Weather Factory

This sprint was truer to its name than expected! We took some holiday at the start because Alexis had booked a Secret Early Valentine’s Event for me. It turned out not to be a candlelit vigil in a graveyard sentineled by moon-crows, as I had first suspected. Nor was it an anatomically accurate papier-mâché heart-sculpting workshop using curiously odiferous glue. No. There were simply Beasts.

(FYI: this is not a zoo! I usually find zoos depressing and unpleasant for the animals. This is a specialist big cat sanctuary where all staff are gaga for conservation and everyone has specialist enclosures and are fed, like, quail with honey jus. Even though some of these animals are seen through a metal mesh, they all have lovely outside runs and are happy.)

We did do some work though. Alexis has been writing and writing and writing an extremely thorough biz post that’ll come out next week – more on that then! He’s also been prototyping more BOOK OF HOURS, while I’ve been concept arting in line with ongoing design. Here’s a WIP glimpse…

Speaking of BoH, we also released another letter from Hush House, this time about everyone’s favourite tragic romance: C&T. 😭😭😭😭 Read it in full here!

I’ve been meaning to get into Medium for a while now, so I finally took the plunge and wrote my first piece on porting Fallen London, Sunless Sea and Cultist Simulator to mobile, and why indies should think more about mobile than they currently do.

Fallen London, much though I love it, was just the wrong… [mobile port] for the studio that made it. Sunless Sea was the right game, but its studio didn’t have the mobile experience to leverage its product well. Cultist Simulator was the right game for its studio, developed with a publisher who really knew what they were doing, and produced by someone who’d made two games’ worth of mobile mistakes before.

– “What Alexis Kennedy’s Fallen London, Sunless Sea and Cultist Simulator say about indie mobile games”

This sprint I’ve also been trying to learn about paid social ads – BRING IT ON, FACEBOOK – and had an argument with a bot about whether Cultist Simulator was a game or not. I’ve also been experimenting with microtrailers, kicked off from the revelation that Steam’s microtrailers are an actually useful traffic-hose for our Steam page. So I get to reduce all those hundreds of hours of an in-depth Cultist run to six seconds.

Next sprint – DUESSA – is the last two weeks on BOOK OF HOURS prototyping before we move onto to something rather exciting that we haven’t publicly announced. There’s a bunch of stuff going on behind the scenes in this early, fluid pre-production period that we can’t talk about yet, but… I’m actually excited about it, and this is my LIFE. So I think you will be too, when we’re able to share!

‘Til then, Believers.