of hard game dev, which looks in real terms like this…



…Cultist Simulator, as we know and love her, was born. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GAME ABOUT PEELING BACK THE SKIN OF THE WORLD! We all really love you.* ♥

*Apart from Dread. Nobody loves Dread.

HOTFIX: lore consumed on influence upgrades, sorry!