Weather Factory

Happy Friday, beloveds! Here’s what we’ve been up to, this fine August sprint.

Firstly, we went on holiday to Wales. It was totally rad and Alexis practically melted on the drive down into a soft, gooey glow of remembered happiness. Yay!

And then of course we came back and did work. Most of Alexis’s week was taken up with Sekret Projekt #2, a non-Weather Factory freelance gig we’re not allowed to discuss yet. But it’s a pretty big deal, and I suspect the majority of Cultist fans will fan-out when the news finally drops. (It doesn’t sound like that’s going to be until next year, though, so talk amongst yourselves…)

Chris Payne, our ghostly third arm who regularly provides us with his UI/UXpertise (ha ha) has made strides with localisation. We’re translating Cultist into Chinese and Russian, though our petty western minds find Chinese particularly mindboggling: did you know there are 20,000 unique characters? You probably did! But here’s what a mere 13,000 characters look like when you render them graphically into Unity…

UNITY DOESN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH ITSELF. (For non-font-rendering people out there, you basically want the characters in the right of the window to be as big as possible.) But Chris does know what to do, and hey, doesn’t this (WIP) look amazing?!

This sprint we also announced a bunch of stuff we’ve been working on for a while. The highlights are:

Lovecraftday competition

HP Lovecraft’s birthday is coming up on Monday 20th August, and as he’s the grand daddy of Cultist’s family tree, we’re running a week-long Lovecraftday giveaway. It’ll launch this Monday 13th August and you can win a bunch of OFFICIALLY COOL THINGS. No, really! #marketing

Keep your eyes peeled from Monday onwards. 🙂

New social: Instagram and Steam dev

We started our Instagram account this week to hilarious effect (the first three posts I made were pixellated beyond recognition and/or borked in other ways; Alexis had to pull me shrieking from my iPhone). We’re also up on Steam with a developer page, so follow us for notifications about Weather Factory’s future game launches/discounts/whatever. If you’re reading this, there’s a high chance you might be interested! Go go go!

Monthly design streams

Taking place generally on the second Thursday of each month, we’re going to start doing live design talks and Q&A with Alexis (myself behind the camera, heckling). Tech willing, we expect to stream ’em live on Caffeine.tv and upload them to our YouTube later on. We’ll advertise the links and the times across our social media beforehand, so if you have any burning questions about Cultist, design or our previous life with Fallen London/Sunless Sea, this is your time! Alternatively, just eat popcorn while watching two devs try to learn how to stream.

Our inaugural session, on WOUNDS, ROMANCE & DAMNATION, is here.

The CHURCH of MERCH

Yep, it’s an actual Weather Factory online shop full of all the occult things your heart desires! Well, all the occult thing my heart desires cos I appear to be blindly selecting what to sell and then wondering if anyone’s gonna buy it. We’ll initially only have small runs of products to test what stuff people actually buy (see: blind selection, above), and we’ll be selling Orchid Transfiguration USBs, cult stickers, posters, Iris pins, and badass cultist’s notebooks to start with.

I’m hoping to open the store next month – we’re all set up, I’m just waiting for the actual stuff to get here so I can play Where Can I Fit That Box with my office. Woot!

Aaaaanyway, next sprint we may have some more Cultist-specific updates for you. But I already have two draft posts lined up for posting next week, so… stay tuned. 😀