Weather Factory

“Rocks are no sharper in the dark.”

HOUSE OF LIGHT is done*, and anyone who’s ever worked on anything creative will instinctively know what that asterisk means. Done* means I have a task list of about sixty items from my own testing and that of our invaluable beta testers, some of them as trivial as ‘lol forgot to put in a recipe for Batter’, some as annoying as ‘I need to rework saves a bit so players don’t occasionally get lorem ipsum text on a reload’. Done* means the novel-sized narrative material is all written, but I’ll keep fiddling with it until and after launch. ‘ Done* means there are things I’ve missed, but perhaps I can still spot some of them.

But ‘Done*’ also means, by crikey, it’s come together. Remember this? ‘The knee-bone’s connected to the thigh-bone?’ There are a half-dozen different systems in HOUSE OF LIGHT (Cooking, Salons, Further Stories, Invitations, Manuscripts, and the Lighthouse Institute endgame) and now they’ve been in beta for a while, I can see that the ecosystem works. It’s an ecosystem, not a machine, because part of the philosophy of BoH was always that there’s more than one way to do something. So you don’t need to write manuscripts to satisfy Further Story requirements, but it will fill some useful gaps; you don’t need to hold Salons to improve your skills, but it’s another way to improve your Manuscripts; you don’t even need to experiment with Cooking to hold Salons – if you really hate kitchens, you can just put everyone in the garden and feed them blackberries – but it’s a lot more fun if you do.

Which reminds me of something else: we’ve had a clutch of emails recently asking for invites to the closed beta. Sorry – those were all gone months ago! This time round, we invited beta testers for HOUSE OF LIGHT  from a larger pool of people who’ve sent us helpful bug reports in the past, and where we didn’t get a reply to the invite, we pulled some more names out of the hat. This has worked well, and we’re likely to take that approach in the future – so the upside is, if you’re hoping to get selected for future betas, sending us helpful bug reports will improve your chances. But most people who sent us helpful bug reports didn’t get randomly selected, so please don’t think you’ve been judged wanting if that’s you, it’s just the nature of maths. Every bug report, whether actioned or not, helps make the game better for you and for everyone else, and I’m grateful to everyone who makes the effort.

Anyway ‘Done‘ finally means that I’ve been able to focus on the Chinese and Russian localisation of BoH, which is out now, and which has also been ‘Done‘ for a couple of weeks now, but once that’s out the gate I can focus on smoothing the last wrinkles out of HOUSE OF LIGHT for a release next month.

Lottie rounding off this post! The art version of AK’s bit above is that I will be randomly called upon for LAST-MINUTE VEGETABLE STEW or create a button to show people they’ve bought HOUSE OF LIGHT on the main menu, but that it’s not translated into their language yet, or add Steam and GOG achievements (which we are! Anyone want to guess how you unlock ‘Stress Cannot Exist In The Presence Of A Pie’? It is not to simply bake a pie).

I should mention that there’s currently 25% off everything in the merch shop to make space for the Lucid Tarot’s arrival next month (cue AK having conniptions, understandably, about living in a warehouse full of boxes that was once our flat), and that Russian and Simplified Chinese are NOW LIVE on Steam and GOG, and we would extremely appreciate your help getting the word out about the game if you have any Russian- or Chinese-speaking friends. ‘Many pebbles, one Beach’ is the motto of the Institute founded under the ambition of ‘Stone Consumed’ – thank you for being a pebble on the beach with us.