The later stages of BOOK OF HOURS get a little stuttery, and I get a mail every couple of weeks from someone whos dismayed that their high end rig built around a 4090 RTX isnt running BH with the buttery smoothness that it can manage for Cyberpunk 2077. Weve tinkered over the last year and improved it since launch, but after wed picked all the low-hanging and indeed medium-height fruit, there were still some stubborn rendering bottlenecks that just needed someone to spend a week sitting down with the Unity profiler and do some meticulous testing. I finally asked Chelnoque, our orbiting contractor, to do that, because its hard to carve out a week of my time and hes better at that stuff than me anyway (I have occasional virtues, but meticulousness is not among them). You can see the fruits of his labours here:
and you can enjoy them in a passworded branch (perf_alpha) on Steam. Ill tell you the password in a minute, but Im making it slightly more obscure than usual, as a gentle filter, because Im going on holiday next week and I dont want to come back to too alarming a support queue! Chel or I might write up something in the mode of this post or this one, because people are often surprisingly invested in the details, but heres one representative example of the Knuthian rule that optimisation is rarely about what you expect: one of the problems turned out to be a quirk of some earlier optimisation code. Theres some manual culling code that ensures the game doesnt render objects that arent on screen (we needed to go further than Unitys built-in culling, for reasons) and this used an additional probably-superfluous RectMask2D component, which was disproportionately hammering perfomance for reasons neither of us particularly understand. Anyway, none of these problems were at GPU level, which is why fancy graphics cards made no difference: this is all about Unitys decisions about which rectangles to render, and how, before it passes draw calls up (down? off? out? in?) to the GPU, and we just have an extraordinary number of rectangles in Hush House. But there are things weve done about them and those things are done in the perf_alpha branch which you can access with the password thedorgeoffays. It is considerably smoother. Your saves should pass happily between perf_alpha and either the beta or the main branch. Like swans, or the jet setters in that Mad Men episode. These things may have unexpected consequences in the UI, like sort order being a bit odd, or some things not being clickable that should be, because Chel really had to go into the walls and move some of the wiring: metaphorically speaking you may happen across a lightbulb that only glows when you open the garage door. So please let us know (support@weatherfactory.biz) anything you see, along with a save game so we can easily reproduce it! and Ill take a look when Im back from Norway on the 18th. If youre not reckless enough to try out something with alpha in the name, and who can blame you, then you can expect the improvements to arrive on beta before Christmas if youre lucky. In the meantime, here is some firmly pre-alpha UI and even more firmly pre-alpha writing from the Game Three prototype which has been occupying my time lately. Dream furiously, people.

[quote]"Chitinous cities embrace the Change, or struggle against plagues of leaf and amber..."[/quote] 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 theHOUSE OF LIGHTexpansion, 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?

• 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?

The Lucid Tarot

An update for all our Chinese players: HOUSE OF LIGHT is now fully playable in Simplified Chinese! This means all 270,000 words of BOOK OF HOURS + HOUSE OF LIGHT are translated in beautiful Simplified Chinese, and you can play the whole game including the expansion from start to finish. If you find any bugs with the Chinese translation, please email them to support@weatherfactory.biz. Otherwise, enjoy! We think we'll be releasing a Russian beta for HOUSE OF LIGHT some time next month, and Japanese beta for BOOK OF HOURS by the end of the year. More info on that when we have confirmed dates. For now, thanks for being patient. Stay classy, Brancrug! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2834350/BOOK_OF_HOURS_HOUSE_OF_LIGHT/ In other news, a reminder that we're launching our long-awaited Lucid Tarot on the shop next Thursday (31st October) at 6PM GMT, should you wish to see the Secret Histories gods represented in new and interesting ways, and that our next big announcement will be what AK and I are moving onto now HOUSE OF LIGHT is complete (apart from localisation, of course). Fans of Cultist Simulator or BOOK OF HOURS will, I think, be pleased...

- The Wonderful Shape is now a Dawn book - Rest at Sweet Bones: Winter message now only displays in Winter - Tooltip on first-day ticker no longer flickers - Tuned some of the sounds in the Wisdom Tree - If you've completed a standard ending more than once, it will no longer display twice in the endings screen. (If you've created a complex Lighthouse ending, with different values, more than once, it'll still display multiple times.) - Chinese and Russian versions of the *closed* village buildings now display correct highlight images. - Added some guard/logging code that might help with that bloody High Contrast Settings crash. - HOUSE OF LIGHT: Fixed an issue with the Unfettered Eye where Hokobald would sometimes be Inspired under the wrong circumstances. - HOUSE OF LIGHT: Olympe's Heist option is available even without a fiddly Memory trick - HOUSE OF LIGHT: The beehive won't offer the upgraded beehive recipes by default any more. - HOUSE OF LIGHT: St Tentreto's Altar is consistent about its requirements after a change. - HOUSE OF LIGHT: Spencer no longer confuses Down for Out - HOUSE OF LIGHT: Mushroom Meringue now correctly causes Regret - HOUSE OF LIGHT: Avenues of Enquiry have a less misleading 'no Incident just now' message (and in new games that message will occur only when there are no Incidents at all) - HOUSE OF LIGHT: The endless struggle against typos remains endless, but it proceeds - HOUSE OF LIGHT: A slight tweak to Arthur's request for one of the De Horis versions to make it clearer which version he wants. - HOUSE OF LIGHT: Rowena's Burden will no longer cause the Convene action to loop frighteningly. - HOUSE OF LIGHT: Some work to make founder names localisable in complex ending screens, which happily also put a correct hyphen in al-Adim. - HOUSE OF LIGHT: Echidna is now blocked from attending Salons in both of her modes.

Thanks to the hard work of the Chinese localisation team, there's a preview version of the Chinese localisation of HOUSE OF LIGHT available now. There may be missing texts or oddities - please let us know about these at support@weatherfactory.biz. To see the preview, switch to the beta_loc branch (Properties | Betas | beta_loc). support@weatherfactory.biz beta_loc -> -> beta_loc Thank you!

The headline feature here is a patch to address the problem some people saw with blank Further Stories events in legacy saves. There are also a bunch of typos and story logic oddity fixes, and a tiny additional feature that will become apparent after completing a couple of Further Stories. to repeat: this is on the beta branch! Properties | Betas ->dropdown | Beta if you want to give it a spin.

[quote]"Mrs Kille respectfully addresses Morgen as 'Chaculette'- a title that Morgen seems to recognise - and bows her head. Morgen touches a finger to her lips, and then to Mrs Kille's forehead - perhaps a blessing, perhaps something else."[/quote] It's finally here! HOUSE OF LIGHT is now available on Steam. Don't keep reading this! Go play it! That honey-haunted pumpkin pie ain't gonna bake itself! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2834350/BOOK_OF_HOURS_HOUSE_OF_LIGHT/ HOUSE OF LIGHT adds a novel's worth of new content to BOOK OF HOURS. It's free to anyone with Perpetual Edition and 10% off for everyone in the first week of sale. It's also purchasable as a new Anthology Edition bundle (including BOOK OF HOURS, HOUSE OF LIGHT and the soundtrack) all with an extra 15% off everything - just like the Anthology Edition of Cultist Simulator. This is the best value and most definitive version of the game you can buy. Once purchased (or if you're a PE owner, once you update to the latest version of the game), you should see a new HOUSE OF LIGHT button on the bottom left-hand corner of the main menu screen.Clicking it will open a 'spoiler-light' introduction to the new content (and how to get it in-game), but I'll share it here too to whet your appetite:

FOOD

A WRITING-CASE

SALONS

MANUSCRIPTS

FURTHER STORIES

THE INSTITUTE

Please leave a review if you like it

Excuse me this expansion appears to be only in English

Anything else?

[quote]"Before gods arose from blood, before ever ape stood upright, this was the language heard in the House of the Sun...[/quote] All 200,000 words of BOOK OF HOURS are now available in Simplified Chinese and Russian! (Japanese language is coming a little later.) Weve tried to capture the poetry of the original English as much as possible, so whatever language you choose, we hope its a joy to play.

Firstly, make sure youve updated the game to the latest version. BOOK OF HOURS should then automatically load in your default language (so if you browse Steam in Simplified Chinese, the game should automatically display in Simplified Chinese). If it doesnt, just select the language you want from the Languages drop-down menu on the title screen. We strongly recommend - we urge you with a desperate passion - to start a new game after switching languages. It might bork your game if you dont! If you encounter any bugs (particularly language bugs, like typos or translations that dont make sense) please email support@weatherfactory.biz and let us know. Some things might be a stylistic choice on behalf of our excellent localisers, but we want to make these the best they can be. All feedback is welcome. Please note that our major expansion, HOUSE OF LIGHT, launches next month on Thursday 26th September. Its huge - including hundreds of new recipes, Visitor interactions, and more - so it will not be playable in Russian or Simplified Chinese on launch day. Well release Russian and Simplified Chinese for HOUSE OF LIGHT as soon as its humanly possible to translate it. Thank you for being patient with us while we make it happen! If you like BOOK OF HOURS, please leave us a nice review and tell your friends about it. Its really hard getting the word out to people we cant speak to directly, so help us spread the melancholy joy of Brancrug by using the enviable language skills we dont have. Thank you!

[quote]"Facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, they generally run away." Mervyn Bunter, Clouds of Witness (1926)[/quote] Facts are the bricks of life, but they need a few licks of paint before you want to look at them. Mr Gradgrind of Bleak House said: "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else."And he turned out to be the villain of the piece! So today Iamgiving you facts, but coated in glorious technicolour.

HOUSE OF LIGHT

The Lucid Tarot

HALLOWEEN (Thursday 31st October 2024)

* A fix specifically for the logo not changing when you switched specifically from Chinese to Russian in the menu. * Another fix for the bug the logo fix caused, where all buildings in Brancrug looked like the Sweet Bones.

(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. ]

ONE YEAR AGO TODAY

SO THE MOST SUCCESSFUL GAME OF YOUR CAREER IS THE NICE ONE

SO WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO IN THE YEAR SINCE LAUNCH?

TELL US FUN HORROR STORIES ABOUT LOCALISATION, AK

OOH, MODDING?

WHAT ABOUT THAT EXPANSION?

OBVIOUSLY YOU CANT TELL US ABOUT GAME THREE.

• 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. Its also the most traditional thing weve done, although its really not very traditional.
• Its 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.

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: [quote]"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.'"[/quote] Or subtle yet pivotal decisions in other occultists' lives: [quote]"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."[/quote] 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.)

[quote]"Lucia the Eyeless will parley with the Chandler. Perhaps she'll alter her loyalties; perhaps the Chandler will free poor Ghirbi..."[/quote] 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 forCultist 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 withMy 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 forBOOK 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 isthe 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.

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 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=zzsm1Gy9FRU;full][/previewyoutube] A few things to note: [olist]

[quote]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...[/quote] https://store.steampowered.com/app/718670/Cultist_Simulator/ First things first: it's Cultist Simulator's sixth birthday today! This is the game that started the Secret Histories, which BOOK OF HOURS goes on to expand. We take you through a whirlwind tour of its 11-month development over here, if you're interested in game dev. If not, over to AK, to talk HOUSE OF LIGHT. HOUSE OF LIGHT melds with the existing game like the Witch-Twin or half a diphthong. So were taking the unusual step of adding actual meta information to the menu when you buy it:
Squint and you might notice an incongruous presence behind the window. The HOUSE OF LIGHT menu icon wont actually be a tiny photo of the Tourlitis lighthouse that was just a reference I gave Lottie for art. Similarly, any and all of the text in this window might change. But this is roughly how the expansion is shaping up, and you can see now some more of what I meant by the foot bones connected to the leg bone. There are probably just two bullet points yet unilluminated: FURTHER STORIES and LIGHTHOUSE INSTITUTE. These are at least 30% of the expansion, though. FURTHER STORIES is what happens in each of the non-Numa visitor stories. Why just the non-Numa stories? Because Numa visitors were really hard to fit in the other points above. Does Coseley have an address? Is Bancroft actually alive? Can you invite Aunt Mopsy to dinner? I know that when I say no therell be a chorus of AW NO FUN, but Im saving you from yourselves. Anyway there are a couple of dozen of even the non-Numa stories, so adding even a modest bit of variant-outcome (branching if you want to use That Word) to each of them is quite a lot of work. BOOK OF HOURS is 100%* backwards-compatible with existing saves. That * means its a bug if its not. This also means that to some limited extent your choices about who you helped and who you didnt will carry over for example, if you helped Coquille or Zachary with the Messengers Casket then its occupant is loose, if you helped Dagmar then its occupant is locked up tight, and if you helped both sides then the seals are cracking. Again, the [strike]branching[/strike] variant-outcome effect is quite gentle, not least because I calibrated most of the original visitor stories so that you could conceivably help several people and never know the difference. But just this once I had the foresight to track effects for the future. So thatll make a difference, at least for the 3% of players who both buy HOUSE OF LIGHT and dont immediately begin a new run. The Further Stories work is most of whats left to do on House of Light, along with the coda which the Lighthouse Institute provides. Once Ive completed three or four of the Furthers, well begin the closed beta which you might have heard about on the grapevine to which weve already invited about twenty players randomly selected from people whove been noticeably helpful with bug reporting. We have another randomly-selected twenty ready to go on the final beta before launch, so if youve been both helpful and lucky you might hear from us. Im talking about this here mainly so we dont get plaintive request emails sorry folks, this ones quite small and I guess also to make the point that being helpful with bug reports gives you a small notional chance of being invited to future betas. If they happen. If we decide not to stop making games and turn Weather Factory into an artisanal custard distillery. I wont promise we wont. Hey Lottie, is this marketing? Am I helping? Back to Lottie. I actually dont have A Marketing to bark at you, for once though I thought you might be interested in the weirdness of translation that Ive been working on recently. BOOK OF HOURS had a great launch (in large part to you, the people reading this post so thank you extremely much if you were one of our early adopters, especially if you left a nice review). But it also highlighted one of our real weaknesses as a team: with just the two of us, cramming as much game into the game as we can before launching in a sensible indie-budget timeframe, we simply cant localise the game in time for launch. I remember some of the other games that launched at the same time as us Shadow Gambit: the Cursed Crew, for example came ready packaged with thirteen languages. THIRTEEN. We initially kept up with them until our plucky lil game (4Chan nominated us for 'Best Game Nobody Played', you know ) slowly but surely fell behind while translated games kept up their momentum. Loc really isnt the sexiest part of post-launch development thats starygazy pie, obviously but it can profoundly affect a studios fortunes, as well as bringing a world youve laboured over for years to a new audience, who may love it! ANYWAY, all this is to say that Simplified Chinese and Russian is coming this August, so Ive spent several days producing translated assets for several hundred books. This highlights some interesting challenges, like how do pictographic languages deal with initials as short-hand for the full title? (You try and fit In The Mountains As Upon The Plain There May Not Be A Path Where None Has Passed on a 194px spine. Initials are my friends.) But there are other, weirder challenges too, especially when they enter the does it look like a bum area of art direction. What I mean by this is every time an artist draws something, there is always the chance that people look at it and do not see the gorgeously-realised impressionistic image of two mountains at dawn, they see ladyboobs, and you have to redraw them so they are definitely not light-soaked erotic mountain breasts anymore. This becomes important with initials on books, because every so often AK will create a book called something like Semi-Esoeteric Xenophon Youths and we have to rename it. In loc terms, you get to Debate of Seven Cups: DoSC in English, no problem, and in Russian of course its
Well. Does this matter? Will it be noticeable to Russian players, playing in Russian? Will it keep me awake at night knowing that there is a book in my serious, beautiful game about life and history and magic with a big rude word down the spine? Yes and yes, I think. So of course I have cunningly changed it to incorporate Roman numerals for seven, and await the Russian beta with interest. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Ill leave you with a loreful snippet from HOUSE OF LIGHT to infect you with Fascination while youre waiting for it to actually come out. Are the gods-from-stone ever gentle? The Wheel, perhaps but Flint? The Seven-Coils? Darest thou trust. the Egg??? [quote]Yvette and Ehsan speak wistfully of what they have read of the lost Hour called Tide. Yvette recalls that when the Sister withdraws, other Hours sometimes fill the space left by her withdrawal, and wonders whether the Tide is gentle enough to remain afterwards but Ehsan politely insists that the gods-who-were-stone are never gentle.[/quote] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2834350/BOOK_OF_HOURS_HOUSE_OF_LIGHT/

- You can now sometimes find blackberries, rosehips and mushrooms on the Moor - ESC now closes the detail window (for consistency: it already closed terrain and verb windows) - You can order a greater variety of things from T.R.N and C&H - though they're of limited use until Cooking becomes possible - Orders from C&H now arrive quicker - and from T.R.N., even quicker - On fresh runs: a new tool in the Adept's Cell - Typo fixes (especially that # in the Mazarine Room) As ever please let me know at support@weatherfactory.biz about any issues you spot - with log and save files is better, but I have a saved reply that lets me tell you where to find 'em if you don't know

[quote]"Al-Adim and Agdistis are gossipping, quietly, about al-Adim's patroness. 'Not a hundred legs,' says al-Adim, 'but more than you'd think'"[/quote] If a videogame is a wall, what do you think - is writing more like the bricks, or more like the mortar? My answer would be usually the mortar... though it depends which game. They're 'video games' not 'letter games', after all. The writing serves mostly to locate and direct the gameplay or to explain and contextualise the visuals. One of the reasons that writing in games is not always good is that writers in games sometimes forget this and stuff words into a scene like an panicked upholsterer frantically stuffing goose-feathers into a cushion. Or an overenthusiastic bricklayer adding so much mortar that it squelches out of the sides and leaves the bricks awry. Arrive late, leave early and all that. Of course some games use the writing as a central feature. In these, the writing is more like the bricks. And of course this is so in Weather Factory games - and in most of my work as far back as Fallen London. But this isn't a licence to write long! Even in a writing-centric game, you never want the writing to outstay its welcome. As soon as the player stops reading, it becomes pointless. The bigger the bricks in a wall, the crookeder the courses.
The very first design of Fallen London, from way back in 2009 This brings us to salons. I mentioned last time that the Salon feature in HOUSE OF LIGHT needed a lot of lines. The game benefit of Salons is that they generate Lessons - and you have some limited control over what Lessons they generate. (This is why you can only have one Salon a season, cos otherwise it would be tempting to turn Hush House into Party House so you can rush the Tree of Wisdoms.) But the actual reason that Salons are in the game at all is to extend the fantasy of having a huge occult mansion as your playground - here, by enlarging on the experience of running salons for this kaleidoscope of occult demi-monde types. I could have had the game print out "The conversation dwelt on Herbs & Infusions..." (in fact this remains the backup for when you've exhausted everything else) but that would have missed the whole point of the experience. Instead I spent a solid two weeks poring over and comparing tome text and setting notes and room descriptions, hammering out things like this: [quote]"Stanislav and Arthur argue happily about which herbal tisane tastes the most disgusting, and hence is most useful to speed lingering guests on their way. [Lesson: Herbs & Infusions]"[/quote] [quote]"Al-Adim describes his memories of Thirza Blake, and her work, in his time as Secretary Nunciant of the House. He is clearly caught between affection and annoyance. Stanislav shakes his head: 'I wish I had known her. I think we'd have got on.' [Lesson: Herbs & Infusions]"[/quote] [quote]"Douglas has been looking into the six-centuries-past death of Abbess Nonna. He's questioned sources he doesn't share with Stanislav, and concludes that she was possessed by a Name of the Blackbone and 'put down' by her sistren - 'nasty business, but best thing for it.' He and Stanislav discuss the herb-mixtures that might have laid her open to that possession. [Lesson: Herbs & Infusions]"[/quote] Have you noticed how much longer the third is than the first? That doesn't make it better. I mean it's fine, and it's a fun bit of backstory, but it's also a bit of a lumpy brick. This is likely because I wrote it at the end of the day when I was tired (Mark Twain: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.") If you can get as much effect for 29 words as for 64, you'll want to go for 29. The player will thank you. And I'm conscious that when the Salon actually runs, the player will see several of these in a row, like bricks in a wall. And it's no more effort to write that 64 words than the 29 words, if anything the reverse - I mean 64 words imply a little more wear on the old distal phalanges, but the effortful bit is reviewing all the details, keeping the lore straight, and then coming up with ten to fifteen decent ideas an hour, for seven hours a day, for five days a week. (Lottie still chortles at me angrily pouring myself a glask of whisky towards the end of a rough writing day and grumbling 'how many interesting things can you even say about pumpkin pie?')
No pumpkin pie anywhere in this salon. Any writer talking about their job eventually ends up complains about how tough writing is, boo hoo, get a real job then, so let's bring down a merciful curtain and say: about four hundred Salon lines are written, and I'll need another couple of hundred at least but how many there are depends on the old triage, deadline, cutting-room biz. And now that the essential work is done, I'm enjoying seating Coquille next to Morgen and having Yvette argue Jung with al-Adim. Some of these characters have been knocking around my head for the a good few years now, but they don't often get to talk to each other, and you see more and different angles on them when that happens. Even Hokobald has a bit more light and shade now. Not to mention poor Zachary. Lottie here, just rounding out the end of this post. I'll leave you with two things: first, a round of Guess That Aspect. Can you work out what they represent in HOUSE OF LIGHT? Obviously my favourite is the SUDDEN FISH, becuase I am yin to AK's yang, and where he drinks whisky while morosely contemplating the nature of pie, I am trying to sneak anarchic Pokmon into his very srs game.
More significantly, we're finally ready to tell you when all this food, fraternity and occult demimondering will come out. HOUSE OF LIGHT will release on...

Thursday 26th September 2024

Aaand were back! The previous article had us rambling about the structure of Alexis Kennedys prose, something that makes translating it akin to translating poetry. Today I am going to talk some more about linguistic treasures hidden in seemingly ordinary texts. Lets start where we left off when illustrating the matter of rhythm: [quote]"Here, impossibly preserved, enfolded in the scars inflicted by the former prisoner's energies."[/quote] Have you, perchance, noticed anything extra? Alright, Ill spoil you the fun: [quote]"Here, impossibly preserved, enfolded in the scars inflicted by the former prisoner's energies."[/quote] Hidden in plain sight, eh? This technique, when one or several letters (sounds, really) are cunningly repeated throughout the phrase, is called alliteration. And this, too, is a very powerful tool. (The ancient Brits, or Icelanders, would even have said magical. No, seriously: in ancient Iceland a properly written alliterative verse was universally taken to hold magical power.) Anyway, this is an aspect that definitely must not be lost in translation. Funny thing is, a lot of such examples can, theoretically, be chalked up to coincidence. We even had a minor argument with another colleague of mine over this line: [quote]"Elucidate Enlightenment from an Earlier Era"[/quote] Oh come on, she said, The letter E is just statistically the most widely used letter in the English language! Alright. Possibly. (Especially given the fact that the actual sounds here arent all the same.) Just possibly. But there comes a point where you cant ignore it anymore: Alexis Kennedy really loves his alliteration, and thats a fact. [quote]"I could curl up in the cold beneath the silent statue's shadow, and see what surfaces in sleep."[/quote] Theres just no way this can be a mere coincidence! By the way, the desire to preserve these alliterations had been one of the driving forces behind that Great Gatsby translation that I at first found so unorthodox. The books translator did their best to preserve these precious phonetic treasures - and it often meant choosing a specific-sounding word (say, a seismograph, rather than a generalized machine) over a correct one. And, needless to say, no machine-translating generative AI is savvy enough to spot and preserve alliteration. It really does require handcrafted translation! But now - a fly in the ointment. Turns out, different languages have varying degrees of tolerance for alliteration. The English language loves alliteration. Be it marketing slogans, politicians speeches, or titles of Jane Austen novels, English is full of these consonances. Not quite so in Russian. Here the effect is usually regarded as sounding funny, and relegated to childrens books. So an aspiring skald must temper their love for alliteration with prudence and temperance. Thanslating Alexis Kennedy really is a balancing act! And with this see you next week for more tales from localisers crypt!

(Everyone of a certain age understands the importance of knowing where one's towel is)

Spoilers ahead. Skip to the food pictures if you don't want spoilers... HOUSE OF LIGHT is a good-sized expansion with an unusual congeries of different features, which I've been assiduously altering from a congeries into a constellation, and I'll talk about that, but UP FRONT let me say that absolutely nothing here is 100% confirmed or promised, everything may change up until release day, and if I get any grouchy emails complaining there are 'only' seventy cooking recipes then I'll... well I'll sigh, mark them spam and get on with my day. It's not much of a threat. The foot bone's connected to the leg bone... I really wanted cooking in the launch version of BOOK OF HOURS, but it was one of the half-dozen things that didn't make the cut (a very casual way of describing the late-development triage process, which fails to evoke all the weeping forlornly at spreadsheets and bank statements). This makes it hard to connect meaningfully to the skill system. The risk with ancillary systems added later is that they can be disconnected from anything meaningful, so they just roll around under the surface of the game like one of those horrible oil globules under a steroid user's skin. Fortunately we have a natural use for them: salons! Which is to say, picnics, elevenses, supper, etc, where you invite visitors to chat about the invisible arts. Of course that basic outline immediately poses half a dozen questions, each of which has a couple of misleading answers before you get to a workable one, and then where the workable ones create further questions. The leg bone's connected to the knee bone... For example: how many slots do you need in a Salon verb? [strike]Ooh probably about ten, we need to revamp the verb window[/strike] no that becomes wildly impractical, so instead let's allow the Salon to respond to food placed in the room. This feels much more immersive for the Librarian, but also means reworking (a) some quite central code and (b) some of the room art - all those neatly placed chairs on the viewer side of the table made it impossible to arrange food on the table. (When I was testing the refectory I had to stack food on the mantelpiece.) Okay then, how do food Aspects tie into the Salon process? [strike]Obviously if you want a good conversation about Resurgences & Emergences you stack the salon with as many Grail and Moth dishes[/strike] this doesn't work because much of the reason for the slot system back as far asCultist was to make it impossible just to stack up twenty identical objects to power through an Aspect requirement. And we don't want people maxing out Grail numbers by filling the room with cake:
This is no longer a viable strategy. So currently, instead, individual guests have some basic dietary requirements - usually based on their traditional interests (Arthur likes a food item present with Lantern in it) but with some variations (al-Adim doesn't drink, Yvette isn't fussy). This immediately throws up some silly preferences (Dagmar won't eat much besides Aglaophotis Souffl, Agdistis will eat basically anything because most foods contain Heart) which will entail a final brow-furrowed tuning session and probably some post-beta tweaks, but much of which will stand because it's basically a game and because the alternative - hand-assigning a hundred-plus food preferences to twenty-plus guests with no particular mnemonic structure is no fun for anyone, least of all me. So you set up your Salon in one of the five or six rooms where you can hold it (it's nice to make more use of the Hall of Voices), you invite your guests and.. wait invite guests? Visitors show up once a season. We need to do something about that, too. So in HOUSE OF LIGHT (and this featuremay migrate back to the vanilla game) you can get someone's address once you've helped them out at least once (though Hokobald, paranoid as ever, will basically only give you the general location of a manhole behind a pub where he might sometimes check for correspondence). You can then write 'em an invite, send it via the Postmistress, and they turn up. If you like you can write a number of invitations in advance for your big do. Or you can actually summon them so you can push through the Visitor stories to get to the new late-game Visitor Further Stories (all the systems connect! more on this anon). And this brings us to the winnowing phase of design, after answering a lot of these questions: al-Adim travels a lot, do we worry about him turning up after sixty seconds while Yvette who lives in London also turns up after sixty seconds? No. It adds nothing and it makes people think too hard about exactly where everyone is; anyway a lot of our visitors have Uncanny Means of travelling. (Travelling at Night, even.) What if you keep spamming invitations? do people stop turning up? No. This would be hassle to code, hassle to signal, and punish people who accidentally invite the wrong guests. There is a rationale ('when the Librarian asks, the invisible world listens') and there is a nod to the requirement to put some effort into invitations (there's a low-ish Aspect requirement that you can satisfy with Soul cards and the right ink, and of course Hokobald will only turn up if he gets an invitation written in Orpiment Exultant). But as with the order forms there is a hazy line between making the invitations feel like some business, so you're not just clicking buttons on a spreadsheet, and making players jump through hoops, which for some people we're already on the wrong side of. Do you get unique Salon responses from guests for relevant food and drink? Now we're really in the meat of it (olol). I would like visitors to have unique lines because other visitors are present. I would like people to comment on the wine. I would like people to comment on paintings hanging in the room. I would like people to have conversations that reference ongoing stories. But that right there is a requirement for - well the maths depends on how you work it, but we can easily get up to ten or twenty thousand unique lines. Or a madlibs approach like the CK3 feast system - which is fine for what it is, I like CK3, but it's a lot of work and it's the opposite of the handcrafted Hush House feel. And we'renot even at the headline feature for HOUSE OF LIGHT story content -the Further Stories for Visitors / Lighthouse Institute stuff - and I'd quite like to get the expansion out this year. I haven't even talked about how the cooking system works. Or Thirza's Knife. OK so briefly: making food is much more like a traditional crafting system, though you get a little bit of potential input from Spices & Savours. Milk plus flour with a mixing bowl (CAKE TIME) is dough, dough plus eggs is cake batter, cake batter plus honey is Cornish Honey Cake (never, never to be confused with Devonshire Honey Cake). Some of the recipes require knives. We don't actually have a kitchen knife in the game, so if you want to chop onions you might need to bring down Sebastian's swords from the Hall of Division. Or find Thirza's Knife, which has probably never been used to cut anything lamentable, probably. The knee bone's connected to the thigh bone... Wait AK what are salonsfor? apart from 'deciding not to invite Hokobald'? And what's the difference between elevenses and a picnic? and why can you only hold salons once a season? For that you'll have to wait until my wife wrestles me back to the blog to write another update. Right now I have aspects to assign to cake. Did somebody say cake? LB here, and I have been made very hungry over the last week as I drew all the delectably 1930s dainties that AK's requested so far for HOUSE OF LIGHT. It requires quite a bit of research - what is the history of Pyrex? What the hell is fish 'Monte Carlo' style? - but I hope the consistency will really create an unusual, European historical sense of reality and you can all enjoy making prune whip for people you don't like. The below isn't exhaustive - I already have a host of new food to draw, from mushrooms on toast to something alarmingly called 'Walls-of-Ys' - but you can already pick a pretty nice meal for yourself from what we have!
(Right-click + 'Open image in new tab' for a larger version.) You can see in the header image of this post how rich, joyful and tasty a full spread of food looks, and how much life it adds to Hush House. AK's mentioned we had to adjust some rooms to facilitate soires, but the end result can have surprisingly sweet outcomes. The Refectory looks warm and inviting, like a welcome-home banquet for a long-travelled friend - but how suitably melancholy and sweet is a tea-party in winter in the Physic Garden? I feel like Valentine Dewulf would have been much the better for one of these.
In other news of things that hopefully brighten your life, we have another MERCH LAUNCH to announce - our limited edition Hours notebooks, now available in the shop. I tried to make them classy and BOOK OF HOURS-y, and I'm delighted with how they've turned out. If you have need of a gently occult notebook in your life - to write your hopes, your dreams, reminders of BoH recipes, etc - these guys are for you.
Finally, we're moving offices next month so are running a major 40% off sale off almost everything else in the shop (the one other exception is the newly-restocked Wisdom Tree pendants, which I've just relisted. People selfishly bought them all, but other people also wanted them and were sad, and we can't have that). So along with the new notebooks, go nuts on our biggest ever merch sale, and help us save our ancient backs by not having to lug 10,000 Lady Afterwards up some stairs.

- Fix for on occasional crash on the menu screen - Fix for a bug where unlocking the village but not the bridge, and then reloading, would LOCK THE BRIDGE FOREVER

You know you're in the right place when the top-rated post on your subreddit is:
The real hot topic from this week, though, is what comesafter vegetables. I'll let AK explain: "You probably know the George Bernard Shaw crack about the US and the UK being 'two countries separated by a common language' (GBS, like many Irish writers, did well out of snarking accurately at British English). BOOK OF HOURSevoked horror and disgust from our American readers with its unsparingly explicit depiction of pre-decimal British currency. But you might not know about pudding. 'Pudding', as all her late Majesty's subjects know, is the correct word for 'dessert', at least in traditional English upper class dialect, just as 'supper' is the correct word for 'dinner'. I was brought up middle-middle-class but my mother had upper-middle-class aspirations, so I learnt that we ate 'pudding' after 'supper' in the evening. If I'd been lower-middle-class or she'd hung around slightly less posh people, we'd have had 'dessert' after 'tea'. As it was, if we ate early, say five rather than seven in the evening, it was called 'high tea'. That was the 1980s, and 'pudding' has been largely been driven to the margins by 'dessert' now, partly cos America and France, partly cos it sounds stodgy, but you'll still find it on the menu invery traditional restaurants. And that 'very traditional' vibe, heavily flavoured with 'English country house' is what we're going for in the cooking update in HOUSE OF LIGHT. The 20s and the 30s were something of a lost era in English cooking, when we got a bit more experimental and informal. (Then of course the Second World War, and food rationing in its aftermath, helped develop a rep for stodgy monotonous food that isn't really deserved any more but I grew up in the 70s and 80s and Jesus Christ it was then.) So some of the dishes won't look English at all, while some of them are so English they'll make your teeth spin. tl:dr; pudding is what you call dessert. ButYorkshirepudding is a savoury dish, duh, that you have alongside the main course. And meanwhile, also, if you put sausages in Yorkshire pud, you get toad-in-the-hole. (No, not bangers, sausages are generally only bangers if you put them in mash.) And black puddingisn't something you should google if you plan on sleeping soundly tonight. Alright?" ...You can't get this sort of #gamedev #content anywhere else, now, can you? It might sound a bit petty that we're spending weeks of development time deciding on the most historically-accurate menu for a cast of fictional characters who may or may not be invited to dine at a made-up library on a made-up cliff, but this is actually the stuff Weather Factory games are made of! AK's particular brand of bizarre but internally consistent period RPGs underpinned by a complex Aspect system means we not only have to research period-appropriate foodstuffs, but they have to make sense of people's systemic affiliations too. For example, DI Douglas Moore feels like someone who's more likely to want a simple, manly sandwich than some fancy French nonsense, but is there a manly sandwich that evokes his Principles of Heart and Lantern? Speaking of Aspects, they're also a good way to show the sorts of things we've been working on without spoilering anyone. So here's a selection of new Aspects going into HOUSE OF LIGHT:
They range from aspects for all 63 non-language Skills in game to Agendas, Fears and Sympathies (feelings and intentions Visitors have which will affect their work if you add them to the Lighthouse Institute board). How many of them can you identify, do you think...? ANYWAY. I hope to have some HOUSE OF LIGHT screenshots for you soon, but AK will be working on his lonesome next week as I have been called for a mysterious life event that I can't talk about until afterwards. Until then!

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

(5) YOU CAN NOW DECIDE WHAT KIND OF VEGITIBLES IS IN THE SACK!!!!

[quote]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.[/quote] 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 doesnt 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 Baldurs 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 Alexiss 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 phrases 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. Heres 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 Kennedys 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 isnt 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 wont do. And this is where we break off. Next time I will continue with my story of the eldritch horrors that lurk beneath Alexis Kennedys prose (kidding). Stay tuned!

[quote]"To mix the rarest colours, a merciless detachment is required."[/quote] Firstly, EHSAN (2024.2.e.11) is now live for everyone on the BOOK OF HOURS main branch. The changes are:

Conversations in HOUSE OF LIGHT

Colouring book out now

- 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 Cred to that bloke on that forum thread for the suggestion/i] - Some minor UX improvements, notably a Refill button to allow redoing actions with the same items This caused a good half-dozen bugs, some quite serious, but I think they're all fixed now - ...lots of typo fixes... - ...and a few small well-hidden surprises. which you can't find by mining the jsons; to my certain knowledge at least one person found each on beta, but possibly _only_ one person. Something to stumble across!

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 Ican 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...

Social Events

Cooking

Advanced Visitor Stories

The Lighthouse Institute

Lucid Tarot colouring book

[quote]"January 9th, 1838. A heavy snow falls on Brancrug. When the staff dig themselves out, Solomon Husher, third Librarian of the House, has disappeared from his quarters in the Long Tower, leaving a letter of resignation. 'Winter,' the letter concludes, 'does not wait forever; though Janus might.' Husher is never seen again, but every year on the same day, his footprints can be found beneath the Tree."[/quote] What were you doing on the 9th, when Husher's footprints once again appeared beneath the tree? We were working on BOOK OF HOURS' latest patch, EHSAN, which contains:
I haven't heard of anyone finding the 'well-hidden surprises' yet - I yelped with surprise and delight the first time I found them - so perhaps they'retoo well-hidden. It'll move to the main branch some time next month now AK's fixed the bug that removed all unlocking requirements from certain rooms, and the one that seemed to play the shrieking howl of the Wolf-Divided every time you clicked a button. The EHSAN e.7 patch is the fifth major patch and the... fortieth? incremental update since launch. AK started typing a long preening bit about all the changes we'd put in and then realised that would be interesting mostly to us, so we'll spare you lot, but if youareinterested, the in-game patch notes go all the way back to October, and the TWELVE DISMAYS OF CHRISTMAS post explains the silliest bug of his career. On the upside, those well-hidden surprises mentioned earlier: apparently one player found one with the assistance of their dog; others may be available to a keen-eyed, or a forward-looking, Librarian. There'll be more quality-of-life updates eventually, but for now we're shifting focus to the HOUSE OF LIGHT expansion, so those updates will likely arrive in a free update alongside it.

Localisation

• "Both suggest a cross in English. 'Rood' is an Old English term for the Christian cross, 'Cruciate' is from Latin crucis, cross. 'Chancel' has several meanings in English but one is the dividing screen between the more and less holy parts of a church - which is also known as the 'rood screen'. The terms are as you say all largely equivalent and the general sense of 'something that separates the profane from the sacred / more sacred from less sacred' would be good. If in doubt, I'd just use the same term three times."
• "There's an obscure adjective, 'nivean', from Latin nix/nivis, which means snow-white. I used a variant spelling because 'Nivea' is a popular European skin-care brand. "
• "Speculum is Latin for mirror, and later in English was used to mean (a) a particular kind of mirror used in telescopes (b) a scrying-mirror used by seers. So 'speculist' implies a mirror-specialist, probably with an occult connection. NB a speculum in modern English refers exclusively to a medical instrument used by gynaecologists! This is definitely not a reference I want to imply here."
• "Remember that all the commitments are alternate, sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory versions. There is some intentional ambiguity here about how the Hours were counted. These texts could be used to support the interpretation that there were seven aviform Hours in total, although one was eaten; they could also support the interpretation that there were six, plus one who was eaten, plus the glitter-winged one; or that the glitter-winged one was the one who was eaten. Unusually this is something I have a firm private opinion on the truth of. I don't think it would be useful for me to share that, but I think it is useful for me to point out that 'glitter-winged' might be read as a reference to 'Glaeterfleoge', so it could be read as suggesting there was a Carapace aviform in the past."

HOUSE OF LIGHT

• Variety of outcomes from the Visitor stories. I actually loathe the term 'branching narrative' because it imprisons us in a 1990s idea of CYOA tree-diagram structures, but 'stories with variety in outcome' lacks zing. Whichever term you use, there ain't any of it in the Visitor stories as they stand. Partly this is just because I wouldn't have had time to write the things, partly because it's hard, maybe impossible, to write stories with variant outcomes in a game that explicitly tells you that there are no mistakes and you can't lock yourself out of anything (ask ten dedicated CRPG players of your acquaintance how many of them don'tlook at a wiki nowadays before making a key narrative decision - and then imagine finding you've missed out on a decision because the visitor came and went while you were unlocking the Wine Cellar). But obviously people were always going to want more (a) relevant story about (b) known characters with (c) choices that allow self-expression. So releasing that as an expansion neatly addresses both probs: we now have some months we didn't have before launch, and it'll be an opt-in for people who've played the game once already or who want a bit more variety in their outcome, FOMO be damned.
• Cooking, and social events. There's a bag of flour and a mixing bowl in the Hush House kitchens, but you can't bake a cake. This is because we started with art for the kitchens, which we sliced up and turned into manipulable objects, and some fitted more naturally into the crafting system than others. But that's not relevant to people who just want to bake a cake. Or have vegetables less generic than a sack. Meanwhile I've seen a heartening number of players talk about how they in-game RP afternoon tea with Visitors and villagers. And it ties together with more Visitor engagement. Some parts of this point may end up in the game as a free update - I don't know until I've worked through the design - it depends on how easy or not it is to tease apart from the rest.
• A bridge to the next game. Lottie and I have an unusually clear idea about Game Three - though we might change our minds and we won't be starting on it until at least 2025 - and I want to lay down a few barrels of the good story so it'll be aged and flavourful by the time it shows up in Three. I'm also planning ahead and trying out some ideas with design, with narrative structure and with UI that - by Three - should ultimately take us beyond windows-and-slots. It's a good model, it's brought us a long way, but it does feel sometimes like trying to write through a keyhole.

Wisdom Tree pendant

[quote]"How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!" 'Ulysses', Alfred Lord Tennyson[/quote] Tennyson knows what's what. It's hard to sit still with art: it jiggles around like a catnipped kitten or a goose on a Roomba or a kid who needs the loo. We've been updating BOOK OF HOURS a lot, and it's put new wind in our sails as a studio - but we have mountains of ideas, and we've been working on other things as well. Tennyson also says that you are a part of all that you have met - so if you're here, reading this, you're part of the Secret Histories, too. Here's a round-up of all the things that have just launched or that you and we both can look forward to in 2024.

BOOK OF HOURS content expansion

BOOK OF HOURS soundtrack

BOOK OF HOURS localisation

Secret Histories merch

Tarot colouring book

Wisdom Tree necklace

Hours notebooks

Reverend Timothy's gifts

Everything else

[quote]"[The music] was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came..." - The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien[/quote] No, you started a Steam post with a quote from The Silmarillion! YOU'RE the nerd! ...Okay okay maybe not in this case. Regardless, a quick update to let you know that the long-awaited OST for BOOK OF HOURS is out now, with a 10% launch discount for anyone who gets it in the first week.
The album features twenty-five remastered tracks from the game, arranged by its composer, Maribeth Solomon, herself. It's totally beautiful, and we've tried to keep some of the game's sense of seasonal change in the track listing. An extra bundle of Christmas candles to anyone who can guess AK's and my favourite tracks. The OST costs $10.99 / 8.99 / 9.99 and is available now. Go forth and float by the shores of Brancrug. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2340780/BOOK_OF_HOURS_Original_Soundtrack/

It's the first of December, and we're trying something NEW this year! BOOK OF HOURS seems such an obvious fit, so starting from today we're running...

...a 25-day advent calendar of Hush House!

Door 1: Seasonal art in BOOK OF HOURS

There was a glitch that could occur if you played during a particular combination of patches in the last week "HOTFIX: If Hendrik's bust niche disappeared, it's now back. If so, you may also find one or more Pale Mommets in there. DON'T ASK IT'S BEEN A WEIRD ONE, JUST CALL IT A CHRISTMAS PRESENT"

This has spent the usual couple of weeks on the beta branch, and I have had ALMOST NO bug reports... but now that fewer people are playing the game my fear is that this is because it's had fewer eyeballs, not just because it's the most stable patch ever. It _is_ a very stable patch, but do hit us up at support@weatherfactory.biz if you run into problems. Notes below - you'll probably be most interested in the bolded things. * You can now order some goods through the post (if you don't have an order form, one will arrive inside a year) * You can now label bookshelves * Timers for workstations look a bit spiffier * You can now zoom while moving the camera * Crafting helper panel now also works for Determinations and Histories * Histories page now includes the pre-ending text for your later referencing pleasure * Tightened up zooming controls * That annoying shelf in the Westcott Room is less annoying * Game won't unexpectedly switch between fullscreen and windowed when you open options * Notification windows now universally respect the timeout option in Settings * HOTFIX: swoosh-to-house-threshold button no longer forces close zoom. * HOTFIX: Deep Mandaic books can now be translated again (you wouldn't believe what caused this prob) * HOTFIX: Bookshelf plaques sometimes didn't appear on load * ...and one additional small, fun, hidden feature -- There'll be at least one more patch before Christmas, with another small, fun, less hidden feature. After that, the updates will keep coming, but at the pace of snowflakes rather than raindrops. As Lottie mentioned last time, we'll be shifting our focus to the first BOOK OF HOURS content expansion. I just spent three days in a quiet room on a shingle headland writing on cards and moving 'em around on the floor, so I know now what it'll be. We can't talk about that quite yet, but I can share this partial photo of the early design process:
this helpful excerpt from our design docs:
this charming picture of a lighthouse:
and this news item from a UK charity:

Some fun announcements below, but first -
If you like BOOK OF HOURS, vote for us in this year's Steam Awards! We're a husband and wife team making extremely niche, weird indie games, so we're very much an underdog here. But if you like weird, warped indie gems, please cast your vote for us. Thank you!

Trading cards and Steam Points Shop

Soundtrack coming soon

Next up: DAYMARE

• Mail ordering some items (from Cater & Hero, and from TRN Ltd). Ordering from a catalogue will be a baroque and leisurely process. It'll reinforce Brancrug's remoteness, and it won't be trivial to top up supplies. But it'll fill some gaps and it'll add some flavour.
• In-game shelf labels! The Skolekosophy section? The Possibly Contaminated section? Unconfirmed Crafting Recipes? Useful Memories (though the book/Memory system may be coming up for a change)? Notes to yourself about who Janus is and who Hendrick was?
• Some UI refresh stuff - e.g. what Lottie refers to as 'spiffing timers' to make workstations a bit prettier
• Some more zoom tuning (restoring simultaneous arrow key movement and zoom-to, and I'll look at the zoom levels again)

The long-awaited DAYMARE update, with a small but tasty list of features, is now on the beta branch. Expect this to make it to the live branch before Christmas. So what've we got? You can now order some goods through the post (if you don't have an order form, one will arrive inside a year) You'll need to go to the Post Office to send it, but the Royal Mail delivers directly even to Brancrug. Why does the UK call it 'post' not 'mail' but our org is the Royal Mail? Ask the Queen NO YOU CAN'T NOT ANY MORE You can now label bookshelves All the plaques were hand-placed by the charming other half of Weather Factory. We might move them if things get in the way. Timers for workstations look a bit spiffier Further future spiffier-ness is probable. You can now zoom while moving the camera Tightened up zooming controls I had to do a whole lot of fiddadling around when I was just back from holiday with Japanese flu, so there might be some leftover eccentricities. I've taken the slow easing effect off mouse zoom too. I liked it but a lot of other people didn't. Specifically, zoom level 2 now takes you to a level that allows interaction with room contents. This was always supposed to be the case! thanks to everyone who pointed out the bug, I finally tracked it down That annoying shelf in the Westcott Room is less annoying You know the one. Game won't unexpectedly switch between fullscreen and windowed when you open options Though I could have tried to pass this off as a 'hilarious prank Crafting helper panel now also works for Determinations and Histories This resolves some priority issues with recipes, and also gives you a bit more clarity generally Histories page now includes the pre-ending text for your later referencing pleasure Ending text is pretty elliptical already. It's even more elliptical when you can't see the pre and post texts side by side, which I wasn't as aware of as I should be because that's how I look at 'em in my spreadsheet Notification windows now universally respect the timeout option in Settings Sometimes software development is interesting and sometimes software development is less interesting than at other times when it's more interesting BONUS CONTENT! People get asking us when we were bringing our podcast, Skeleton Songs, back. We did, it's here again, with an episode about invisible magicians pinching the Pope's parts: https://weatherfactory.biz/skeleton-songs/ -- [A weird Unity problem means I can't build on Mac right now, so there's no Mac beta just yet. Mac players, we haven't forgotten you, I'm working on it]

(Lovely image above is courtesy of the Lucid Tarot, which we hope will be available by Christmas.) Another big update only two weeks after BANCROFT? Why not. COSELEY is a great big grab bag of quality-of-life improvements, and a couple of new features. I'm not done with QoL yet, but the next update (DAYMARE) is more content-focused. That's going to be a while away though, because Lottie and I are taking a couple weeks off, because apparently working all the time is in some nebulous way bad for you and you're supposed to 'relax' and have 'fun' and all that other human nonsense. Patch notes, and my glosses, follow!

• Zoom-to-cursor is back! I've reworked it from my eccentric experimental version to be more what people expected, and switched it on by default. You can still turn it off in the options menu if you don't like it
• Auto-arrange changes; undo button, separate merge and arrange, variant ordering on reclick Keep clicking the arrange button (or pressing Tab) to see the effects
• It's now possible to dream on a Memory when night comes, preserving it for the following day You can't do this with Weather, and you can only do it after nightfall
• Dedicated verb icons for workstations Lottie wanted these in to add character - and they're also pavingthe way for another UI upgrade
• Added a small feature to make the endgame, and rare scenarios in the midgame, easier (psst it relates to Numa) psst psst there's a way to finish the game when you're ready without waiting for the right time
• More performance optimisations! Still ongoing, still experimental I'll keep working on these, but do drop me a mail if you're still struggling on a machine that's above minimum spec
• There's now a second phonograph in the House *on new saves only* (i.e. if you haven't opened the Severn Chamber yet in this playthrough). The Governor's phonograph also now accepts different aspects (run something through it to update)
• TAKE NOTE! If a Soul card becomes contaminated after this update, it will sometimes be able to pass on the contamination to books Expect more from contaminations and maladies later - but I'm feeding these in very cautiously
• You can now mute copied-text popups (and/or re-enable them in Options) Sorry, folks, finally got to it
• The harp in the Windlit Gallery is a little different (on new saves only)
• The Librarian can now burn correspondence Right now that means 'spare reminder from St Rhonwens isn't wirh you forever' but it may be more relevant in future updates
• You'll no longer get two simultaneous Numa incidents when playing on 6x speed I was hunting this one for a while - thanks to D.K. for giving me the final piece in the puzzle via their bug report
• One candelabrum moved in the nave of St Brandan's so you get a little more space in the window-shelf We'd have done this a coupla weeks ago, but the other half of Weather Factory, who does the art, just put in a couple of fifty-hour weeks to get the Lucid Tarot finished. WELL DONE LOTTIE. Same with the art bits below
• Entrance hall chairs now show in front of shelved objects
• Added a visible path down from Earl Brian's field to make the cliff-link clearer
• The Mirrors in the Hall of Division now accept Grail (as usual, you'll need to run a recipe through them to see this, if you're playing an existing save) This is more thematically on-point; also there was a single solitary Soul evolution where you could still lock yourself out of an upgrade, and this resolves it. Thanks to those who reported this!
• You'll only see the Wisdom Tree tip once (finally got around to this)
• Swimming in the sea is now possible, though not always wise, and a swimmer should ensure they know where their towel is; AND examining Fabric no longer destroys it; AND clean fresh linen now has restorative properties All these three points are related. I wanted to stop destroying Fabric, as part of upcoming feature tweaks for both analysis and Mommet work. So I wanted to give towels and linen something else to do. (previously they were one-shot Memory generators - they had just looked nice in the room art, and it's often hard to find a use for these objects). PS people should stop trying to give their dirty laundry to Mrs Kille, people, she's a midwife not a laundress
• Added an extra quarter-second delay to the room preview window still too intrusive? now too slow? needs to be configurable? we'll see, it's all a grand adventure
• Added a Revert button to the crafting helper panel, which returns the window to the first available recipe
• Added a missing connection from Gullscry Loggia to Gaol Bridge
• Lucid Tarot cards in ending screens display at a better ratio I didn't even notice, and I don't know if anyone else did, but it was upsetting my wife to see her art squashed
• Fixed some Ouranoscopy hint and recipe issues, and added a new recipe
• Fixed some Stone Stories hint and recipe issues, and added a new recipe There'll be more of this sort of thing
• Options in crafting helper panel are slightly easier to click
• Fixed an irritation where mousing over Period aspect could bring up an irrelevant unlock preview tooltip
• Father Schaller now admits that he reads Sanskrit Expect him and other visitors to show more of an interest in some other relevant books in the future
• Westcott Room scroll cubbies now work
• Fixed an issue where Memories found as random gathers would sometimes only appear once (with thanks to M.W.)
• Wormwood Dream is persistent
• Crafting is no longer possible in bed. It was rarely useful, usually confusing, always a health and safety issue Are there other things coming that you can do in bed? no wash your mind out, not that. But one of the potential expansions has to do do with dreaming
• A terminological issue re: scientific instrumentation has been addressed. Can't believe I forgot what an astrolable looked like
• Added a missing sound for some small things being dropped I only noticed this because I was tuning the volume of the spookier sounds in the caves below the House
• Fixed a problem where detail messages weren't showing on consumable objects when they were Considered
• Clearer slot labelling on Skills So fewer people will get to hour six and only then realise you don't need to use up Lessons for every slot?
• Saves and Backups button doesn't suffer from desynced text
• Detail images for very small objects no longer pixelate Surprisingly fiddly to fix, but glasses of water are now much charming-er

Loads of tiny fixes and enhancements in this one. The points at the top in bold are probably the ones you'll care about most. - Zoom-to-cursor is back! I've reworked it from my eccentric experimental version to be more what people expected, and switched it on by default. You can still turn it off in the options menu if you don't like it - Experimental auto-arrange changes; undo button, separate merge and arrange, variant ordering on reclick - It's now possible to dream on a Memory when night comes, preserving it for the following day - TAKE NOTE! If a Soul card becomes contaminated after this update, it will sometimes be able to pass on the contamination to books - Dedicated verb icons for workstations - More performance optimisations! Still ongoing, still experimental - There's now a second phonograph in the House *on new saves only*. The Governor's phonograph also now accepts different aspects (run something through it to update) - The harp in the Windlit Gallery is a little different (on new saves only) - One candelabrum moved in the nave of St Brandan's so you get a little more space in the window-shelf - Entrance hall chairs now show in front of shelved objects - Added a visible path down from Earl Brian's field to make the cliff-link clearer - Added an extra quarter-second delay to the room preview window - Swimming in the sea is now possible, though not always wise, and a swimmer should ensure they know where their towel is - Examining Fabric no longer destroys it - Clean fresh linen now has restorative properties - Added a small feature to make the endgame, and rare scenarios in the midgame, easier - Added a Revert button to the crafting helper panel, which returns the window to the first available recipe - The Librarian can now burn correspondence - Added a missing connection from Gullscry Loggia to Gaol Bridge - Lucid Tarot cards in ending screens display at a better ratio - Fixed some Ouranoscopy hint and recipe issues, and added a new recipe - Fixed some Stone Stories hint and recipe issues, and added a new recipe - Options in crafting helper panel are slightly easier to click - Fixed an irritation where mousing over Period aspect could bring up an irrelevant unlock preview tooltip - Father Schaller now admits that he reads Sanskrit - Westcott Room scroll cubbies now work - Fixed an issue where Memories found as random gathers would sometimes only appear once (with thanks to M.W.) - Wormwood Dream is persistent - Crafting is no longer possible in bed. It was rarely useful, usually confusing, always a health and safety issue -A terminological issue re: scientific instrumentation has been addressed. - You'll no longer get two simultaneous Numa incidents when playing on 6x speed - Added a missing sound for some small things being dropped - The Mirrors in the Hall of Division now accept Grail (as usual, you'll need to run a recipe through them to see this, if you're playing an existing save) - Fixed a problem where detail messages weren't showing on consumable objects when they were Considered - Clearer slot labelling on Skills - Saves and Backups button doesn't suffer from desynced text - You'll only see the Wisdom Tree tip once (finally got around to this) - HOTFIX: nasty bit of borked JSON output - HOTFIX: auto-arrange button wasn't working - HOTFIX: can drag to move in Wisdoms tree again

HOTFIX: Nume-Brume should now only show up in Numa; you shouldn't be able to skip incidents on 6x speed

FEATURE: Crafting helper panel for workstations FEATURE: Mouseover to show unlock requirements on rooms FEATURE: Save-independent endings. You can now unlock a History with one save, and access it from the Histories screen even when playing another save. (When you open the game, it'll log any new Histories from your current AUTOSAVE and store them permanently.) Two matching spintriae can now be converted into a spool of metal wire. Items fixed to the wall no longer highlight as Considerable. To minimise beach-madness, some UI elements only appear once you're out of the first phase of the game Added an 'Unlock All Resolutions' checkbox option for people who really don't want to play in 16:10 Aspect-finder pulse now keeps going if you leave your mouse over the aspect display Little bit of camera easing Fixed some incorrect crafting hints Expanded hints on Determinations and ending-related info Fixed Curse of the Flying Scroll/Phonograph bug Rev Tim no longer pretends like he's going to give you two Memories on first introduction Roots Origin Determination no longer claims to affect Grail Tree of Wisdoms auto-closes when you hit Backspace Clarified some Moth and Lantern History text Added some clarifying information about Numa frequency Dog is no longer confusingly found in staff-room if already found elsewhere (in new games, anyway) Candles, and some llies, are no longer Fuel Fatigued Soul cards now properly affected by theoplasmic contamination Deeplight Corals didn't allow crafting. Deep Mandaic no longer alphabetised under M Fludd Gallery glassware is a little less greedy for clicks Some experimental perf optimisations Added a hotkey to hide the HUD/UI, for screenshot enthusiasts UI Scale is now a slider Fixed annoying mouseover flicker bug on aspect preview Rags are now Fabric VSync options are now separate from quality settings Some more of the higher-level Memories are Persistent (but no longer Confounding Parable) Pennies can now be disposed of Fixed an issue where you could use hotkey to start a room unlocking while another unlock was in progress, bypassing checks and devouring the assistant Leathy now consumed when drunk Added some aspects to Telescope and Cage. Tweaked some miscued recipes to fit their skills better. All Altars which accept Lights now also accept Fuels and Pigments. Dragging an item a very long way from a newly unlocked room while scrolling will no longer make the item disappear Activated nooks in the dispensary room in the Motley Tower Tiny icons for things now preserve the correct aspect ratio Typos! HOTFIX: 'ghostcrafting' issue (thanks E.K.) where mysterious empty recipe info could appear in helper panel HOTFIX: no black border around books HOTFIX: silly bug fixed where books were taking up too much space HOTFIX: reverted accidental ordering changes in trays HOTFIX: Reduced likelihood of pulse-search getting stuck HOTFIX: Occasional issue with cards escaping from inside workstations HOTFIX: Sun-Cross symbol has suitable aspects again HOTFIX: ordering for money is sensible again HOTFIX: truly ridiculous bug where things go BONG when you pick them up or put them down.

As you may have noticed from our Steam updates, weve been updating BOOK OF HOURS with loads of fixes and improvements since launch (well, AK has. Lottie been fidaddling about with ART like the hornswoggling dilettante that she is. More on that below). Weve got some big QoL features nearly ready to go on the beta branch for the game. But first of all, heres one much-requested change that has made it into the main game. Over to AK:

NEXT COMPLETED WORKSTATION WATCHER/BUTTON

LESS CLICKY ROOM NAVIGATION

SAVE-INDEPENDENT ENDINGS

THE CRAFTING HELPER PANEL

SCREENSHOT MODE

.. AND THIS

UP NEXT

This is on the beta branch now! I've had some life admin this week, so it might make it to the main branch by Friday if it's stable, but no guarantees. BETA 2023.9.a.9 - FEATURE: Crafting helper panel for workstations - FEATURE: Mouseover to show unlock requirements on rooms - FEATURE: Save-independent endings. You can now unlock a History with one save, and access it from the Histories screen even when playing another save. (When you open the game, it'll log any new Histories from your current AUTOSAVE and store them permanently.) - To minimise beach-madness, some UI elements only appear once you're out of the first phase of the game - Added an 'Unlock All Resolutions' checkbox option for people who really don't want to play in 16:10 - Aspect-finder pulse now keeps going if you leave your mouse over the aspect display - Little bit of camera easing - Fixed some incorrect crafting hints - Expanded hints on Determinations and ending-related info - Fixed Curse of the Flying Scroll/Phonograph bug - Rev Tim no longer pretends like he's going to give you two Memories on first introduction - Roots Origin Determination no longer claims to affect Grail - Tree of Wisdoms auto-closes when you hit Backspace - Clarified some Moth and Lantern History text - Added some clarifying information about Numa frequency - Dog is no longer confusingly found in staff-room if already found elsewhere (in new games, anyway) - Candles, and some llies, are no longer Fuel - Fatigued Soul cards now properly affected by theoplasmic contamination - Deeplight Corals didn't allow crafting. - Deep Mandaic no longer alphabetised under M - Fludd Gallery glassware is a little less greedy for clicks - Some experimental perf optimisations - Added a hotkey to hide the HUD/UI, for screenshot enthusiasts - UI Scale is now a slider - Fixed annoying mouseover flicker bug on aspect preview - Rags are now Fabric - Some more gof the higher-level Memories are Persistent - HOTFIX: no black border around books - HOTFIX: silly bug fixed where books were taking up too much space - HOTFIX: reverted accidental ordering changes in trays

Teeny patchlet, most importantly addressing what one bug reporter described as 'Mr Crab's Bad Day' - Chimeric Larva now develops into, not produces, Perilous Imago - Franklin speaks Latin - Added a missing requirement to the hidden ending (it was less hidden than it should have been) - Circumstances now disappear in Numa; numina make it clear that they will only disappear in Numa. - 'Multitudinous' books are identified. - Once an attuned Skill has been used to evolve Soul, it gets an Attunement Fulfilled marker so you don't need to keep futzing around with it. - Fixed that disturbing crab glitch. You know the one. Count yourself lucky if you don't. Poor Carkifer. - Smoothed out zoom step movement, added a little easing

That makes it five major patches and, good crikey, twelve minor patches since launch on 17th August. We're going to slow down a bit now, although by 'slow down a bit' I only mean 'take a coupla days off and not work this weekend'. Expect more quality-of-life updates soon. 'Forerunner?' 29th August is traditionally celebrated as the day of the Decollation of the Forerunner, which is to say, the day that Herod had John the Baptist shortened. I hadn't run across 'decollation' before. The etymology suggests cutting the neck, rather than the head. You know the story about Loki losing the bet with the dwarf Brok where his stake is his head? And he says, okay, my head is yours, but you better not touch my neck? So Brok sews Loki's lips shut, although at least in the Crossley-Holland version he has to use his brother's awl because Loki's lips are needle-proof. I can't imagine there's any relationship at all between John the Baptist and Loki, I just always liked the story, lots of fab swag. Patch notes. - Added a Completed Recipe button + count - Added a fourth zoom level - Added a config slider for zoom speed with scroll wheel / keys - When you change zoom level, mouse moves towards cursor - WIP, currently optional in settings - When using BACKSPACE to cycle to a recent workstation, zoom is not horribly close on external workstations - [b[Another optimisation pass - memory requirements and frame rate should be better on lower end machines - Daybreak and nightfall sounds are now (again) different! - Boathouse and Crane now allow you to release beasts, and no longer have currently-extraneous ability slot (run an item through to refresh and update in existing saves) - Save and Quit disabled as well as Load and Save in ToW - Fixed bug where you sometimes had to ESC not [x] out of windows (when you dropped a card on a stack instead of in a tray) - 'NOPE' marker when you can't put something in a slot (and hotfixed NOPES getting sticky when you dropped a card on a stack) - Some card autosorting options - A genealogical chart is no longer fixed in place - Lengthened some workstation timer displays - Snow displays on top of beehive in winter - SFX play on workstation close as well - Optimisation pass on textures! which means the game can just about run on 2GB VRAM now, but we're still working on it. - Kanishk's book has a more suitable cover - Windlit Gallery shrouded image updated - Clearer hint about brewing tea - 'NO RAIN BEHIND STAR' - Marked fixed wall art so it didn't confuse people - Disallowing invalid save characters again - Cats may now be placed in niches in the Grand Ascent (also any other tame beasts, though some may look odd) - Enabled mouseover highlight for accessible card text - Ending text is visible again! (it was broken briefly on beta) - Lower pump room now clickable rather than entirely hidden behind pump - Sea now lines up better with rocks - Soft Amber Pumpkin is no longer an infinite source of honey - All rest beds now have a certain hidden interaction that was limited to one particular rest bed - Thing slots in Windlit gallery now appear no longer appear in front of... other things they're not in front of - Fixed optimisation bug: rooms offscreen when unlocked are now visible without a reload - Fixed optimisation bug: very large rooms no longer flicker in and out on close zoom - Hopefully fixed optimisation bug: objects should no longer glitch in/out on close zoom - Hopefully fixed optimisation bug: scrolls and books should no longer show black instead of transparency - Sacrament Calicite is now Grail, not Heart BUT to avoid inconveniencing people who were planning to use it, existing S.C. retains Heart - Fixed misleading Scholar-level clue when making moth-gold paint - 'Deep Mandaic', not just 'Mandaic' - Glinting Cranial Tchotchke displays again - Middle display in Duelling Hall has more wiggle room

- Added a Completed Recipe button + count - Added a fourth zoom level - Added a config slider for zoom speed with scroll wheel / keys - When you change zoom level, mouse moves towards cursor - WIP, currently optional in settings - When using BACKSPACE to cycle to a recent workstation, zoom is not horribly close on external workstations - Another optimisation pass - memory requirements and frame rate should be better on lower end machines - Daybreak and nightfall sounds are now (again) different! - Boathouse and Crane now allow you to release beasts, and no longer have currently-extraneous ability slot (run an item through to refresh and update in existing saves) - Save and Quit disabled as well as Load and Save in ToW - Fixed bug where you sometimes had to ESC not [x] out of windows (when you dropped a card on a stack instead of in a tray) - 'NOPE' marker when you can't put something in a slot (and hotfixed them getting sticky when you dropped a card on a stack) - Some card autosorting options - A genealogical chart is no longer fixed in place - Lengthened some workstation timer displays - Snow displays on top of beehive in winter - SFX play on workstation close as well - Optimisation pass on textures! which means the game can just about run on 2GB VRAM now, but we're still working on it. - Kanishk's book has a more suitable cover - Windlit Gallery shrouded image updated - Clearer hint about brewing tea - 'NO RAIN BEHIND STAR' - Marked fixed wall art so it didn't confuse people - Disallowing invalid save characters again - Cats may now be placed in niches in the Grand Ascent (also any other tame beasts, though some may look odd) - Enabled mouseover highlight for accessible card text - Ending text is visible again! - Lower pump room now clickable rather than entirely hidden behind pump - Sea now lines up better with rocks - Soft Amber Pumpkin is no longer an infinite source of honey - All rest beds now have a certain hidden interaction that was limited to one particular rest bed - Thing slots in Windlit gallery now appear no longer appear in front of... other things they're not in front of - Fixed optimisation bug: rooms offscreen when unlocked are now visible without a reload - Fixed optimisation bug: very large rooms no longer flicker in and out on close zoom - Hopefully fixed optimisation bug: objects should no longer glitch in/out on close zoom - Hopefully fixed optimisation bug: scrolls and books should no longer show black instead of transparency

To switch to the beta branch (usually fairly stable, occasionally contains dragons): right-click on game in library->properties->betas->dropdown 'beta' - When you change zoom level, mouse moves towards cursor - Added a fourth zoom level - Added a config slider for zoom speed with scroll wheel / keys - When using BACKSPACE to cycle to a recent workstation, zoom is not horribly close on external workstations - Another optimisation pass - memory requirements and frame rate should be better on lower end machines - Daybreak and nightfall sounds are now (again) different! - Boathouse and Crane now allow you to release beasts, and no longer have currently-extraneous ability slot (run an item through to refresh and update in existing saves) - Save and Quit disabled as well as Load and Save in ToW - Fixed bug where you sometimes had to ESC not [x] out of windows (when you dropped a card on a stack instead of in a tray) - 'NOPE' marker when you can't put something in a slot (and hotfixed them getting sticky when you dropped a card on a stack) - Some card autosorting options - A genealogical chart is no longer fixed in place - Lengthened some workstation timer displays - Snow displays on top of beehive in winter - SFX play on workstation close as well - Optimisation pass on textures! which means the game can just about run on 2GB VRAM now, but we're still working on it. - Kanishk's book has a more suitable cover - Windlit Gallery shrouded image updated - Clearer hint about brewing tea - 'NO RAIN BEHIND STAR' - Marked fixed wall art so it didn't confuse people - Disallowing invalid save characters again - Cats may now be placed in niches in the Grand Ascent (also any other tame beasts, though some may look odd)

- Added a setting for camera pan speed with keys - Unlock button when opening rooms now responds to hotkey (S by default) - Some tweaking and tuning on item slots that should make them accept items more easily - The Postmistress isn't quite as generous when paying for Spintria - Some items in the Duelling Hall are now Wooden, not Wood (there is a difference!) - The Librarian's Glasses now count as glass (so you can, ultimately, grind them into ink if you like) - Time now passes in portage/belongings slots (this means certain surprise treasures found in the House will resolve into their final form) - Niche in the Ivory Vault no longer displays a box when the box is removed - Beehive now accessible in all seasons. - Added an extra interaction for a visitor. - Added a missing recipe for Porphyrine. - Fixed an inconsistency in card arrival position in trays, my bad - Higher-level Elements of the Soul, when fatigued, now show what their Powers will be when they recover. (Intentionally, this doesn't show up for the lowest-level Elements, because it's visual clutter at game start - I'll fix the inconsistency later)

- Font size slider in settings (works, but is first pass and labelled 'experimental') - Aspect mouseover now works as everyone expected it to ('pulse cards with this aspect') instead of the previous logiconfusing approach ('pulse cards with this aspect at this level') - Sound effects for pause/unpause - Village houses update after Unsociable Hours end, without you needing to put a card in them. - Tantras are now correctly categorised as scrolls. - Nocturnary now accepts Devices (in existing saves, you might need to run a recipe through it before you see the slot change.) - Added absent requirements to Solar and Nocturnal workbenches. - Fixed a weird early softlock where you could send the Fisherman back to the village by mistake. - Fixed annoying habit of windows of opening mostly-offscreen on load - Baronial and Curia era uncatalogued books swapped to correct colours. Sorry for any alarm this may cause. - Daymare wants Knock, not Winter, to deal with the Endless Guest. - Mommets are slightly more useful. - Now that we've seen just how many items some Librarians leave outside the house, it stretches across the bridge rather than clumping in antigravity mode - Bridge button glow doesn't stick on mouseover - The Poet and the Nun can make use of additional exaltation items. - You can no longer bind a key to two commands! (if you try, it'll swap the commands) - ESC exits keybinds - Commands can now be bound to exotic mouse buttons (let us know if your high-end mouse / accessibility-focused device still has unbindable buttons, we'll do what we can) - Moved a couple of troublesome starting items to where they're less troublesome - Added another row to card trays for people who've really gone wide on skills (more QoL to come, here) - Mirrors in the Hall of Division now correctly allow Knock aspect. (If that's not working for you, run any recipe through the workstation, it'll refresh and catch up with itself) - Fixed a couple of teeny but significant ending glitches - Another raft of typos and text tweaks

User avatar level 1 lessofthat OP All-Time Top 10 Poster +5 19 hr. ago WEATHERMAKER - Scroll bar on news window now responds to scroll wheel! - Double-click to zoom to room, double-click again to zoom in closer (little rough still, I'll clean it up) - Animals no longer recover from hunger at dawn (but dw, they won't starve either!) - Better hints about how to hire rare guests at the Sweet Bones - Fixed several floaty / odd shelves - Workstations and items are interactable at a slightly farther distance - We stopped autosaving when you alt-tab out, for reasons - Some improvements to camera movement - Comfort slots are less obtrusive - Assistance can't be right-clicked to an inappropriate rooms lot - Fixed Aspect mixup on three Numina - Drag hints go away forever after a half-dozen times (placeholder for a better system) - Postage slot will now only accept money - Various other typos and hint clean-ups

Well that's nice. We thought BoH would do pretty well, but we emphatically didn't expect this:
The launch went really, really well. Lottie and I teared up more than once, basically the max number of times Brits are allowed to show emotion and a bit over. Thank you, everyone. The downside of the launch going really well is that I've answered something like a hundred help tickets since Thursday night and I have another 135 in my inbox right now! So I'm taking today off but next week I'll be back on the patch train. Our regular freelancer, Chelnoque, is pitching in, and we're getting a specialist in from the Knights of Unity for optimisation and obscure technical issues ('why is my mouse cursor insanely tiny on this Linux distro') . The next month is going to be all about quality of life improvements and bug fixes - after that, a holiday - after that, we'll start looking at content updates and, ultimately, localisation. But it's QoL first. We don't want to polish away the intentionally eccentric design decisions that some people have fallen in love with... but we don't want to annoy people needlessly, either. There's almost always a smart third way. We probably won't add an in-game recipe book... but we probably will add in-game note-taking as room notes or bookshelf plaques. We probably won't add fast-travel to Brancrug, because I want the House to feel remote... but we definitely will tweak and improve ways to get around the map and reduce wear on the wrist. We might add mouseover to view on slots... and we definitely will find ways to make the game less 'clicky'. And so on and so on and so on and so on. We're nowhere near done with this game: we're going to keep on improving and expanding it. Thank you to everyone who's left a review. As I said elsewhere, I enjoy reading the rave reviews much more. But the nuanced positive reviews, and even the negative ones, are also the designer's meat and drink, and we're going to use them to polish this gameuntil you can see your face in it. EDIT: yes polish the game with meat AND WHAT

- That left-hand bookshelf in the Westcott Room is no longer blocked - Fixed broken tooltips on Essential/Required/Forbidden - Disabled saving (and autosaving) in Wisdoms Tree for now - Increased number of backup saves from 7 to 14 - Fixed Linux and Steam Deck cloud config (I think!) - You can no longer learn Skills at Desks (it could break skill progression)

A S T R O L A B E

- Arrow / WSAD key navigation no longer sticks - Insane bug where unlocking Brancrug would try trigger an achievement tens of thousands of times: fixed - Added missing dialogue for Corso re: Apollo and Marsyas ('stains, Librarian'); also he now reads Phrygian - Resting at the Sweet Bones in Numa has an outcome - comfort slots are displayed with a gentle uplight hint - reading... messages appear before ...read messages - Improved some placement rules for wall art and books - Oversized Egg no longer has Living Relic aspect - corrupt autosaves can (again) be bypassed by loading backups from the menu - Display layout tidier for items/slots with lots of aspects - Multiple achieved endings displayed more attractively - Beasts can now be released and items renounced to the Sea - Dividing a Gold Spintria at the smithy is no longer a perpetual money exploit - HOTFIX: comfort slots no longer block bust niches on the Grand Ascent - updated credits in memoriam Mickey Erbe

Well, *I* didn't sleep last night. Thank you so much to everyone who's taken a chance on BOOK OF HOURS so far - it's the best launch AK or I have ever been a part of, and I can't believe so many people seem to like it. ALL THE FEELS. We've just uploaded a bunch of bug fixes and quality of life tweaks to the beta branch, so if anyone fancies jumping on and testing them out, please do!

How to get on the beta branch

• Go to your Steam Library and right click on BOOK OF HOURS
• Select 'Properties'
• Click 'Beta' from the menu on the left
• Select 'beta - here might be dragons' from the 'Beta participation' drop down on the right

Changes in PATCH 2023.8.b.2

• Arrow / WSAD key navigation no longer sticks
• Insane bug where unlocking Brancrug would try trigger an achievement tens of thousands of times: fixed
• Added missing dialogue for Corso re: Apollo and Marsyas ('stains, Librarian'); also he now reads Phrygian
• Resting at the Sweet Bones in Numa has an outcome
• Comfort slots are displayed with a gentle uplight hint
• Reading... messages appear before ...read messages
• Improved some placement rules for wall art and books
• Oversized Egg no longer has Living Relic aspect
• Corrupt autosaves can (again) be bypassed by loading backups from the menu
• Display layout tidier for items/slots with lots of aspects
• Multiple achieved endings displayed more attractively
• Updated credits in memoriam Mickey Erbe

[quote]BOOKS ARE THE MEMORY WHICH DOES NOT DIE. (inscribed in five languages over the gate of Hush House)[/quote] I cant believe Im writing this, but: BOOK OF HOURS is OUT NOW! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1028310/BOOK_OF_HOURS/ If you like what you see, leave us a review. Our games tend towards the weird and inexplicable, and its incredibly helpful to let other gamers know that weve not just, like, knitted a sock and drawn a face on it or something. Help unweird and explicate us! As much as is possible. After Cultist Simulator, we wanted to set our next game in the same universe - but AK felt bad that hed made another game about eating people and bringing the apocalypse, and he wanted to write something kinder. Fast forward four years and here we are, in the soft golden glow of a deep auburn game about managing an occult library, of organising things carefully and thoughtfully, of being left alone in a beautiful Gormenghastian abbey to light candles and read books and walk the parapets, where every so often someone drops by to ask you something or give you a book - and then they go away again. BOOK OF HOURS: the introverts dream! I thought you might be interested in some fragments of development history. You might recognise some things that evolved into the game weve just released, and others that (rightly) were left by the wayside because for the love of god how was that UI ever going to work? Heres a little sample: Early sketches for our hero art:
Some of the earliest design notes:
The first draft layout of Hush House:
Early Hush House design:
Some early prototypes of what BoH's art might look like:
Our 'porthole' phase:
We wanted to build something that had the crunchy recipe-based mechanics of Cultist Sim but was a welcoming place, somewhere you could go just to be on your own even if you werent working to achieve anything: a sun-dappled hammock; a candle-lit nook; a secret walled garden whose only key is yours. BOOK OF HOURS will not be for everyone, but I hope everyone can feel the love we poured in radiating from the worn stones of Hush House, the wave-weathered rocks around Crowcross Sands, the lamp-lit leaded-glass windows of the Sweet Bones, and the purr of the well-fed cat you brought in from the cold. The mellifluous Systemchalk is broadcasting BOOK OF HOURS live on the Steam page, if you'd like to see the game in action. Alternatively, join us at 8PM BST / 12PM PDT for an AMA on r/Gaming (live here!), or in a live interview on GOGs Twitch stream tomorrow at 7PM BST / 11AM PDT. Thank you so much for reading, and if you decide to pick up BOOK OF HOURS this week, may the Hours look kindly on your deeds. Love, Lottie & Alexis

If you're lucky enough to have a preview key... I've uploaded a beta patch with some teeny narrative easter eggs, some UI improvements, some fixes to things like inaccessible glasses of water. For everyone else... the beta patch rejoices in the name of 'Release Candidate 7', which means that it's the version you'll see on Thursday, in 5 days 22 hours 36 minutes 37 seconds. Except by the time you read this that time is GUARANTEED TO BE EVEN SHORTER. pip pip AK

Its less than one week until BOOK OF HOURS launches. Our social countdown has begun, theres that terrifying clock ticking down on our blog, and AK and I are finally releasing our most ambitious game ever, the culmination of years of effort. I thought itd be useful to collect all the most important release info in one place. Let me know if Ive missed anything, and feel free to ask questions in the comments!

The main points

• Launching: Thursday 17th August 2023 @ 6PM BST / 10AM PDT
• Platforms: Steam + GOG (on Windows, Mac and Linux)
• Price: 19.99 / $24.99
• Launch deal: 10% launch discount + Perpetual Edition for anyone buying in Week 1

How YOU can help

• Buy BOOK OF HOURS at launch. Lots of people buying very shortly after launch tells Steam: this game is beloved by its people. Perhaps I should attend.
• Leave a positive Steam review. Positive Steam reviews are one off the biggest factors in peoples decision to buy a game (as far as I can tell, its screenshots + Steam reviews) AND ALSO they tell Steam: this game is good. It can make money. Promote it!
• Tell all your friends. The more traffic our Steam page gets, the more enticing the game looks to the algorithm (If I promote it more, even more mice will come). So if you enthuse to your friends, suggest BOOK OF HOURS to streamers, talk about it on social media, share screenshots or do anything that might encourage more people to check out the game, that makes the algorithm think: this is the most popular game in the world. It will bring Valve 8 trillion delicious English pounds. I shall put it on the front page.

Whats coming next

• 17th August AK and I are running an AMA on launch day at 8PM BST / 12PM PDT on r/Games. Well crosspost to the WF subreddit for ease of access, so come say hi and chat with us!
• 18th August AK and I join Cultist Sim super-streamer Systemchalk for a BOOK OF HOURS dev stream at 7PM BST / 11AM PDT on GOGs Twitch. Try explaining that sentence to someone from the 1930s.

* Wisdoms Tree button works again. - It's always been a bit temperamental, this one, so I've taken steps to stabilise it. Save and Quit immediately followed by Continue gave you a black screen!!! - It doesn't now.

[quote]"The Hours are not all-knowing. Perhaps in truth we should not call them gods..."[/quote] What secrets lurk in old grimoires? What histories lie beneath Hush House? What's true about the invisible world, and what legacy will you forge with your hard-won numina? It's finally time to share BOOK OF HOURS' launch trailer, the first step across the threshold for all Librarians. Hopefully this gives everyone an appealing taste of the game, from hardcore Cultist Simulator fans (here's looking at you, Apostle Entheates) to people who've never heard of the Secret Histories. Watch below, share it around and let us know what you think! [previewyoutube=38D565xKp-8;full][/previewyoutube] So shiny! Much heart-feels! Wow! Now, onto development. Our beta period is now officially over, so a serious thank you to everyone who participated in any of them over the last few months. Your feedback has been incredibly helpful, and AK's full-time job at the moment is tweaking the game based on what we're hearing from players. He only implements a few suggestions - as with all Kennedy games, BOOK OF HOURS is highly distinctive and therefore divisive - but he really does read and think about every email we receive. AK + Feedback in the 'Consider' verb = Better Game + Need of Gin...?
As a result of everyone's hard work, I've finally been able to take some shiny new screenshots (check 'em out on the Steam page if you haven't seen them yet), and have been feverishly finishing off all remaining Aspects, Elements and Things, with some help from veteran element artists Clockwork Cuckoo.
Most importantly, we now have proper states for all pets. Like the Wild, Tame and HONGRY cat below:
AK, meanwhile, has been working flat out on polishing the game post-beta. This mostly means bringing the last 20% of Hush House to life (that's right: the caves under the House remain unexplored until launch), zillions of technical bugs like 'this runs at 3FPS on my potato', 'this runs at 10FPS on my laptop' and 'are you trolling us with the phonograph, where the hell is it'. Having finally had the time to play the game myself, oh my Hours am I sorry I didn't put in more wall art / comfort / thing slots for you all to put things down! I love the idea in theory of picking up a snake and then never, ever being able to put it down, but in reality it's less fun. So... I'm working on that! But let me hand over to AK for one moment... In Sheri S. Tepper'sSideshow, there's a recurring children's story that has always stayed with me. I re-read it today, and it sounds oddly relevant in some expected and unexpected ways. [quote]"And so, sustained by this ambition, he went higher and higher yet, gray stone and gray cliff and gray rain falling, year after year, until he came at last to the place the swallows danced in the air above the bottomless void..."[/quote] Back in 2021, Lottie and I described BOOK OF HOURS as a game of 'peace, melancholy, satisfaction and curiosity'. If you've followed our work, you'll know that we're theme-first; you might also know that I have a thing about there always being an core, understated theme that the others orbit like an invisible sun. In BOOK OF HOURS, this understated theme is loneliness. [quote]"When they saw him, they stopped dancing to perch beside him on the stone, and when he saw them there, silver and black, beautiful as a night lit with stars, he was possessed once again by a great longing, and he told them of his desire for wings. Perhaps you may have wings, but you must give up your shell, they cried..."[/quote] One of the things they tell you in children's books is that if you're a loner, but gifted, or virtuous, or interesting, you will have a happy ending. This much is often true. But many children's books end with the loner getting a medal, or a big parade, or a special hat, while everyone cheers. This is not, in my experience, how it generally works. [quote]"And even as they told him he might have wings, he seemed to hear in their voices some of the carelessness he had heard in the voice of the owl and the bat and the bullfrog, who had told him where to go without telling him the dangers of the way. He heard them rightly, for the winged gods have a divine indifference toward those who seek flight. They will not entice and they will not promise and they will not make the way easy, for those who wish to soar must do so out of their hearts desire and their minds consent and not for any other reason..."[/quote] The Librarian of Hush House has left the world behind. Visitors will pass like seasons into their life and out of it, and the Librarian may never see them again, let alone know the end of their stories. The Librarian will live, die, and leave something for whoever might come after. This is of course what all of us do, all our lives. Much is taken, but much abides. [quote]"And the turtle struggled with himself, wanting wings but not wanting wings, for if he had wings, they told him, he would no longer be interested in going back to the pond to tell the creatures there of his journeythat comfortable telling, the anticipation of which had been, perhaps, more important to him than the wings themselves. So, he struggled, wanting and not wanting "[/quote] I don't think anyone will enjoy BOOK OF HOURS if they have never been lonely. I hope that people who've never been lonely will still like the game. But, honestly, I don't know if there's anyone in the world like that. .........I always come across as a bit of a cheesepuff (light; dusted; non-profound) after I let AK write anything, so I shall epilogue succinctly. We've a bunch of stuff coming between now and actual release, including streamer access, social countdowns, a launch-day AMA on r/Games and a gameplay-focused final video. It should all be terribly exciting and I will be appealing to YOU good souls to help us, if you like, make BOOK OF HOURS' release as big as a game about being left alone to read quietly in a library can possibly be. Thank you for sticking with us so far - you must now enjoy launch on our behalf while we run around with our hair on fire saying terribly British things like 'ah, I am a-pother' and 'halp'. Stay tuned. And for our final 'dog on a skateboard' story, I leave you with news that everybody's favourite Weary Detective from Cultist Simulator has been working hard, working out and has duly received a much-deserved promotion. Good job, Douglas! That means you get a cooler hat. [quote]"Detective-Illuminate of the Suppression Bureau. A stoic, but weary, fellow. His dearest wish is to move to Chingford and grow roses. But the buggers won't let him retire."[/quote]

[quote]"Write a truth in a book that no-one reads. Then drop dead. No-one knows what you wrote. Unless the truth is numen."[/quote] We've just emailed a bunch of new and existing testers to confirm the release of our final and most lore-heavy beta, NOCTURNAL. Unless we run into significant bugs we're not expecting, this beta will only run for one week (we'll remove access from everyone on Monday 24th July), and will be BOOK OF HOURS' last beta release. Get your early access while stocks last! Having a beta build live is fantastic for catching issues but adds a support and development burden to us for the duration. So we want a short sharp pinch of testing to make sure the game's still holding up okay, then focused dev time in the run up to launch so we can get stuck into final content passes, technical optimisations and all the little baubles that make an inanimate fir tree you've stuck in a pot into a magical Christmas tree.

What's in NOCTURNAL?

What happens next?

[quote]"Marksman, detective, renegade. He has always been a quiet man, but since he left the Suppression Bureau, he has grown even quieter, and terribly still - except for his fingers and for his eyes, always in restless motion."[/quote] It's June the 28th, once again. So we have presents to share! Shiny animated presents. Here's a fresh new atmospheric trailer for BOOK OF HOURS, introducing how it feels to play this melancholic, bittersweet CRPG. I hope it tugs at your heartstrings like a kitten alone in the rain. [url=https://youtu.be/KZBXr5V6PUI]
Click to watch the 'COME HOME' trailer! I can also now tell you useful launch info. BOOK OF HOURS will cost 19.99 / $24.99 when it releases at 6PM BST / 10AM PDT on Thursday 17th August. (It's double the size of Cultist Sim at launch, with 120,000 words to Cultist's mere 60,0000.) We're also offering the same Perpetual Edition deal we did when Cultist Simulator released: anyone buying the game in the first week of sale will get BOOK OF HOURS: Perpetual Edition and receive all future DLC for free, for life! (This means we're committed to releasing DLC, in case anyone's worried we'll scam 'em.) Now, let's get to the GAME. AK's written [strike]99[/strike] 101 different endings - I am not making that up, that is not a typo, there are [strike]99[/strike] 101 different endings. [AK says: I apologise to my wife for adding content even while she's writing this blog post.] Some of them are variant endings rather than totally unique ones (my favourite is an extremely lovely homage to a famous ending of Cultist Simulator's) but I feel even our most enigmatic players still have quite enough to get on with within that vast array. With some of AK's most weird and wonderful prose, too: [quote]"I crouch beneath like the scavenger I am, but the bloody gods favour me - I feast on furry shadows..."[/quote] We're also implementing a record system which tracks players' endings over multiple playthroughs, so you can see all your different characters' ends:
And in case you feel that's setting the bar too low, I'm working to implement 77 achievements with names like 'A Knowledge In The Look Of Things' and 'The Bells of Ys'. One of these is a total troll-y condition and I will not apologise for it. You'll know it when you achieve it. >:) All major content is now in-game. AK's finished the core of the writing, including the Visitor stories - hence the enigmatic quote at the top of this blog. Any guesses who the quiet ex-Bureau gentleman is? We now have a month and a half of fixing and tweaking time before launch. That means we have a final round of card art, aspect art, new books, text tweaks, bug fixing and UI love before launch in August. AK will be spending a lot of time playing the game and making sure there are helpful breadcrumbs just the right side of esoteric to lead players enjoyably through the game, while I'll be desperately polishing assets, taking screenshots for our Steam page (finally!) and adding all the little extras that should make the game sing, like custom cursors...
... and fixing crabbed old fossils like this.
This is what the save menu looks like currently. It will not be what the save menu looks like in August. [sez you. - AK] Finally, all Cucurbit Gaol and underground Dawn rooms are now in-game and functional. Some took alotmore effort than others (the Night Gallery with all its shadowy swathed-paintings was particularly complicated) but that means the game can really be properly fully played and all of Hush House unlocked. So our last beta - the NOCTURNAL beta - launches on Monday 17th July and runs until Friday 28th July. It will include all rooms up to the end of the Cucurbit Gaol, a bunch (if not all) our endings, and probably achievements. It will be our last beta before launch - we want to save the true horror/wonder of DAWN for the full game.

Look how pretty it looks in winter. Hope you felt the love and loss in the new trailer, and are as excited as I am for release! That is: terrified and determined, like a storm-wracked sailor at dawn. Stay tuned.

[quote]After the red leaf and the gold have gone, Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain I speak to you now with the lands voice, It is the cold, wild land that says to you A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things: The old hills hunch before the north wind blows. Howard Nemerov, A Spell Before Winter (1962)[/quote] By the time you read this Ill be in Dungeness, a wonderfully desolate shingle headland in Kent where I go for writing breaks, sometimes (although inaccurately) called Britains only desert.. Dungeness features an army of gulls, three lighthouses, two defunct nuclear power stations, a snack shack, a lot of sky and absolutely zero distractions. Ill work happy twelve hour days, subsist on cornichons and rainwater and a half a bottle of emergency late night Eagle Rare, come back with the last major writing tasks complete. These are the visitor stories The Affair of the God in the Wood, The Affair of the Threshold Revolt and the endings That Old Lost Music, A Final Understanding, The Suns Secret. I reserve writing breaks for the difficult, deep dive design & writing work where I need to splash about in spreadsheets and cover the dining room table with index cards. The visitor stories and game endings which interweave references with each other, with the Librarian origins, and with the deep lore of Hush House, the Secret Histories, pentimenti and numina are some of the most allusive and self-consciously literary work in the game. They need to be compelling and satisfying for the casual players and they need to reward years of analysis and argumentation by the most dedicated players. So they merit a whole-ass not a half-ass approach.
Fig. 1 A whole-ass approach And after that, the hay is in the barn. Well have a release candidate that we could go with if we absolutely had to, if we didnt mind the launch being a bit of a shambles. Weve still got lots of QoL work, bug fixes, audio tuning, performance optimisation and balancing to do so that it wont be a shambles and some features it would be nice to add before rather than after launch (Mr Kille sends you marrows if youre nice to him; Hokobald steals his own book) but even if I fall into a deep coma on June 17th, we should still be OK as long as I wake up on August 17th. Three things I want to say, just in case I do fall into a deep coma! First: a big thank you to everyone whos participated in the beta and sent us helpful feedback and bug reports. All I can offer you is the assurance that its made a serious and significant difference to the final quality of the game youll end up playing: but I can offer you that assurance. Weve kept a lot of final detail back, partly for canny reasons but partly with beta testers in mind. Everyone was keen to see everything, and I know how tempting it can be to spoil yourself on one too many details. (There will be one last beta phase, but even that will keep some juicy stuff back for launch.). Second: a big thank you to Lottie, who is going to be embarrassed now she has to put this into a blog post. Theres been a real creative dialogue on this one between writing and art, and as a result, Brancrug and Hush House and the moors above, with all their mists and histories, feel wistfully and transcendently real. I half-forget sometimes that they cant actually be physically visited. But well be making the place as visitable as we can very soon now. Just a few more weeks to oil the hinges, clean the bird droppings off the windows, lay fires in the hearths. We wanted Hush House to feel like a home to anyone whos ever been momentarily tempted by the idea of life as a country librarian or a lighthouse-keeper. If thats you, then welcome home.

[quote]"In Brancrug Village, they tell of Thirza Blake's boast that she crossed an ocean in the Bounds by clinging to a broom of lignum vitae after a shipwreck. The pedant Strathcoyne points out that lignum vitae sinks in water. 'An ocean of mercury,' Thirza replies, and then, to provide a suitable punchline, clouts him on the head with her broom."[/quote] See, BOOK OF HOURS is a *fun* game. People hit each other over the head with cleaning accessories! And we named this sprint after Joan the Wad ('wad' being Cornish slang for 'torch'), who's the Cornish pixie queen and a sort of chaotic-good pagan version of Saint Christopher. Depending on who you ask, either Joan looks after those who carry her talisman as they make their journeysor she, er, leads them into a bog. Whatever the truth, researching it taught me that her husband is Jack o' the Lantern, of Halloween pumpkin fame, and it's nice to think of the Piskie king and queen being in some way included in light-heartedly spooky celebrations each year even if nobody knows they're there. But while piskies play, game devs work. I've been focused on two big art tasks since we last blogged: seasonal art and the skybox, which (as those of you in the beta will know) was until recently a vast blinding square of blue. It's a bit of a clich for a British couple to get excited about the weather, but BoH's weather is inspired by paper-theatre and I kind of love it!
(A few more examples on the blog.) There are a few mechanical changes that take place during different weathers (different resources and opportunities), and this only gets deeper with seasons. You'll be able to harvest Lenten Rose from the Scent Garden in spring, for example, but Fragrant Chalice from the same plot in summer. There'll be stickily bountiful bees in the Kitchen Gardens when it's warm, and cornucopic vegetables in the autumn. Most importantly, of course, there'll be a CHARMING CHRISTMASSY ATMOSPHERE when Brancrug Village is coated in snow in wintertime - and I may even add Christmassy bunting up the Grand Ascent. Let's just see how quickly I finish my other art tasks! Numa is the outlier here. Capricious as fog, it's the season of mists and silence and gently foreboding stars, and it occurs only once every nine seasons, never at quite the same time as before. It has the power to reshape the world you've come to know... [quote]"The smithy fire still glows, but through the window I see a gaunt, eyeless shape working the bellows. There is no sign of Denzil, and I know better than to interrupt this visitor..."[/quote] ...and offers unique opportunities not available at other times. [quote]"Afterwards I don't remember what work I performed, except in scents and sensations - leaf-mould, a rhythmic musical clicking like melodious castanets, soft blue flame like antique gaslight. And cold; I remember that where we went, it was cold."[/quote] So, you know. Pour libations to the Velvet when it comes, enjoy its spooky bounty, and don't spend too long outside. AK, meanwhile, went on a writer's retreat last week (read: AirBnB'd a pared-back ex-Coastguard lookout and asked me to change his Netflix password). He powered through a terrifying amount of item descriptions - over 500 of them, I believe - except it wasn't 500 descriptions he had to write. Every object in BOOK OF HOURS needs at least two descriptions, one for when you're casually engaged with them and one when you're really considering them, so he wrote over 1,000 loreful snippets about candlesticks, armoires, buckets of seawater, and a weird fern that looks like it has a face. He ended up with a spreadsheet that looks like this:
And I've seen him cross-referencing everything with various lore docs, artwork, Unity notes and aspects. It's TERRIFYING - sort of like a nice granny sewing an anatomically perfect but Cubist interpretation of a kitten in cross-stitch, listening the entire time to AC/DC played backwards. He's also been writing room descriptions (which, er, also need two versions). You'll see the first description when you initially discover the room by unlocking one just next to it: this one explains the problem you need to resolve before you can enter it. You'll see the second when the room is unlocked and restored to its former glory, giving you a toothsome morsel of lore. The closest analogue to the effect is the expedition mechanic in Cultist Simulator, where you'll find out a little about the specific vault you're exploring ('The ascent to the cave through the high passes will be dangerous. Whatever waits in the darkness below is probably more dangerous still') and have an opportunity to supply Followers and resources to overcome those obstacles. You'll need help from specialists in BOOK OF HOURS - you're a librarian, not the A Team, Jim - but once you've found the appropriate item or helpful assistant, you're in. [quote]"A thick and freezing murk, like a clinging black mist, roils at floor level. Not theoplasma exactly - the ragged remnants of some chilly Wood-thing? Or a good old-fashioned ghost, decayed to half-elemental energies? Some local will probably know."[/quote] We've also been sprucing up the Wisdom Tree (more on that later) and drawing more card art, so I just want to share with you the truly horrible image for 'Wormwood Dream':
Didn't wanna sleep anyway.

The next beta: SOLAR

Finally, those of you who speak another language which isn't English

• French
• Italian
• German
• Spanish
• Russian
• Simplified Chinese
• Japanese
• Brazilian Portuguese

[quote]"Cracktrack was a gift from the light above the world. When Glory touched the first life-motes with this language, they entered the waking world. They were Illuminated."[/quote] Big news first: GET HYPE! We can finally reveal that BOOK OF HOURS is launching on Steam and GOG (across Windows, Mac and Linux) on...

17th August 2023

[quote]Westengryre is what the early monks of St Brandans called it; that old green-sickness, the raptness of desolation, the terror of the wastes, and it is upon me now. The Wood. The Wood. The Wood![/quote] What would a Weather Factory game be if it didnt try to kill you every so often? The Hours are much more merciful in Brancrug, but the House Without Walls still waits behind the world, and its still a dangerous place. Elements of the Soul are vulnerable to maladies if overused, or used unwisely. Chor is drawn into Duendracy by music only you can hear. Wist becomes tangled and Shell-Crossed with pre-human thoughts.. Ereb is vulnerable to Westengryre, and Phost the HIGHER YOU RISE the MORE YOU SEE. You didnt think wed make too easy a game, did you? On to the beta. Thanks so much for everyone whos tested so far its so helpful! AK mentioned this in a recent Reddit post, but heres an easy visual guide to what happens next:
Well be removing access to the beta on Monday 17th (youll be able to load it after that point, but not get past the title screen), and reopening it on Thursday 27th April with a new expanded build, BARONIAL. Weve also decided to add testers incrementally over the course of the rest of the beta. A bunch of people will get emails on the 27th, and every week or so when AK updates Steam with a new build a few more will find a tasty beta key in their inbox. I know some people were disappointed when they werent included in the first tranch of testers and had to wait a month before being in with another chance. This way everyone should be happier, AND we get a steady influx of new people to tell us our UI dont work. Woo hoo!
Look how nice this one looks! And this is a screenshot, not a mock-up. Were getting there Art-wise Im astonished to say that we are ONE ROOM AWAY from all (base) art complete. Theres one place left to draw a triple-sized subterranean chapel of the Sisterhood of the Triple Knot but were looking pretty peachy. Im now working on bringing it to life with animations (beta testers may have noticed the nice candle animations going in, for example) while Adrien makes a number of seasonal outside art and Important People busts youll find around Hush House. Heres a sampling of what hes up to. Any guesses on who these busts are?

Right! Ill leave it here so we can get back to work on the game. More updates soon: beta hopefuls expect an email (maybe) on the 27th, and in two weeks time we have something important to share with all of youse. In the interests of getting hype

I reckon we'll have five or six more mid-release updates like this, and then go to BARONIAL - the next batch of rooms, with a new batch of beta testers.

• BIG UI UPDATE - still WIP
• Updated prentice-level recipes, added scholar-level recipes
• fixed flicker problem with workstations
• 'see those trees / bend in the wind / I feel they've got a lot more sense than me'
• changed requirement for Gatehouse entry
• can't Seek Unusual Help with a fatigued Soul any more
• Made Timothy et al unique. I had thought maybe you hire them for a double helping, but it just confuses people
• Various aspect fixes
• Purging St R's reminders properly
• Tuned edge drag movement better
• Chor exaltation shouldn't give sky
• Fixed wrong connection in Wisdoms
• Trist shouldn't claim nectar as an exaltation benefit
• Borders on world
• Zoom out further
• Why does the barber attract all the typos?
• Heart consultations now possible
• Telescope is now a telescope, moor walks are pugs
• Sea's Edge is pugs
• Plants no longer get unhelpfully fatigued to 'petals'
• Placeholder to make the abandoned items issue easier to parse
• Moved troublesome trees
• Denzil doesn't hide his timer
• Slot glow tidy ups (niche glows currently hyperaggressive tho)
• calm seas + gentle mists
• Fixed revolutionary journal image
• Fixed unintentionally generous skill jump at skill 4
• Latest round of item development... including uniqueness for transient memories.
• Special-hired assistants don't get confused at night
• Knock text recast
• Calicite Supplications now studiable!
• Updated fallthrough hints
• lotsa new underground art (still invisible in beta)
• bottomless thing spheres no longer bottomless
• tray now occludes less
• skills tray arranges skills better
• 'shiny happy treesies holding hands' apparently
• sky tweaks
• slot dropcatcher tidyup

• Fixed some silly nonsense with offstage spheres
• Fixed some silly nonsense with the Wisdoms
• You know if you clicked and dragged a wisdom node it appeared to do nothing but actually scrolled the hidden map? It doesn't now though.
• Plaques less obtrusive (WIP tho)
• Abandoned objects harder to lose
• Fixed ridiculous bug where an object would sometimes slide mischievously behind a portage slot and become inaccessible
• Lone autumnal tree in summer now retains summer colouring
• Postmistress will now change a half crown",

Just a mini update to confirm that BOOK OF HOURS has launched in closed beta! If you haven't signed up for the beta, register your interest here. And if you weren't picked for this round, don't worry! You might well be chosen for next month's group. (We'll be adding new people each month, so there are lots of chances to get a key.) Good luck! To those of you currently playing, I hope you enjoy Brancrug. :)

[quote]"The Curia used to issue gloves and slippers of soft leather to protect the books and premises. Patrons were often asked to remove their shoes. Pause a moment and listen to the Histories."[/quote] Don't worry everyone we finished the game
AK said he wanted a 'Generic Thing Image' ('Thing' being our development term for any movable object you can place on top of other things, like candlesticks or mounted skulls or alembics), I gave him a Generic Thing Image, and he's all, oh, that looks insane, why is our game full of gigantic ragdolls, and I'm like, babe, leave the art to me. (After much energetic debate, beta players next week will notice that the Generic Thing Image has been replaced with a much less interesting triangle with a question mark in it. Le sigh.) In more joyous news, I have loads of new art to share with you along with our beta milestone (scroll to the bottom if you just want to read about that). We received some more beautiful element art from habitual element-er Sophie H. Unlike the previous portraits we've shared (who have been assistants you'll meet in Brancrug Village), the following are all Hush House patrons - people who'll appear from time to time with a request for a book, help with lore, or simply checking up on you.
You've met a few of these characters in Cultist Simulator, and a few of them have even been physically represented in The Lady Afterwards. Any guesses on who's who above? Meanwhile, Adrien and I have been hard at work drawing new rooms. Adrien's drawn over 70 now, which is officially nuts. Here are some of my favourite recent ones, starting with a room in which nothing bad has ever happened (the destroyed room at the top of the Crucible Tower) to the peaceful whimsy of the Lower Cliff Path:

(More over on the blog!) Oh, and just to whet your appetites on something totally banonkers that Adrien's working up now - anyone have an idea of what THIS room is?
I've also been tweaking the background art, redrawing Hush House (it's now much sharper and those dotted lines line up really nice, a la Wes Anderson perfectionism) and the world's trees. We now have seasonal variantsandanimations, so you'll see the year change (and the resources you can nab from it) over time. Behold the four basic starter animations...
We've added some new books to the game, too! Here's a selection of covers and how they might look lined up on a shelf:
I leave you with the news that BOOK OF HOURS' beautiful soundtrack composed by Canadian soundstress Maribeth Solomon and co. is finalised! I can't share the final music with you yet, but I can say it's double the length of the CS soundtrack (15 tracks in CS, 31 in BoH) and pique your interest with our nearly final track list...

Finally, the beta

DEMO PATCH NOTES 2023.2.a.19 - saves should be compatible, but restart to be on the safe side - TWOPENCE AND THREEPENCE - Restart button may work - can't drop tokens haplessly on bed - some minor content tweaks, blink and you'll miss - bit more skill upgrade flexibility - Pugs have gone to a good home (see https://weatherfactory.biz/pug-reports/) (we'd have added click-slot to make match cards glow but it's surprisingly hard for silly gfx reasons. It'll be in the release build though)

We're delighted* to be releasing the BOOK OF HOURS: Early Draft demo on Monday! Look out for a big green download button on our Steam page at 6PM GMT / 10AM PDT. We hope you enjoy it on your own, but we'll be playing through the demo ourselves in a Steam Broadcast on Thursday 9th Feb, at 6PM GMT / 10AM PDT. That's UK evening time so we will likely have appropriately hyggelig wine and candles. Join us to lift the lid on game dev. Hear us curse when we discover a bug! See Alexis talk inspiration and probably drop a crumb or two of lore! Find out how the Cultist Simulator tabletop's hiding in plain sight, and what's *really* going on behind that fog! The chat will be open, so we'd love to hear your comments, questions and blessings of the Madrugad. Hope to see you there. Alexis & Lottie *Actually, terrified.

[quote]There was a storm. It smashed the ship like an egg. But I seized this book as the sea seized me then the sea brought me here to Brancrug.[/quote] BOOK OF HOURS looks like itll end up five times the size of Cultist Sim. The whole game is set in a single location (see below), but theres a hell of a lot to dig into with the story, nine different origins to choose from which direct your initial interests, and thats before you get into the lore in all those books or the nine Wisdoms. We wouldnt normally attempt a game as large of this its just the two of us + friendly freelancers but weve a big leg-up from Cultist Simulator. It provides the basic code framework (things nobody thinks of but you have to do before launch, like saving and loading systems, or Steam achievement integration) and the core mechanic (card + card = new things + new story). This means we can focus on improving things from CS while building out a new world for BOOK OF HOURS. Its not a roguelike, which makes us a bit nervous because wed love people to replay the game as much as people replay Cultist Simulator. But it is big, deep and visually charming, like Chi at the bottom of a well.
Weve been really hustling these last two weeks to get a first-look demo of in Steam Next Fest at the start of February. Were on track for that just! so look out for more info in our newsletter, going out next week. Itll be pretty rough around the edges, but it should give you a good understanding of where were going with the final game. Youll crawl your way out of the freezing sea to the door of an old friend, charm some suspicious rustics who just want to be left alone with their pints of bitter, and eventually cross the Cucurbit Bridge all the way to Hush House, where youll unlock the first room of the library. Until I played an earlier build this week, I hadnt realised how large this game world is.
In the meantime, this means I have a great many other things to update you on. Are you sitting comfortably? Then Ill begin. Firstly, we confirmed the final look and feel of the overall game world goodbye old cliffs, hello turquoise sea. Its still WIP (dont look too hard at the beach) but the vibe is there. Weve also revamped the misty effect that the game opens with, which form the fog of war you spend the first part of the game unlocking. Ive a lot of work ahead of me representing the different seasons (including Numa), and animating various parts of it to bring it alive. But I like where its going, finally.
More importantly, Alexis has finally been writing content! Hes focused on the first half hour of the game, with our upcoming demo in mind which is why he has been reading up on Cornish hospitality in the 30s, and why he left a card on my desk which just says YARG. [quote]At last, the light of a hurricane lamp bobbing in the dark. As it approaches, a face looms out of the night.[/quote] A face! Quite a rugged face, but not a rock, or a vengeful sea-bird, or a poisonous snail. This face helps you to the nearby village (banishing Brancrugs misty fog of war), where you end up dripping interesting patterns into the well-worn wooden floor of The Sweet-Bones. But its not exactly an overwhelming welcome: [quote]After the Restoration of 1930, the New Kings agents came looking for his enemies in these parts and they werent gentle about it. Since those days, the locals are suspicious of foreigners. No-one in the Sweet Bones will talk to me.[/quote] Using your characters chosen skills, an old friend and your own actual brain, you must convince the villagers to aid you. Once you have, its on to Hush House, to unlock the first of very many unusual rooms Now, books. Youd expect a game christened That Damn Library Game to have quite a lot of them. But how to represent them is a surprisingly thorny issue, because they have to fulfil lots of sometimes contradictory requirements. They must be small enough to fit reasonably in rooms designed for humans; they have to be large enough that players can click on them realiably; they have to be complex enough to tell you something meaningful about their contents just by looking at them; they must be simple enough that Lottie doesnt lose her mind. Most importantly, theyre also the meeting point of our two different art styles the vibrant, vector-style element art weve kept from the cards of Cultist Simulator, and the textured, illustrative style of the world of Hush House. Because books are now objects, not cards. They exist as real-world items youve carefully organised on a shelf in the library, but they can also be used within the UI as part of recipes with cards and other objects. So they need to straddle two quite different and demanding worlds. And you thought books were just opportunities for Hokobald of Pocsind to complain about the various iniquities perpetrated against him! #BIGHUFF Anyway, weve come up with the following, which I think does all of the above very nicely. There are lots of different designs (in various sizes, so they look interesting together when you arrange them on a bookshelf), but you get the idea from the two examples below:
We can also use this style to differentiate the nine different starting roles you can choose for your Librarian. You start every playthrough freezing and storm-wrecked on a beach, your only possession a carefully-wrapped journal. These journals accompany you through the game, evolving into different versions of themselves as your Librarian progresses.
(In order, these journals belong to: the Archaeologist, the Artist, the Cartographer, the Executioner, the Magnate, the Prodigal, the Revolutionary, the Symurgist and the Twiceborn.) [quote]My journal Im sure of it. The storm scattered my thoughts, but each page I turn is familiar. I begin to recall now why I came here and the knowledge I yearn for.[/quote] While Im futzing about with books and AKs writing about cheese, Adrien continues his great work populating Hush House. The Curia-period rooms are now totally complete, so here's two of them: puzzle over what, exactly, needs so large a cage in an upper room of Gullscry Tower, and settle select guests in the moony Severn Chamber.

More images over on the blog! Were also working with Clockwork Cuckoo for our card art, so perhaps youd like to try and guess what skills are represented by their latest batch of sketches. We only pick one from each group to become the Final Icon, so look out for a number of polished versions of these in the final game.
If youve seen our latest screenies, weve also been revamping the UI. UI is the part of game dev thats interesting to artists and lethally boring to anyone else, so I wont go into too much detail. But theres one new change you might find interesting:
Alexis still has nightmares about the tooltips from Fallen London. If youve ever played a Paradox game youll probably know what Im talking about: hovering over something brings up some extra information about that thing, which is a really useful way of explicating deep and complex games without overcrowding the users basic experience. The downside is that you can often end up in a terrifying SCP-like tangle of tooltip after tooltip after tooltip, ending up more confused and distracted than you were before. So weve come up with the above approach for the deeper lore in BOOK OF HOURS: its optional (only displaying if you click on it), linked to other relevant parts of the game through aspects, and visualised separately from the main text. This is something Alexis wanted to do in Cultist Simulator, actually we just never had the time. Anyway, youll see all of the above and more if you choose to give the demo a go next month. More info on the blog about the Lucid Tarot, in case you're interested in that too - otherwise, stay tuned for Next Fest! Get hype, Librarians.

Holmes had Moriarty. Ripley had the Alien. Beowulf had Grendel (and Grendel's mum. And a rando dragon. Go away). Do you know what my nemesis is? CLIFFS. They are impossible to draw, no artist has ever been able to capture them properly, no I am not accepting any counterarguments or 'evidence' to the contrary at this time. I will return once I have located my smelling salts and have another go. (AK adds: writers' nemeses are counterintuitive plural agreement in English.) That is to say, I've been working on the game's background this week and it's gone from the first to the second image, which suits the game and the way you'll use it much better. I want to parallel the unreal Wes Anderson-inspired symmetry of Hush House on the left, and to lean into the sense that this world is a place where things really do have real-world connections to one another, but aren't trying to represent any sort of visual reality. Plus, I like the spooky storybook vibe - I think it's a perfect page for Alexis' words to shine.

Still stuff to do, but we're getting there! AK and I both have also been working on various different weathers, as we'd like to show different environmental conditions, seasons (including the elusive Numa), and something AK alarmingly refers to as 'incidents'. We want you to feel like you're passing time in an actual, fully-functioning world, cultivating the places you've unlocked over time. Super WIP, but you get the idea below:
Similarly, we're iterating on ways to shroud various parts of the game before the player's progressed far enough to unlock them. Remember, the opening of BOOK OF HOURS is your sorry, amnesiac library washing up on the beach, soggily making their way for help to the village, and finally finding their way to their new gothic home... The answer is clearly groovy lil' clouds on cocktail sticks. Hah, you thought this studio could only do words!
AK, myself and freelance codemaster Chelnoque have all been working on card management, too. This is by far the most 'art heavy' game AK or I have ever worked on, and we need to balance those visuals, lots of gorgeous AK-writing, crafting windows and the numbers of cards you would expect either from late-game Cultist Simulator OR the storage basement of a mad shut-in Magic the Gathering collector. We're going with a drawer system for now, which we think is a good half-way house - but this may change.
AK's found the time to write a bit, too. January will probably be a writing-heavy month (bring on the coffee!) because we're hoping to get a solid, representative game build at the end of the month, but we already have early-game options like: [quote]"I am the Librarian of Hush House. If I write Histories with an encaustum ink, it is no small thing. I'll need to use one of the languages of power, and muster enough of a Principle to support my assertions."[/quote] Or, conversely, if you're a reprobate - [quote]"I am the Librarian of Hush House. I probably shouldn't write my Histories directly on the table."[/quote] AK adds: one of the temptations in game writing, especially when there's a lot of gaps to fill in, is to treat it like grout. This will do, let's put it in. And some writing is just filler. The introit is 'Move to the next day' and the follow-up is 'A new day dawns.' It could reflect the game state - 'the new day dawns fresh and cold' but that might be redundant if you're showing the weather graphically - which means you're teaching the player that the text is ignorable froth, and also landing yourself with a bit of extra complexity and opportunity for bugs. It could be a gag or image - 'Another day. I'll be useful once I have some coffee in me' or'Another day. I'll shake the sleep from my limbs'but maybe that conflicts with something else, maybe it sounds repetitive... especially on day 20. It could be one of several random text strings, but that almost never works as well as you might expect - it tends to draw attention to the repetition rather than otherwise - and it then takes several times as long to write. One approach is to treat it like negative space, and really just go with 'A new day dawns', which takes no time to write and which allows the more interesting text to pop. Sometimes the player just wants a tiny rest. Another approach is to do what you'd do in a song or a poem, which is to have a chorus - something that'sintended to be read as repeated. This might mean a rhyme, or a striking image. As a result of Lottie's influence I rather like kennings, which crop up a lot in OE poetry. Kennings for dawn might be 'Day-beacon, sun-herald'. You get these things popping up in relatively trivial text and it might feel fresh and strike your brain at an angle. Or it might feel weirdly stagey, because people don't do that in games. But then BOOK OF HOURS does a lot of things that people don't do in games. We'll see. Back in art world, Adrien has been beavering away at more Hush House rooms. There's loads more on the blog, or coming shortly in our newsletter, but feast your eyes for now on the abbey atrium, the Map Chamber and the infirmary's recreation suite...


Finally, I thought you'd appreciate a first glimpse at some of the faces who'll assist you in rebuilding your library. Again, there's a bunch more on the blog - but to whet your appetite, meet Rector Timothy and his friend, Mysterious Nun!

Onwards to January, our first playable build and LAUNCH in June. MERRY CHRIMBLETIDE FOR NOW, PEOPLE. AK and I wish you a wonderful holiday, a smashing 2023, and surprise and fluffy cats. 'Til next year!

So sayeth 'Baron Silence', also known as Thomas Dewulf, also known as not the sort of person you'd probably invite round to play Pokemon Violet. He's writing about Ouranoscopy, a Winter-inflected skill of particular interest to Husherists, members of the Haustorium and, probably, magical goths. This week we have a crunchy BOOK OF HOURS progress report: AK's been working on the start of the game, the end of the game, and the bit in between. Over to you, Alexis...
Most crafting systems are combinations of recipes. Rags + Thread = Bandages, Coal + Iron Ore in Furnace = Iron Ingot. There's limited room for creativity. In Cultist Simulator I wanted to allow more inventiveness - hence the aspect system. What do you get if you mix a lot of Forge with a little Winter and Knock? One problem with this is it suggests everything works like a stewpot. You put a lot of Forge and a little Winter and Knock in a pot, you cry out ARISE MY BEAUTY and a Caligine comes out. It doesn't matter if the Forge needs two followers or half a follower and eight lumps of coal. Except it does, because you need a Rite, which limits you to one follower and one lump of coal, or whatever. Rites are the unsung heroes of CS design. They make room for more elaborate and flavourful decisions about how to combine. Exceptexcept people quickly converge to the 'best' rites, the ones that don't use up hard-to-obtain resources (like Tools) and do use up easy-to-obtain resources (like Influences). This is why we make experimental games, to figure out this stuff.
In BOOK OF HOURS, I wanted more ways through the narrative crafting maze. Originally I said Workstations (Kitchen Range, Garden Plot, Mirrors, Piano) were like Verbs in Cultist. They are, but they're like verbs with pre-fitted Rites. Guest Beds accept a Visitor and a Beverage. Rest Beds accept an Ability that you want to recover more quickly, and a Beverage. A Piano accepts a Skill card, a Memory card, and up to three Ability cards, one of which has to be Chor. Mirrors accept a Skill, a Memory, an Ability, and a couple of Light Sources. If your Purifications & Exaltations Skill is really high, maybe you can make Inks of Power on the Kitchen Range or even at your Desk, but it's easier to do with Alchemist's Glassware given the limitations on what you can put in it. It's easier to study Hushery at the Pale Desk than it is at Abbess Nonna's Desk. And so on. I'm aiming for a system where resources keep being unexpectedly interesting in unexpected contexts as you unlock more of the game. As ever, we'll see how it goes. *** You can see a bit of AK's design already in the room art Adrien and I are drawing. Lots of rooms have variations on basic furniture like shelves because, by last count, there's some bananas number like 1,000 books we expect to have in-game. But some rooms also have a specific workstation that will open up new crafting options when you unlock that specific room, making it a strategic and rewarding (we hope!) choice which rooms you unlock in which order. Take the rather alarming gurney-looking thing in the first image - this is the Scrimshawry workstation in the rooms of Natan of Regensburg - which allows you to do all sorts of artisanal things with whalebone and netsuke and (if no authorities are around) bodyparts. You couldn't craft the same items - or use the same ingredients - with the giant secretary desk in the second image, because if you tried stuffing bodyparts into Thomas Dewulf's desk you'd find yourself in an oubliette faster than you could say 'I regret my previous life choices'.

(To avoid totally spamming this update, I've only included these two pictures - but there's lots more room art available on our blog.) I can also share a first pass at Hush House itself, perched like a owl above sepulchral hills. Our whole art style is about leaning into the unreality of things, and into theatre- and dolls-house-like flatness and intrigue. So were testing out effects like this night-time scene have a look at a WIP version:
The dark rectangles are, of course, where all the rooms go, and you'll unlock them sequentially by unlocking a room before them. Hush House has been gutted by a fire, so each room will need a specific set of resources to fix them up before you can use, furnish and capitalise on any resources contained within them. AK came up with the truly horrifying idea that in the later game, when you've worked your way through the building to Brancrug Gaol on the left, you could even unlock rooms with people (could they possibly be people?) still walled up inside... But sunshine flowers kittens springtime this is a NICE GAME remember! Not like mean ol' Cultist Simulator though come on that bit about putting people in the cupboard is still very funny. Anyhoo, I leave you with a reminder that Cultist is 40% off in the Autumn Sale, and everything in the merch shop (including The Lady Afterwards boxes!) are 20% off for Black Friday. Tune in next week for the Sixth History licence reveal, our subreddit AMA on Thursday, and more BoH work. This game is my favourite game I've ever worked on - I hope we do you proud next year. :)

Recently AK's been working on BOOK OF HOURS' visitor loop - which includes characters you might recognise, like a certain Detective-Illuminate Douglas Moore, but also new faces like Seor Corso Reverte and the notorious Princess Coquille.
Visitors aren't ready to share yet, but I can talk about Brancrug village, your conduit to the outside world beyond Hush House. It's the place you'll visit to find the assistance you need to restore the library to 'not a blackened ruin'. First up, here are its five major stops: the post office, rectory, carpenter-slash-handywoman, smithy and village pub, The Sweet Bones. (A 'handywoman' is not what it sounds like - look it up!) Sometimes these buildings will be shut - at night, most likely, and perhaps in a particularly cold and impassable winter - but when they're open you'll be able to petition their owners for particular assistance. In The Sweet Bones, you'll also find a rotating roster of specialists who may come in useful: a maverick geologist, a surrealist painter, an occasional convict, or perhaps an unexpected nun.


Here's what it looks like when you put it all together. Remember this is ALL TERRIBLY WORK IN PROGRESS - lots more to do before it looks like the final thing. :)
Annnnd just as a petit digestif at the end of the meal, here's a look at a few new rooms - not all drawn by me this time! We have a modded Librarian's Quarters from our usual element artists Clockwork Cuckoo, the ground floor of the grand staircase by me, and the very first room you unlock in the game - the Lodge of Hush House - by Adrien Deggan, whom you may remember from that lovely concept art of Hush House and Brancrug Isle many yonks ago. He'll be working on a lot more rooms in the future, which makes me both exceedingly excited and relieved...


Hope you're hype about the shape of BOOK OF HOURS' world coming together! If you haven't already, please wishlist the game and tell your friends / familiars / enemies as a cunning double-bluff to wishlist, too. It helps us tackle the mighty beast that is Steam's 'How Successful Do You Want Your Game To Be' algorithm, so you would gain the blessings of the Mother of Ants if you do. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1028310/BOOK_OF_HOURS/

Happy Friday, everyone! We've been planning the full BOOK OF HOURS production cycle this week - actually, we planned the whole Weather Factory plan to 2028, which I think you would really likeif I could tell you anything about it. But it seemed like a good time to post an update on what we've been up to.

The Lucid Tarot

BOOK OF HOURS

Happy August, everyone! A juicy BOOK OF HOURS update for you today, as we hit an internal prototype, updated the store page and have a bunch of new lore and design to share. Wishlist the game if you haven't already and receive the blessings of the Sun-in-Splendour, from another History.

Gimme summore lore

Art and UI

Into the future

A new look!

To Superintendent Wynford, of Nocturnal Branch

Long time no update! We're working towards a vertical slice of the game, which will be ugly and crabbed but will give the first real sense of what BOOK OF HOURS will be like to play. Here're some updates on where we are! We've finalised the design of the Wisdom Page, the occult sort-of skill tree where you can choose which forbidden knowledge to specialise in, and which affects what you can do elsewhere in the game based on your choices. We've hidden the full size of the chart, but you can see the first four levels here:
(Click for a larger image.) Players choose cards or objects to commit to each slot up the chain, pledging allegiance - for example - to Birdsong by committing a skill card for Ramsund, the language of secrets. This will enhance the player's Birdsong affinity and ability, opening up new opportunities elsewhere and unlocking the next tier of the branch. We hope it's also a nice roleplaying opportunity, as you can see that each of the nine Wisdoms is variously associated with several Principles from Cultist Simulator. People have strong feelings about whether they're a Winter-y sort who wants a beautiful end or a Lantern-type who's brilliant but a bit caustic or a Forge-person who really loves hitting things with hammers. The Wisdoms are deliberately broad and ill-defined, drawing from multiple Principles at once, so they should open up new avenues of characterisation. Which is useful in, er, an RPG! Speaking of the Wisdoms, we've uncovered a new letter from a mysterious 'Arthur' to his nephew, discussing the Illumination-affiliated events that took place in a Pyrhhic battle against the Khusgai of Persia, and the bravery - and unmasking of Lieutenant Malcolmson. Most importantly, though, weep for Menander, the bravest steed that ever was! "Nephew, make a fist of your hand. Muscles move beneath the skin. So powers move beneath the skin of the world, at impulses equally invisible, but greater."
Click here for full images + alternative read-friendly text. We also have a mock-up of Hush House's layout to share. Please note that this is not what the game will actually look like (though mmmm isn't it all nice and neat in a grid), but it is likely to represent the layout of rooms in the final game. We've censored some of the more deep-lore rooms, and you can't see all of it - but here's a first glimpse at the library at the centre of it all!
(Click for a larger image, again.) Finally, as a palette-cleanser from all that war, here're some recent elements for you to deduce the skills going into BoH...
If you like our stuff, please wishlist BOOK OF HOURS to keep updated with our progress! More on that in the next few months.

SECRET HISTORIAN'S BOXES

OTHER SECRET HISTORIES STUFF

• The Lady Afterwards: Boxed Edition is back on the merch shop! It restocks every Tuesday - tomorrow it's restocking at noon BST.
• The Locksmith's Dream is a real-world event set in Monmouthshire, UK and running in October and December this year. Tickets have just gone on sale on the official site - check it out!

Happy Friday, peeps! We've stopped doing our fortnightly sprint updates (please tell us in the comments if you'd like us to start doing them again), but we have lots of irons in the fire and I thought it's high time for me to give you an update. So here's what's coming up in the next chapter of Weather Factory: Still Not Doing the Visual Novel We Made Up In 2018.

BOOK OF HOURS

Secret Historian Boxes

Other stuff

Anyone fancy a deep-dive into BOOK OF HOURS's Wisdom tree? WELL BUCKLE UP. In our last update, we shared the image below. This week, were going to talk about it. Some spoilers follow, including a couple of possible ending spoilers, so skip ahead to the cat pic if youd rather not see em.
There are nine Wisdoms in BOOK OF HOURS which a librarian (or any other scholar) can pursue. Each of these is associated with three of the traditional Secret Histories aspects, and nine skills. Some of these skills are more familiar than others; nearly every skill appears in more than one Wisdom line. The unnamed Wisdom of Edge, Lantern and Winter above includes the skills of Ouranoscopy, Snow Stories, Serpents & Venoms and Sacra Limiae. Ouranoscopy and Sacra Limiae are also relevant to the Horomachistry Wisdom, and Serpents & Venoms is also of interest to skolekosophists. Youll notice theres overlap between the interests of scholars and adepts, but they tend to do different kinds of things, in the same way that good scholars of game design are not necessarily (honestly, not often) good game designers, and vice versa. Different things can be true about the same thing you look at in a different way, especially if those truths dont conflict. Well come back to that. How do you advance a Wisdom? In an earlier design draft, you found Insights for the relevant Wisdom in books, and you plugged those into the Wisdom tree, which in turn spat out related skills. This is roughly the way a lot of skill trees in games worked, but in a game about knowledge, it seemed rather backwards. If you read a book on the history of fifteenth century Armenia, youd learn more general things about History, but you wouldnt get a History insight which you could plug into a notional Wisdom tree which would spit out a skill relating to the history of twelfth century France. So now it works like this. You read a book about Ouranoscopy, and that improves your Ouranoscopy skill, and then you can present your Ouranoscopy skill card to the Wisdom map above, and say, O Map of Wisdom, behold that I know some Ouranoscopy. And lo the Wisdoms will answer, did you want to advance along the Horomachistry line, or were you looking to improve that other Wisdom? And you might answer, that other Wisdom, cos its something to do with Edge and Lantern and AK wont tell me what it is yet but it sounds like a gas. So why advance a Wisdom? Well, first, bragging rights. Who doesnt want to be a skolekosophist (except those losers who dont enjoy picking hungry worms out of their ears)? Second, attribute advances. There are two attributes elements of the soul, usually associated with each Wisdom. So fet (the part of you which dreams, the part you wear when you visit the Mansus, which of course as you know manifests just below the skin of your navel) is associated with Nyctodromy and Horomachistry, and you can choose to get an extra Fet card by levelling either of those up. But third, if you want to reach a victory, youll need to get one of those Wisdoms to the outermost ring. Maybe you dont, maybe you just want to chill in a library and dabble in all the Wisdoms but theres a single unique book (in some cases, not exactly a book) that, if you master a Wisdom, you can use to help you reach a fundamental conclusion about the world. Weve already mentioned two of these books in passing elsewhere. Heres one:
Those last two options are possible conclusions about what has happened, or what will happen. Of course, just because you draw those conclusions, it doesnt mean theyll happen, right? Who changes the world by spending years in a library? Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.
We also offer a bunch of updates on our upcoming TRPG The Lady Afterwards, set in the same universe as BOOK OF HOURS (and Cultist Simulator). So if you fancy seeing pictures of our Essential Hours deck, new character pins and more, check it out on the blog.

We've released a new sprint update where Alexis talks in detail about BOOK OF HOURS's current design process. Expect lots of tantalising screenshots straight from the design spreadie, like this:
And, because it is a Friday, also a GIF of his tumbleweed head.
We also reveal the latest (draft!) version of the Wisdom tree, BOOK OF HOURS's take on the traditional skill tree. Any guesses for what's censored here?
Read the BOOK OF HOURS deep-dive over on the blog, alongside some bonus Lady Afterwards updates. More updates soon, and happy weekend!

I'm normally careful not to cross the streams between Cultist Simulator and BOOK OF HOURS, but we've a few announcements that touch both games. So BUCKLE UP!

The Lady Afterwards: a Cultist Simulator TRPG

• The Lady Afterwards, a Cultist Simulator TRPG scenario set in 1920s Alexandria
• A game-runners handbook, incorporating all story, locations, lore and mechanics
• An exultation* of clues, curiosities, clippings and collectibles
• "The Essential Hours", 23-card pocket tarot
• Eight customisable character sheets, complete with secret agendas
• Eight art deco character pins in silver, brass, copper and gold
• A scented Serapeum candle, to evoke that which cannot be seen
• Three Mansus candles, for important plot points
• A full-colour map of contemporary Alexandria
• A set of seven antique TRPG dice in a velvet dice bag
• A Steam key for Cultist Simulator, in the unspeakable instance where someone hasnt played it yet
• A 50% discount token for the Church o Merch
• Access to a custom-built mood-music playlist, to further SET THE TONE

Against Worldbuilding, and Other Provocations

The Lucid Tarot

Stained glass tarot

Secret second project

Happy spring, everyone! I come bearing the dry, enigmatic bones of the Tomb of Lies, another new library from BOOK OF HOURS. It lies somewhere uncertain in the subcontinent, probably. And it's the home of the Hooded Princes, who guard its collection on the Five Histories under the joint guardianship of the Mother of Ants and the Horned Axe. As BoH libraries go, it's a relatively safe one - if you can find it.
Click for a larger version!

"The Great Hooded Princes are described as having 'escaped from the history of their death to a history where they yet live'. The text claims that there are now one hundred and eight of them, but - in one of many instances of twinnedness - before they crossed from their death chronicle, there were only fifty-four."

Another quick update while BOOK OF HOURS is in the early, non-sexy-can't-really-share-much-at-this-stage part of production. Meet another one of BOOK OF HOURS' sister-libraries, the bookish troves you'll work with when managing Hush House. This update it's the Grove of Green Immortals, a mountain-monastery of renegade Taoists specialising in horticulture and medicine and patronised by the mysterious Hour known as the Applebright. (The Applebright, as any lore-hound will tell you, is a little-known God-from-Nowhere who is probably very, very dangerous. But look how lovely her library is! How bad could she really be?)
Click for a larger version. More info and updates over on the blog. And have a bonus photo of one of the Weather Factory cats: Chi, He Who Never Shuts Up.

Happy spring, everyone! BOOK OF HOURS will feature an overarching cycle of seasons, including the four you know and love along with the mysterious Season of Numa - but more on that later down the line. For now, I'm just sharing another occult library, like Crossrow a few weeks ago. Meet the Haustorium, the chilly, unforgiving fortress dedicated to things other libraries fear. Click for a larger version!
More on the Haustorium and development on the blog!

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, Ive also been working on some concept art for the places youll interact with in BOOK OF HOURS that arent Hush House. We havent entirely decided yet whether youll send a librarian out to visit or whether theyll function more as a quest- and story-generators. But heres 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. Its 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.

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!