Book of Hours
BETA BRANCH: Simplified Chinese localisation of HOUSE OF LIGHT preview
多亏了中文本地化团队的辛勤工作，中文版《光之居屋》现已有预览版本。该版本可能会有些文本遗漏和不妥——请通过 support@weatherfactory.biz 向我们反馈这些问题。如需查看预览版本，请切换到 beta_loc 分支（属性 -> 测试版 -> beta_loc）。
Thank you! ♥
HOUSE OF LIGHT Day 1 Update on beta branch
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.
HOUSE OF LIGHT out now!
"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."
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
Combine Ingredients, Sustenance, and Kitchenware items at the three Kitchen workstations to create nearly a hundred new dishes. TIP: The Spice Scales, and the Spices & Savours skill, will substitute for each other.
A WRITING-CASE
Once you've received this gift, you can record addresses from the calling-cards left by satisfied visitors; and write to these visitors to invite them back to the House. TIP: Visitors don't arrive instantly; visitors don't leave calling cards until you've helped them; and some visitors are easier to summon than others.
SALONS
Place food and drink in one of the six Salon rooms, and then use the bell to begin a Salon. Do it right and you'll be rewarded with sparkling conversation... and Lessons. TIP: Visitors usually prefer food and drink which matches their primary Interest, but some have additional requirements.
MANUSCRIPTS
Use Paper, Ink, and a Skill to write a Manuscript based on that skill. These Manuscripts may be necessary to satisfy thirsts for specific knowledge in FURTHER STORIES. Lessons from Salons will help you improve those Skills and write more useful Manuscripts. TIP: You can't reliably control what Visitors will discuss - it's a party, not an interrogation - but they'll usually provide lessons related to their shared Interests.
FURTHER STORIES
Once you've completed an Incident, follow it up in the Tree of Wisdoms. Visitors will need more specific help here - perhaps a book on a specific topic, or a specific book. TIP: An Affair opens to Further Stories once all interested Visitors have had the opportunity to ask you for help with it. Be aware in some Further Stories, it can make a difference who you originally helped. Be careful. This is the one part of the game where choices can sometimes have permanent consequences.
THE INSTITUTE
Look for the lighthouse, out at sea. When your Visitors are ready, use it to establish the true heirs to the Curia of the Isle. TIP: Further Stories outcomes can inspire your Visitors to support the Institute - for their own reasons. Their nature is constant, but some story outcomes can make them decide to emphasise one agenda over another.
Please leave a review if you like it
If you like HOUSE OF LIGHT, please leave it a positive review! People tend not to leave reviews for expansions / DLC, but it would be extremely helpful if you do for this expansion. So if you can, please give us a nice blue thumbs up! ✨👍✨
Excuse me this expansion appears to be only in English
HOUSE OF LIGHT is currently being translated into Russian and Simplified Chinese, to match the tip-top localisations of the base game. Please be patient with us while our wonderful localisers complete their work. We're actually planning to launch Simplified Chinese beta for HOUSE OF LIGHT next week!
Japanese is coming for the full game and the beta ASAP. More news on that when we have confirmed dates.
We're still considering translating BOOK OF HOURS into other languages. We'll let everyone know if we decide to go ahead with any additional localisations, just as soon as they're confirmed in studio.
Anything else?
Everyone's favourite Canadian (OK, after Benton Fraser from Due South), Systemchalk, is livestreaming BOOK OF HOURS on the store page right now. If you'd like to experience the sensation of pouring warm maple syrup into your ear while you drowse by a library fireplace, tune in.
Also, all merch is currently 25% off in the shop to celebrate HOUSE OF LIGHT's launch, so go nuts with all the things you've had your eyes on but wanted to wait for a good deal (here's looking at you, Lady Afterwards).
Fingers crossed you enjoy all the love we put into HOUSE OF LIGHT. Thanks so much for playing, and happy hosting in Hush House!
Russian and Simplified Chinese now available!
"Before gods arose from blood, before ever ape stood upright, this was the language heard in the House of the Sun...”
All 200,000 words of BOOK OF HOURS are now available in Simplified Chinese and Russian! (Japanese language is coming a little later.) We’ve tried to capture the poetry of the original English as much as possible, so whatever language you choose, we hope it’s a joy to play.
Firstly, make sure you’ve 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 doesn’t, 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 don’t!
If you encounter any bugs (particularly language bugs, like typos or translations that don’t 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. It’s huge - including hundreds of new recipes, Visitor interactions, and more - so it will not be playable in Russian or Simplified Chinese on launch day. We’ll release Russian and Simplified Chinese for HOUSE OF LIGHT as soon as it’s 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. It’s really hard getting the word out to people we can’t speak to directly, so help us spread the melancholy joy of Brancrug by using the enviable language skills we don’t have. Thank you! ♥
The Secret Colours of the Sun
"Facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, they generally run away."
— Mervyn Bunter, Clouds of Witness (1926)
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 I am giving you facts, but coated in glorious technicolour.
HOUSE OF LIGHT
You all know that HOUSE OF LIGHT is launching on Thursday 26th September at 6PM BST. I can now confirm that it will cost $14.99 / £12.99 / €13.99 with a 10% launch discount in the first week of sale (except if you're a Perpetual Edition owner, in which case it's free). We'll also be adding a new BOOK OF HOURS: Anthology Edition bundle, just like Cultist Simulator, which includes the base game, the soundtrack and HOUSE OF LIGHT with a 15%-off-everything discount (making it about $43.32 / £35.67 / €41.21 in total). This should make it easy for first-time buyers to get the definitive edition of the game with one click, and for existing fans to force gentle occult librarianship on all their friends by buying it as a gift for someone else.
AK has already mentioned this in a few places, but it's worth reiterating that HOUSE OF LIGHT is roughly comparable in size to all Cultist's DLCs wrapped up in one. Cultist had lots of smaller expansions, but we tried something different with BOOK OF HOURS and spent much longer making one really chunky expansion rather than lots of little pieces. So just in case anyone was worried about the value of Perpetual Edition dropping, it hasn't! It's all just coming at once this time.
Depending on how HOUSE OF LIGHT goes, and how pre-production on our Mysterious Game Three goes, we'll make a decision in the first half of 2025 about whether we come back to BOOK OF HOURS and release additional expansions like HOUSE OF HUES. More on that as/when we have updates.
Now, for some long-awaited news...
The Lucid Tarot
It finally has a release date! That release date is:
🎴🎃🦇 HALLOWEEN 🦇🎃🎴
(Thursday 31st October 2024)
We'll be releasing it on our Etsy shop at 6PM GMT, it'll cost £70 + shipping, and we'll be starting with 500 signed, limited edition copies. Every deck comes with a velvet tarot bag and quick start guide, but the first 500 decks will also contain a certificate of authenticity, signed and numbered by 'the artist'. Once these are gone, they're gone - so if the Tarot of the Hours and the Lady Afterwards launches are anything to go by, I'd suggest camping out on the Etsy shop at this time on Halloween and grabbing a copy while they're still there.
If you miss out on the first 500, don't worry. Like we did with the Tarot of the Hours - to make sure everyone in all time zones had a fair chance of getting a deck - we'll release another 500 Lucid Tarots over November / December. If we sell out, we'll restock for 2025. So everyone who wants a deck will be able to get one - we just have to take it slow so I (and my mum and dad, who have been unceremoniously roped in for packing duty) can manage demand.
Right. See you on the other side of Simplified Chinese and Russian release, which is happening next week on Thursday 29th August. Wish us luck!
mfw. fml. etc.
* Another fix for the bug the logo fix caused, where all buildings in Brancrug looked like the Sweet Bones.
A handful more loc fixes
UPDATE 2024.8.h.12
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.
BOOK OF YEARS
ONE YEAR AGO TODAY…
On August 17th 2023, just before six o’clock in the evening, nervous glasses of wine in our trembling hands, cats winding demandingly round our trembling ankles, Lottie and I clicked the big green LAUNCH button for BOOK OF HOURS. (I believe we placed both our hands on the mouse.) In the great tradition of software launches everywhere, nothing at all happened.
The BOOK OF HOURS Steam forum went berserk. The Weather Factory subreddit went insane. Our social media accounts were instantly submerged in a battering vortex of good-natured but anguished queries. Meanwhile Lottie and I tried every channel we knew to contact our Steam rep and find out why our game hadn’t launched. (The GOG version had launched on time, but you probably know that the bulk of a small dev’s PC sales usually come through Steam, and that’s where the vortex was centred.)
The thing is – and this is absolutely central to the indie dev experience – all this vortex and berserkness business manifested as me and Lottie sitting in our living room typing quickly and saying things like ‘erk’. There wasn’t even any background music, unless you count the cats complaining about our lack of attention. My job is this: all day I sit in front of a screen in a room with my wife and I type (if I’m on a writing break, I sit somewhere sunnier with nicer coffee and type on my own). Then occasionally I type something different from usual, and that immediately causes tens of thousands of people to play our game, and/or send me emails about how our game isn’t working. Any software developer will be familiar with this. Even when I worked at bigger companies, launches were often anticlimactic. You make a deal of it with bunting and countdowns and sparkling drinks in flimsy plastic cups, and then it goes quiet and someone comes back from the toilet and says ‘oh did we launch?’ But all over the world there is a ripple of change.
The launch was fine in the end. Our Perpetual Edition offer (any and all expansions free if you buy at launch) meant we had to do something a bit non-standard, the non-standard thing gunged up the launch process, and our famously affable Steam rep, though theoretically away at the time, got back in contact to sort it out. We launched, a not quite half an hour late. By then, the degree of desperate enthusiasm showed us that the launch was likely to go okay.
And lo, it was so. BOOK OF HOURS has been the most successful game of both our careers. Not in a dramatic and overwhelming sort of way – what we do is, and will always be, too niche – but it’s sold a little more than Cultist Simulator, which itself sold a little more than SUNLESS SEA, and the Steam review % is much than either of those. This makes sense – if you build a following, and get better at making games, you do a little better each time – but it’s never something you can count on, especially in the fervid rainforest which is game development.
So if you bought a copy – whether you’ve been following us since the early days, or you just stumbled across us last week – then thank you! Without your support, Weather Factory would be a rain-haunted shell. And thanks to your support, we likely have the resources to make a third game… of which more shortly.
SO THE MOST SUCCESSFUL GAME OF YOUR CAREER IS… THE NICE ONE
Remember the origin story of BOOK OF HOURS? Back in 2019, I was working on the GHOUL and PRIEST expansions for Cultist Simulator. At that point I’d already been working for two years on this cult-themed body-horror-heavy game where you play a manipulative monomaniac, and both those expansions are particularly gruesome. So in a melancholy moment I tweeted this:
It got a lot more engagement than I’d expected and before we knew it we found we’d sort of announced our next game before we’d known what it was ourselves. But we went ahead and for the first time in my career I made a game which contained no cannibalism nor allied trades. It was a bit of a departure and I’m relieved it worked out so well.
HOURS is not quite a certified horror-free game. You can find manskin parchment if you poke around the house, there were some pretty nasty things going on with the Cucurbit Prison, and of course some of the occult books were written by people who these days would merit their own soberly narrated Netflix documentary. But it’s clearly the kindest game of my career. The tone throughout is eerie rather than grisly, and the worst thing you-as-protagonist can do is ‘forget to feed the cat for a bit’. (Well yes there are the endings where you can unleash theomachic conflict or convince the Sun to start drinking blood again, but that’s all another History.)
I’ve really enjoyed the quieter tone, and it’s been good discipline for me as a writer to work without some of my habitual tools. But I don’t want to leave those tools in the box forever. So Cultist was sour, HOURS was sweet, Game Three will be sweet and sour. More on that, as I said, in a bit.
SO WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO IN THE YEAR SINCE LAUNCH?
The first few months were post-launch support. BOOK OF HOURS was in better shape coming out of the gate than Cultist Simulator. This was as I hoped – we had a nice long beta period and a shared codebase – but HOURS is quite an intricate machine and there were lots of things that needed tidying up. And we’ve added a lot of stuff too: the crafting helper panel, the zoom-to-cursor feature that I finally got working properly, the order form system, layers and layers of optimisation, all that good stuff. The secret panels in a few rooms of the house that you can find only with a sharp eye or a lucky click. And the feature almost no-one has discovered, where whatever you put in the thirteenth niche will appear in the next game. And the weird sub-feature of that which I think no-one at all has discovered yet.
Oh and the Hush House Advent Calendar, which I put together very hastily because I wanted to do something nice for my Christmas-obsessed wife, and which as a result was a little buggy and in particular contained perhaps the most notorious bug ever to haunt these halls:
(if you’re interested, I did a whole post on the cause of that and of another dozen hauntings, here.)
Anyway since then, it’s been localisation and the GIGANTIC EXPANSION.
TELL US FUN HORROR STORIES ABOUT LOCALISATION, AK
We’re about to release full Russian and Chinese localisation (they’ve been in beta a few months now), which is – you know Hofstadter’s Law? ‘It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law’. Localisation is always more work than we think. Obviously the translators do the bulk of the work, but some of that work means asking me questions which take, um, considerable attention…
[table equalcells=1]
[tr]
[th]Since Shell is a rather obscure entity, could you please clarify which word should be used here (assuming it is the same Shell in both cases) – should we use the word for a sea-shell or an egg-shell? Or even crab-shell, since the description of Wist malady implies it is related to Carapace Cross?[/th]
[th]I would like to imply both the casing of an insect and the outer surface of an egg, but if that ambiguity isn’t possible in Russian, ‘insect’ is the preferred implication[/th]
[/tr]
[tr]
[th]What fountain is that? Is it a fountain spring, your regular garden-variety fountain, or a drinking fountain (just kidding on that last one)?[/th]
[th]A fountain spring. This is the ‘Spring’ referred to in the 1932 letter from Teresa in the hidden papers, which the Long of Noon used to drink from in order to be forgotten. I said ‘fountain’ rather than ‘spring’ only for reasons of prosody 🙂 so translate freely in Russian[/th]
[/tr]
[tr]
[th]Sorry for asking this so late – we have found it’s Greek etymon ‘calypto-‘ (hidden, covered), while calyptra also refers to hoodlike structure in plant. So considering the relationship between the Calyptra and the Chancel, whether we should translate it into a botanical term, or shouldn’t do so?
By the way, we temporarily translate it as ‘根冠’, ‘root cap’. We try to make it sounds like ‘root and cap’, and the description of Tree’s flowers used ‘lies heavy’, so we guess root or underground may be a part of Calyptra’s imago.[/th]
[th]The Russian translators just asked about this and here was my answer:
”’Calyptra’ is from the Greek meaning ‘covering’ or ‘veil’, particularly a woman’s veil; I think I also referenced the botanical term which derives from that. I imagine the moth genus has the same etymology. Some authorities in the game use the term to refer to a law or principle that conceals knowledge, others to the entities that enforce that law – there’s a synecdochic effect – and authorities disagree on how the term should be used. The confusion about number, and about whether an article should be used, reflects this.’
I think a botanical term is the best approximation. But can you give me a quick summary of how you’re translating Chancel and also Haustorium? these are all similar co-opted terms and there is probably a useful parallel in approach somewhere.
(I assume in Chinese there won’t be the same problem of deciding number / capitalisation!)[/th]
[/tr]
[tr]
[th]‘Ivory’ usually has two meanings:
①the white color of bleached bones
②a variety of dentin of elephants and walruses
In BoH there seems to have three kinds of Ivory: the Grail’s Name (we have a special translation for it), for the Ivory Dove and angthing connect with him(like the Obliviate), and the others(like Silent Typewriter). On the whole we translate the second kind as ①, and the third as ②. If the above details are correct, how should we translate ‘the ivory towers’ and ‘Carapace-spires of horn and ivory’ in endings? ①, for it happens in Port Noon, or ②, for it’s connection with horn?[/th]
[th]I think the simplest answer is (2). More details:
‘Ivory tower’ is a specific and widely recognised idiom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivory_tower
‘Horn and ivory’ is a specific reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_of_horn_and_ivory that players have recognised elsewhere – the White Door and the Stag Door in the Mansus can be interpreted as an ivory gate and a horn gate.[/th]
[/tr]
Now, not all the questions are this complicated, but there are literally hundreds of questions in all, and few were questions you’d want to answer before a second cup of coffee. My hat is off to Dove Archive and Riotloc (our Chinese and Russian translators respectively) for the intense and sophisticated effort they put into navigating the labyrinth of lore.
And then there’s the technical and the UI side: the problems of presenting Chinese characters in a way that works with the logo on the menu screen, the many Russian texts that tend to be longer than English labels and creep over the edges of things, the dozens of items I accidentally hardcoded and had to rip out and dynami…fy..icise, the week Lottie spent just putting together book covers for Russian and Chinese characters, and the Gordian mare that resulted from keeping card ordering rules semi-consistent across all three languages…
We’re tidying up now, finally. Japanese should be along later; depending on all the usual boring business reasons we’ll make a decision on what other languages to localise into; and we do plan to release Steam Workshop / localisation modding support for people to do their own translations.
OOH, MODDING?
Don’t get excited. My answer on game modding support remains ‘maybe, someday, but not a priority right now.’ But we do want to offer, specifically, modding support for languages, so that will be along in a while.
WHAT ABOUT THAT EXPANSION?
Okay, now we’re talking. HOUSE OF LIGHT, the expansion I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year, is nearly out. It’s an absolute chonker. Here are the headline features:
FOOD: Combine Sustenance and Cooking Ingredients at the three Kitchen workstations to create dozens of new dishes. You’ll need Kitchenware items to find all the recipes.
WRITING-CASE: You’ll receive this at the end of the first Spring season after you’ve replied to St Rhonwen. You’ll be able to use the calling-cards left by satisfied visitors to invite those visitors back to the House.
SALONS: Place food and drink in one of the six Salon rooms, and then use the bell to begin a Salon. Do it right and you’ll be rewarded with sparkling conversation… and lessons.
MANUSCRIPTS: Use Paper, Ink, and a Skill to write a Manuscript based on that skills, and satisfy your Visitors’ needs for more specific knowledge. Lessons from Salons will help you improve those Skills and write more useful Manuscripts.
FURTHER STORIES: Once you’ve completed an Incident, follow it up in the Tree of Wisdoms. Visitors will need more specific help here – perhaps a book on a specific topic, or a specific book.
THE INSTITUTE: Look for the lighthouse, out at sea. When your Visitors are ready, use it to establish the true heirs to the Curia of the Isle, unlocking a new kind of ending.
The Salons, Further Stories and Institute are, as a one-time lawyer of mine would say, ‘compendious’; and honestly even the Food absorbed a frankly insane larder-load of effort. So there’s more content (and new art) in HOUSE OF LIGHT than in all the Cultist Simulator expansions put together.
Because it’s such an absolute beast, and because I’ve now been working on BOOK OF HOURS, on and off, for five years, there won’t be another expansion any time soon. I think we will probably go back and do at least one more (working name HOUSE OF HUES) but if so it’ll be after a break. And when I say ‘break’, I mean a few months of pre-production on Game Three.
OBVIOUSLY YOU CAN’T TELL US ABOUT GAME THREE.
Reverse psychology huh. Well you got me. Here’s a little.
- Three will be set in the Secret Histories world again. There are clues about it in the Lighthouse Institute endings in HOUSE OF LIGHT.
- It is unmistakably the most ambitious thing Lottie and I have yet done. It’s also the most traditional thing we’ve done, although it’s really not very traditional.
- It’s something that many players, over many years, have vocally hoped for.
- At least two characters in Three are among the most beloved, or most provoking, fan favourites.
- At least two other characters in Three are fervently discussed Secret Histories characters who have made at most fleeting in-game appearances. One of those characters is located in the first person in Three.
- The working title of Game Three is the name of a beloved book from the Secret Histories.
- It contains at least one carnival.
Once we’re through the support aftermath of localisation and HOUSE OF LIGHT, we’ll begin pre-production: the process of answering questions like ‘what will this look like’, ‘will it actually work’ and ‘do we have enough money to make it’. And when we come out of the other end of that, we’ll have more to tell you.
Gleam-Touched and Glory-Gifted
AK is away currently on a mysterious writing trip - his last before HOUSE OF LIGHT launches - to finish up the Lighthouse Institute. You've probably noticed that our teasers up until this point about the Lighthouse Institute have been, er, here is a lighthouse! Here are some aspects! Be excited! Well, soon we will have some more specifics to share. People in the HOUSE OF LIGHT beta seem to really enjoy the interactions between visitors - for example, surprising revelations about the hobbies of well-known occultists:
"Douglas and Serena discuss a shared, concealed, but evidently profound passion for knitting. Douglas: 'If you tell anyone outside this room, I'll have you locked up.' Serena: 'If you tell anyone outside this room, I'll give King Crucible your address.'"
Or subtle yet pivotal decisions in other occultists' lives:
"Morgen and Arun return to their conversation about the Obliviates, who once were called the House of Lethe. She playfully accuses him of being a member, and asks him where he keeps his three chains. He parries by asking her where she keeps her notorious key of black sapphire. Morgen crosses her legs and asks Arun silkily if he would like to search her. After a moment, he says very definitely that no, he would not."
AK is writing even more to cover all the potential interactions of the Lighthouse board. As there are six positions available and 1-3 people (I think!) who are eligible for that position, there're a lot of different possibilities here. It's actually a great illustration of the danger of hidden multipliers in game development. To take an art pipeline example: 'I will add two vases of flowers to each room in Hush House, which will take 5 minutes each. That's quick! OK, so there are 107 rooms, multiplied by 10 minutes, which gives me a task list that will take... realistically three full days' work to complete. Maybe I won't add those flowers then.' This is why AK has to basically rent a room and lock himself inside it when it comes to these big writing tasks in BOOK OF HOURS. It's on us for making such a complicated, baroque game, but hey!
What I can share at this stage is that AK is doing a lot of work on endings, making them truly reflective of your choices and your specific Lighthouse Board. Here's our new Lighthouse-specific ending page, for example (please note this is a mock-up, and may change before we launch):
You'll be able to click on each of the Lighthouse Institute roles ('Secretary Vigilant', etc) to see what that specific person did in that specific role. So you should have a really good sense at the end of a HOUSE OF LIGHT playthrough of the effect your choices had on the world, and what the personalities you put in power went on to achieve. Hopefully that will feel crunchy and rewarding, like a fresh slice of Amber Pumpkin Pie. But more news on this soon, when AK returns!
(Also, more news on the Lucid Tarot and Cultist Simulator coming to consoles on the blog, if you're interested in other Weather Factory news.)