More general BOOK OF HOURS updates in the latest blog. ♥
Book of Hours
Introducing: CROSSROW
More general BOOK OF HOURS updates in the latest blog. ♥
FEB #1: CURIA
Speaking of libraries, I’ve also been working on some concept art for the places you’ll interact with in BOOK OF HOURS that aren’t Hush House. We haven’t entirely decided yet whether you’ll send a librarian out to visit or whether they’ll function more as a quest- and story-generators. But here’s 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. It’s 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.
We'll share the final images when they're ready, but for now, here're the ones we're working on...!
This sprint's name, Curia, refers to the Curia of Hush House, the governing body of the library at the centre of BOOK OF HOURS. It has seven members, only one of whom we’ve revealed so far. Here's a letter from that one, a Dr Serena Blackwood who has little time for the Suppression Bureau's nonsense...
You might also want to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and/or Instagram for our daily library posts this month, celebrating National Library Lovers' Month. I've collected a bunch of the most beautiful libraries that actually exist in the actual real world, and am sharing one a day. Enjoy!
Jan #1: APELLICON
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!
2021 ROADMAP
To keep things simple, we're also going to update this image...
...as we go, showing the various parts of the game and their progress. It don't look much now, but keep watching to see it bloom.
There's more info about BOOK OF HOURS's development in our last sprint update, XENOPHON. We already have our first musical feels back from Maribeth our wonderful composer, so you can expect some atmospheric tunes in the near future too.
More updates soon!
NOV #1: THE WITCH
Meanwhile: Alexis has been building BOOK OF HOURS, but he’s doing it inside Cultist Simulator. This might sound like a long way to go about things, considering that BOH will look almost nothing like Cultist, but we want to reuse as much of Cultist‘s genetic material as we can. It’s very tempting, when you’re making a new game, to start over with a FRESH CLEAN code base in which you end up making weirdly parallel mistakes. We want to take advantage of the lessons we learnt making Cultist.
As Alexis puts it: consider BOOK OF HOURS a butterfly. Better: a moth. A Madagascan sunset moth:
(This gorgeous beast has a wingspan of nine centimetres. Local tradition has it that the souls of the dead take this form. Its colour comes from optical interference effects on the wings, not pigment. Its Wikipedia article claims that consumption of Its caterpillars’ silk causes a euphoric high; there’s a suspicious lack of citations on that, but, well, you never know.)
As you know, holometabolous metamorphosis is one of the most ghastly things in nature. (Can you tell this is Alexis yet?) The larva is driven by chemical imperatives to entomb itself alive in its own final skin. Then the absence of a protective juvenile hormone permits the activation of the imaginal discs embedded in its infant flesh. (Oh my god.) These spew forth a torrent of enzymes which tear apart most of its cells in a sort of quasi-digestive self-immolation, leaving it as basically a shiny bulging sac of goo in which the discs float, spinning new arts and organs round themselves out of the dissolved ex-caterpillar. When they’ve finished, the imago will explode out of its old skin like a John Carpenter special effect. Its wings at this point are still soft and soggy, with the consistency of used kitchen paper, so it’ll have to hang upside down, dry off and pump hemolymph into its wing-veins before it can take off and make innocent humans coo over its beautiful colours.
Anyway, so the point we’re at is that I’ve spun a cocoon round Cultist Simulator and I’ve pumped enough liquefying enzymes into it that it’s more goo than game at this point. This is progress.
AREN'T YOU GLAD YOU'RE WAITING FOR THIS LOVELY RELAXING LIBRARY GAME ABOUT PHAGOCYTOSIC LEPIDOPTERA? More on the blog, and our season one finale of the Skeleton Songs podcast, all about apocalypse. Enjoy! <3
#lovecraftday giveaway!
If you couldn't tell, BOOK OF HOURS and all our games are heavily influenced by weird fiction, and weird fiction by H. P. Lovecraft. He turns 130 next Thursday, so we're running a week-long merch giveaway to say YAY to his ghost.
You could win any of the following...
All you need to enter are any social media account on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Pick your poison, then check out the relevant post!
- Twitter - retweet this tweet and follow @factoryweather
- Facebook - like the Cultist Simulator page and comment on this post
- Instagram - tag a friend on this post and follow @weatherfactory
There's a full FAQ on the blog about how it all works. Winners will be announced on 20th August - good luck!
Wes Anderson, meet BOOK OF HOURS
We've been prototyping the game and settled on a side-on cross-section view of Hush House, where you control and interact with your Librarian and their Assistants and your Visitors as you delve deeper and deeper into the belly of rock beneath you. Call it a gentle sim with an occult twist. It’s still going to be narrative-driven and text-based, of course, but we’ve moved away from Cultist‘s minimalist tabletop.
Here's some early concept art, to show you where we're heading!
Lots more Weather Factory news - including new Cultist Simulator content, new Skeleton Songs, our full Tarot of the Hours reveal, and more - over on the blog. ♥
‘The Sweet Bones’, Brancrug, June 28th, 1929
"I know the ink that you describe. It exists. I shouldn’t tell you even that, and for the sake of our friendship I ask you to burn this letter after reading. The ink is called here 'encaustum terminale' and it is a great treasure of the House."
A brand new letter has come to light, from a mysterious 'F.' to Christopher Illopoly. It sheds light not only on the 'secrets of inks' but on the Hours, the Librarian and Christopher's own heart, too.
Check out the originals and their transcript on the blog.
A letter to Detective-Ostiary Pender
If you find Dr Blackwood's typewriting difficult to read, there's an eminently readable transcript over on our blog. ♥
January 15th-ish, 1906
If reading early 20th century handwriting isn't your thing, take a look at the post on our blog for a more accessible text transcript.