Weather Factory

“The Wood opens around me, but with my new eyes, I see another path now…”

OK, this quote from Cultist Simulator is possibly one of the grimmest things AK ever wrote in the game (the ‘Marinette ending’ from The Dancer DLC. IYKYK). But I am repurposing it to herald to a good thing and that good thing is some secret Cultist Simulator news! Namely:

Cultist Simulator… on console?!

Screenshots from the PlayStation dev kit

This is not a drill! Cultist Simulator is coming to Xbox and Playstation on 8th August 2024.  We partnered with Polish publishers Klabater because a) they clearly know what’s what and b) we love the Poles. (I used to date one and AK used to live there. One winter’s day his hair literally froze into icicles.)

Cultist Simulator‘s console UI is heavily based on Playdigious’s excellent rework for the Nintendo Switch, which we think is the best way to transform a fundamentally clicky PC-first game to a controller-friendly game. So here are the key details to know:

• Launch date: Thursday 8th August 2024
• Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
• Versions and prices:
  • Initiate Edition (game plus mini DLC: Cultist Simulator + Dancer, Priest and Ghoul DLC) – $24.99 / €24.99
  • The Exile DLC – $9.99 / €9.99
  • Anthology Edition (everything together: Cultist Simulator + Dancer, Priest, Ghoul and Exile DLC) – $29.99 / €29.99

Wishlist the game today if you’re interested! Click to wishlist on….

Perhaps some people reading this have had enough of being nice and homey in BOOK OF HOURS and want to start a new run of hubristic Lovecraftian fun. Maybe you want to go through the game to find something AK wrote that’s even more upsetting than Marinette’s story. Perhaps you just want the colours beneath the skin of the world. Whatever your motivation, I hope you pick Cultist Simulator up on your platform of choice next month. It’s the first time we’ve ever released any game on console (including any of our work on Fallen London or Sunless Sea) so we are excited! Excite alongside us, if you like.

Where in a month of Sundays is the Lucid Tarot?

Click for larger versions.

It has taken a preposterously long time to make this a reality. I’ll spare you the tedious details, but some highlights include £44,000 quotes from local suppliers, another supplier running off with our money, and having to come up with an entirely new production process for printing double-sided opaque-but-also-transparent tarot cards. I literally couldn’t find anyone who’d made cards like this before, anywhere in the world. I even tried to contact the people who made the Gloom deck – one of the key inspirations – but no dice. Fortunately, I found a wonderful factory producer and we’re now on our sixth or seventh iteration of the deck. To give you an idea of the problems encountered, here’s a comparison of the first prototype we produced (which I loved) with the first production-ready deck:

The production-ready deck is smooth and scratch resistant and gorgeously made. But the production process significantly darkened the deck from the prototype (which was a manual, not production-viable first pass).

You might think the difference isn’t terribly significant – you might actually prefer the darker version – but problems became particularly apparent when you held the cards up to the light:

Bearing in mind the whole point of the deck is for them to be actually usable as tarot cards – so you can place them face down and then reveal them – this really wasn’t cricket. But thanks to brilliant work from Emma, my contact at the factory, we’ve now come up with a totally new method which involves printing multiple middle-levels of white ink and then splicing those layers with a layer of iridescent ink. This necessitates using specialist ink and materials I hadn’t heard of, but now we have nice opaque cards which also have gently silvered iridescent edges (this is the version featured in the gallery at the top of this section). I love them! There are some minor imperfections – I think they add charm, Emma thinks they can be improved upon – so we’re trying one last improvement before greenlighting full production. As a result, I still can’t confirm a specific release date yet, but I can at least tell you we are very close, and have an MVP (minimum viable product) as a beautiful worst-case fallback.

I appreciate that from the outside it all probably looks like this:

BUT TRUST ME! People are excited about the deck, it’s been a much more complex physical production process than expected, and I don’t want to sell anything I can’t enthusastically and truthfully endorse. Here’s what I can confirm at this stage:

• The Lucid Tarot is almost certainly launching on our Etsy shop this year
• We’ll offer an initial, limited run of 500 signed and numbered decks which will come with a signed certificate of authenticity
• We’ll then move to staggered runs of 100 (or so!) of unnumbered decks, so people in different time zones have a fair chance or getting them when they go on sale
• Every deck – both the 500 limited edition and the unnumbered version – comes swaddled in a rich velvet tarot bag and ‘quick read’ summary of each card’s meaning, so you can get strated tout suite.

BOOK OF HOURS

[MAJOR HOUSE OF LIGHT SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT]

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 the most likely potential outcomes 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, or whether they’re still sulking because the Institute decided to be friends with the bug people instead of the year wranglers. 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!