Author: Alexis Kennedy
“What are your influences?”
This is probably the question I’ve been asked most over the years, and every time as soon as I answer it I think of someone
State of the Factory: Year 2
Thanks for reading to the end! I hope it’s been useful. And if you’ve stayed with us through the rough times, we really appreciate it, both of us. A heartfelt thank you. It’s probably meant more this year than any time before or since.
What Actually Happened
My name’s Alexis Kennedy. With my fiancée, Lottie Bevan, I run a very small game development studio out of our London flat. I used to own and run another studio, Failbetter Games, which was a little bigger (about half a dozen employees for most of my time there, ballooning to seventeen by the time I left in 2016) but was also generally indie and cash-strapped. We’ve...
BOOK OF HOURS: Where Knowledge Goes
…and next time, I’ll talk about not just about Knowledge and Skills but also about Thoughts and Beliefs, and how in BOOK OF HOURS you can make and shape them.
NERDPOST: Content Frameworks in Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours
This is probably interesting to about 2% of the already select audience of this blog. Sorry, everyone else! But for those who are interested, this is from a Slack discussion about how the content framework in Book of Hours (which we’re calling ‘Vak’) looks like it’ll differently from the content framework in Cultist Simulator (retrospectively called ‘Fucine).
The Busiest Week of Our God Damned Lives
We haven’t posted for a bit, and I don’t think Lottie is going to manage a sprint update this week unless she works over the weekend which she definitely ain’t doing, so I wanted to talk about what’s been happening. It’s a lot.
NOW HIRING: UI-Focused Unity Developer [Applications now closed]
Weather Factory is an indie studio founded in 2017 by Lottie Bevan and Alexis Kennedy (creator of Fallen London and Sunless Sea) to make experimental narrative games, and joined recently by Claire Sharkey of Sharkbit. Our first project, Cultist Simulator, exceeded all our expectations, and we’re growing the studio.
ONE WEIRD TRICK TO GET STARTED IN GAMES WRITING NO SERIOUSLY
Here’s the good news. This blog post really does contain one weird trick. The bad news: it isn’t a reliable list of steps you can follow, or a career track with an exam you can do, or the email address of someone who wants to hire you. Those things don’t exist. Games writing is a very competitive career. More on what that phrase, ‘competitive career’, actually...
Enigma: what it is, what it isn’t
This is an unusually straightforward post on a subject I am usually very coy about. Please feel free to link to it if you ever think anyone will find it useful.
SILENCE PLEASE
(PS! A number of actual librarians, only one of whom got cross, engaged with us on Twitter about this. if you’re a librarian, please feel free to drop us a line at contact@weatherfactory.biz with Interesting Librarian Facts or Things That People Don’t Understand About Libraries That Annoy Us. This is a game set in a fictional alt-universe 1920s library so I can’t promise it will address...
The Long Midwinter
Feedback is super welcome – more than that, it’s the whole point. I wrote a thread of protips on how to get devs to listen to feedback here, but honestly even if you just @ me on Twitter it’ll be useful. The balance needs a lot of tweaking, and there’s no Dream attacks to speak of, but you’ll probably find smart things to say that I...
Christopher’s Build: The Long March
In January, we’ll be releasing Christopher’s Build, the second major free update to Cultist Simulator. (Anyone following on the beta branch will see some of the updates well before January).
TERESA’S UPDATE AND DANCER DLC LIVE!… and first post-launch patch
On Tuesday we released a giant free content update, TERESA’S BUILD for Cultist Simulator along with a frankly underpriced piece of DLC, DANCER. Headline features: goth change moth sex death skin ROMANCE archrival nemesis detective melt.
Cultist Simulator: Five Tricky Design and Production Decisions
On Tuesday 16th October, we’re releasing our first major update for Cultist Simulator, along with the Dancer DLC.