Weather Factory are an indie studio made up of two Failbetter alumni: Producer Lottie Bevan and Failbetter's founder and the creator of Fallen London, Alexis Kennedy. Their Weather Factory debut came out last year. Cultist Simulator is a singleplayer card game about being the head of an occult society, delving into mysteries that ought not be delved, avoiding the police, and spending all your money on books. It's a fun puzzle to solve, but hardly a safe bet in the world of videogames.

However, it seems to have paid off. In a detailed blog post over on the Weather Factory website, Kennedy talks about how the studio's first year went. There's a complete budget in there, which isn't the kind of thing every studio shares, and full sales data. Cultist Simulator sold most of its copies on Steam (85,200 after refunds) with the rest via Humble, GOG, and itch.io. The total comes to a healthy 105,000, give or take.

There were also half a million copies distributed as part of the Humble Monthly which was part of a deal they signed to have Humble act as their publisher. As part of that deal they don't earn any royalties for those copies. They decided it was worth the risk for the sake of publicity and increased word-of-mouth. As Kennedy writes, "our daily sales numbers about doubled the day that the Humble Monthly hit, and they’re still at the same level nine days later."

It's not easy to make it as an independent studio, but it's nice to see that an interesting idea like Cultist Simulator can succeed. They've made enough money to keep going and make another game, which is realistically all anyone can hope for.

It can be hard to know what to do when you’ve achieved your dreams. For instance, I once made an extremely good sandwich, and I’ve really just been coasting ever since. In Cultist Simulator, the goal is a bit more ambitious: start a cult and achieve immortality. But where do you go from there? A free update due out later this month has a very satisfying answer: become a god. 

The advanced, post-game mode can be unlocked by finishing the regular game. Playing as your own apostle, you’ll need to work to transform your immortal character into a deity while powerful immortal enemies try to put a stop to your plans. They’re not messing around and will happily kidnap your family, expose you and leave you impoverished. Friendly bunch. 

Cultist Simulator’s disquieting lore is also being expanded. If you’ve got questions, you might find answers. Don’t count on it, though. They’d probably give you disturbing dreams, anyway. 

I’ve ‘finished’ Cultist Simulator a few times, so a New Game+ mode sounds right up my street. And it’s shaping up to be a lot more novel than just playing the same game but harder. Not that it won’t be extremely tricky. Expect it to be pretty unfair, according to developer Weather Factory. 

Unavowed got my personal pick for our 2018 Game of the Year awards, but it was tied right until the end with Cultist Simulator (and RimWorld), and I still feel a little bit guilty. Thankfully, Chris made it his, pointing out how half the fun of Cultist Simulator is figuring out how it all works. It takes you in such strange directions and lets you tug at so many different threads that it can be a little confusing, but confusing seems the right tone for a game about secret gods and mind-bending magic. 

The free update is due out on January 22. 

The first time I played Cultist Simulator my character died pretty quickly. The singleplayer narrative card game from developer Weather Factory doesn't have a proper tutorial so I had very little idea what was going on, what most of the cards did, or what I was meant to be doing with them. Unless you want to google a bunch of guides first (and there weren't many back when I played it), the only knowledge of how to play comes from a bit of flavor text on the cards, a little experimentation, and a lot of trial and error.

This probably doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, and it's not really a format I'd recommend for most games—losing and having to start over from the beginning without knowing or understanding why is usually a frustration, not a selling point. But Cultist Simulator is the rare game (I'd throw Crusader Kings 2 into this category) where it's still immensely fun to play, and lose, without really knowing what the hell is happening or what went wrong. Plus, over the course of each game, I'd always get a little bit further, last a little longer, and learn a bit more.

Most importantly, in each game I played I'd get a glimpse of just how much more there was to learn. Maybe just before I perished, I'd meet a character I'd never seen before, or I'd come into possession of a mysterious new item, or discover a new location card. This meant each time I failed and died and watched my lovely collection of cards turn to ash, I'd feel eager to immediately dive back in, intrigued by the new possibilities I'd seen in the last game, ravenous to discover those new cards again and uncover their meaning and purpose. It's a dark, murky, mysterious game, and that mystery goes on and on, even dozens of hours later.

And Cultist Simulator is a surprisingly long game, too. As my desktop grew more and more cluttered with cards, and as I used them to found cults, to attract followers, to send them on expeditions and gather relics, as I grew in power and wealth and was drawn deeper into the twisted story, I'd always figure I was close to the end. Close to whatever approximated winning. And then another mystery would appear, another layer to the madness would appear to wrestle with.

What Cultist Simulator simulates best is the feeling of having an obsession, or even just having a deep interest or a hobby you love more than anything else. Strip away the mysterious cult business and it's a time management game, as you attempt to balance work, money, health, and recreation. And as in real life, you can feel your attention being dragged away from your day-to-day routine and into what you're really passionate about. You stay up too late, you don't make it to work on time, you get in trouble with the boss, and your health might even start to decline as you get more and more obsessed. (Though hopefully in real life you don't get so distracted that you wind up having to hurriedly poison a nosy detective and store his corpse in your closet.)

Even now there's still quite a bit about Cultist Simulator I don't completely understand, but for me that's all part of the fun. There are plenty of games that take hours to master, but it's rare to find one that can throw you an unexpected curve dozens of hours in. I'm not a Lovecraft fan, and I don't typically play card games (aside from a little app-based poker), but I fell heavily for Cultist Simulator. It became something of an obsession, you could say.

Since its release it's gotten not just DLC but some additional gameplay tweaks, including less reliance on RNG, which should alleviate some mid-game frustration when trying to acquire certain items. There's more coming in the future, too, though it's safe to safe I probably won't understand that, either.

I've always been fascinated by the idea of one- or two-person indie game development teams. Dedicated people tackling all the tasks necessary to create and release a game is inspiring. That mythical status has an unfortunate side effect: we (including myself) have a habit of glamorizing self-sacrifice and overwork. We laud the mental and emotional imbalance that's created when small teams combine their hobby and artistic passion and turn it all into a job. For small teams, social and professional life can become one and the same with no place to turn for a break. 

Even more daunting is that idea of two-person teams made up not of friends or acquaintances but spouses and life partners. This special class of development team combines not only their hobby, social life, and profession, but their romantic life too. I spoke with six couples who have successfully developed a game together about how they kept their project from dominating their life or eclipsing their relationship. They all highlighted communication as key, as any successful couple or business partners will, but exactly how they go about communicating was different for each. 

Here's what they had to say.

Helen Carmichael and Jake Birkett: Regency Solitaire, Shadowhand

Helen and Jake have been married for 20 years. They worked from home out of separate rooms doing different jobs for several of those years, only transitioning to developing Regency Solitaire and Shadowhand together when Helen had an off-the-cuff idea for a historical fiction solitaire game. Their prior experience working from home separately gave them the confidence they could make the process work, and they make it seem effortless, continually deferring to one another in conversation and speaking of each other supportively.

"We've had a fairly good work-life balance," Jake says. "I haven't had this problem where I haven't been able to stop working. It's almost the opposite, sometimes. We did go out for a lot of trips, ostensibly research for a lot of our games, but also just to have a nice time really. I think other indies might view us as a bit lazy in that sense. I don't mind. It's all about quality of life, really. It's a bit like having a jogging partner, you're more likely to go out if you're meeting your jogging partner at the same time every day."

Although their children are older now, having young kids during their early days of development sounds a bit hectic.

HELEN CARMICHAEL: When we were doing Regency Solitaire—four years ago we started on that and our kids were a lot younger—I would do my work between 9am and 3pm. Then I would stop and I would be available for the kids to do whatever they needed to do. Whereas Jake would tend to start a bit later in the day and continue on working into the evening.

JAKE BIRKETT: It was always stressful if we were having meetings sort of near dinner time because the kids would come home and make a fuss and we'd be right in the middle of some really complex design thing and they'd all come home making noise or whatever and want our attention. I've said before that having kids is indie hard mode.

Rebekah and Adam Saltsman: Overland, Finji Co

Rebekah (Bekah) and Adam Saltsman have been together since 1998, married since 2006, and started their company Finji Co the same year. The creators of Overland, they went on to publish other indie games like Night in the Woods and Tunic. They work out of a home office from which they post Overland gifs to their official Twitter account and amusing interactions with their two boys to their personal accounts. It seems like a dream, but when asked if they're doing what they've always imagined, it turns out that's not the case.

REBEKAH SALTSMAN: Somebody actually just asked me this at PAX, well no, it was just a throw-off comment. It's actually been sticking with me now for like two weeks. 'It's always been yours and Adam's dream to make games.' And in my brain I was like 'No?' This has actually never been a dream of mine—to make games.

ADAM SALTSMAN: Even my goal for most of my life was to be a cog in a machine that eventually produced a game. That was the biggest vision that I had. I would go 'Maybe I could be a level designer or something. That would be incredible!'

RS: The idea that my dream was to run a company with my husband—like, no! It's actually not, that's just the reality of what fell out of both independently and together following the things we perceived as our dream. Mine is I eventually wanted to be a mom and I wanted to work and I wanted to work with brilliant people. That's where I come at into the game industry. Whereas Adam has just forever needed to make games. The idea that I can help him accomplish that, which is one of the main tenets of who he is as a person, like hell yeah I'm all in!

Despite the chaos, Bekah and Adam seem like a well-oiled machine, even in casual conversation. It's a confidence in one another they've earned over 20 years by continually re-assessing their own wants and needs from the projects they tackle together.

"It sounds so obvious but we have made this mistake before where you just go, 'Well we're basically on the same wavelength so we don’t actually have to talk about our major goals and aspirations and things we want out of the company,'" Adam says. They both stress the importance of these "boringly explicit" conversations that they have with each other about the future of Finji and their personal aspirations. "The idea that you have that conversation once and then never again is insane. We basically have it every Sunday!" Bekah says.

RS: People are always so scared to have the first conversation. If you have the first conversation before there are any conflicts or feelings hurt, before—

AS: Before there's a ton of money involved. Before there's a ton of responsibility involved. Before you've settled into some kind of weird work habits or personal disputes. It's not going to magically protect you but—

RS: At least if there is a problem you can approach it like real adults and talk it out if you're on the same page.

Priscilla and Kevin Snow: Southern Monsters, Mama Possum

Kevin and Priscilla have been together since March of 2014. "Within the first few weeks of us dating we were talking about what we could work on together," Kevin says. They were thrilled to be in a relationship where they could be proud of their partner's creative work and feel as though their successes were shared rather than resented. 

They work out of a home office in their apartment cluttered with Priscilla's eclectic collection of instruments (Theremin, acoustic guitar, Rock Band guitar, and Nintendo Labo piano to name only a few) and Kevin's collection of post-it notes chronicling the first draft of Southern Monsters, which he wrote while on hold at his old call center job. They both work on upwards of five games at a time—some together and some separate.

KEVIN SNOW: It's kind of easy to just work side-by-side for 12 hours.

PRISCILLA SNOW: Which we do a lot.

KS: It's super easy to turn into a work Katamari together. We're both excited and both working on creative stuff and then we're like 'Oh god, we haven't eaten today.'

KS: Let's say you have a client and you're paying them money to produce goods and services for you like you do with money. You have that professional distance where you're treating them respectfully and you can give really honest feedback. When you're in a relationship with someone and you're also working together there's an overlap between your personal relationship and work relationship that you have to be aware of. There's been moments where we’ve worked on something and we’re both really really stressed. What would be a normal round of feedback might upset the other person just because we have that close emotional connection. We have to be really careful sometimes and closely pay attention to the other person’s mood.

PS: The longer we work together the more we realize we have good heads on our shoulders. When Kevin gives a critique now I'm like, 'OK, there's probably something there' and if I give Kevin a critique he's like, 'OK, I'll think about it'. So it’s evolved from 'How dare!' to 'Yeah, you’re probably right'.

Bart Heijltjes and Roy Van Der Schilden: Herald

Roy and Bart have been together since meeting in 2009 at university. They founded their company Wispfire with a third co-founder in 2013 and moved to working from a dedicated office space while developing Herald, an interactive period drama set in the 19th century. 

Bart and Roy have been an inseparable team since they met. Bart recalls their university graduation in which professors who had attempted to split them up creatively realized there was no keeping the two apart.

"They tried putting us in different groups so we wouldn't become too reliant on each other's opinions and work. So we could get more of our own artistic style. When we graduated from our Bachelor's degree one of the teachers said, 'OK, we failed. You can keep working together. We see that it was pointless to try and stop you.'"

BART HEIJLTJES: We can be very frank with each other because we know each other so well. So when we have creative differences, for us we are having a normal conversation but for people around us in the company it could be a little bit scary. Like 'Oh, they are really fighting right now!' when actually to us it's more like we're just having a creative difference and we'll work it out.

ROY VAN DER SCHILDEN: When you're in company culture, especially when you're a bigger company than we are, you have to have those practices to work together but in the end it loses a bit of the soul because fighting creatively is something that's needed sometimes to create something that's more than just a standard product.

RVDS: Often when you work with people who aren't your close friends or partner, it's hard to admit that you don't really know what you're doing. Sometimes you really want to say 'I'm so stuck. I have no idea what I'm doing. Please look at this.' It's nice that I don't feel a barrier to say that to Bart but I have certain colleagues I would never say that to because then I'm afraid they would think 'Nobody knows what we're doing!'

BH: Especially during the final production parts of Herald I think we had a couple moments where [Roy] said 'I really want this in the game' and I said 'That's not going to happen. It's impossible in the time we have.' And then later on maybe when other people are going home I was like 'Maybe I can make this work.' And I'd actually push myself to get it in there anyway. That happened a couple times. I think it made the game better in the end. I wouldn't do that for a boss or for anyone else. I know Roy really wants this in and I have an idea, I'll go and try it and maybe spend a couple hours working late on it.

Lottie Bevan and Alexis Kennedy: Cultist Simulator

Lottie Bevan and Alexis Kennedy are a rare sight: a relationship between former boss and subordinate with a significant difference in age—both qualities of their relationship they speak of willingly and with candor. They're eager to dispel the taboos associated with workplace relationships, having successfully navigated one themselves when they worked together on Fallen London and Sunless Sea at Failbetter.

In fact their working relationship was so productive, when Alexis left Failbetter to create Cultist Simulator they found they missed that sense of creative collaboration.

LOTTIE BEVAN: With a totally new project that I had no professional involvement in, there was a bit of a wall between this guy that I am in love with and what he was really excited about right now. He could talk about it all he liked but it wasn't the same as working on the project.

ALEXIS KENNEDY: If you're doing intense creative design work it's a bit like going off to sea with somebody waiting at the shore for you and I don’t like that aspect in a relationship. I don't like feeling separated from Lottie so I was very keen to find ways for us to be on the ship together.

Now they're working together again as Weather Factory studio, recently releasing Cultist Simulator to rave reviews. They protected themselves against potential creative differences by taking unequal shares in the company to avoid the possibility of a deadlock. It works for them, they say, because of their established respect for one another as co-workers.

"If you ever overrule me to the point where I'm like 'I really disagree!' and you say 'No I'm going to use my power here' then we may have a tense couple of drinks at a bar where we discuss it and go back to being boyfriend and girlfriend," Lottie says.

Beth and Andy Korth: Verdant Skies

Andy and Beth Korth didn't intend to have their first child right as they were beginning development on Verdant Skies, a farm-life sim set on an alien world, but that's how the timing worked out. As full-time indie developers, they weren't able to set aside money for childcare. They worked it out like a relay race, tossing the baton back and forth (but never tossing their baby, I'm sure) until Verdant Skies reached the finish line.

ANDY KORTH: What we try to do is decide 'today is my work day' or 'today is Beth's work day'. So one of us can stay at home and the other can get out of the house and work.

BETH KORTH: We did struggle with that a lot at the beginning when [our son] was born. Waking up in the morning and deciding whose day it is is not good because it's sometimes 11 by the time you decide. We tried to schedule it where I was Tuesdays and Thursdays for a while and at the end when it was obvious that the writing needed extra I switched to Monday/Wednesday/Friday.

Beth and Andy found that their most significant challenge as a couple and as development partners was acknowledging that both game dev and child-rearing were demanding tasks in separate ways.

"It's really important to honor each other's time," Beth says. "If it's somebody's work day you have to respect that they work but also know that person who stayed home spent a lot of time with your child or was taking care of the house or doing their day job. I think you can lose sight of that. 'I worked all day, why should I have to take the baby?' 'Well, because I sat at home with the baby all day and I need a break.' It's important to remember that the other person's also working and suffering too. Give them time to do something fun or go out or just be alone and sit in a quiet place."

I've always sympathized with the people who worship elder gods. In H. P. Lovecraft's stories, and the endless fiction and games that have followed in his footsteps, incomprehensible alien entities rule the universe and we're worthless by comparison. The cultists who devote themselves to these beings are perfectly sensible if you think about it. They're the ones who've read the books, know what's really going on, and have embraced the true nature of reality rather than deluding themselves. And that's what I'll be screaming as the investigators break down my door to burn my many blasphemous texts.

Cultist Simulator lets you play the head of a Lovecraftian cult, gathering followers and deciphering grimoires and eventually performing rituals that summon things better left unsummoned. It basically lets you be the bad guys from Call of Cthulhu or Arkham Horror.

Cultist Simulator is also a single-player digital card game. It's Cthulhu Solitaire, or perhaps Reverse Eldritch Horror is a better comparison. Everything from Secrets and Hangers-on to your own Reason, Passion, and Health are represented by cards on a table surrounded by infinite darkness. Also on the table are verbs like Study, Explore, and Talk, each one a puzzle box you feed cards into and then see what comes out.

Adding the card representing a bookstore and one for Funds to the Explore box gives me a new book. Studying that book gives me a Secret, and then popping that Secret and a Hanger-on into the Talk box transmutes the Hanger-on into a full-blown Follower. Every step makes your cult bigger and better. Discovering combinations and sequences more esoteric than this pretty obvious one is what Cultist Simulator is all about.

It takes time to do all this Exploring and Studying though. Once you add cards to a hungry verb a countdown begins, telling you how many seconds until the outcome is revealed. You can pause and fast-forward whenever you want, but some cards vanish after a certain amount of time. Cultist Simulator eventually becomes a game of spinning plates. I'm trying to Study using Reason to get some Erudition but then I keep having to add Reason to my Work so I don't lose my lucrative day job as a clerk, and meanwhile The Passing of Time is devouring my Funds one by one.

Philippa played an earlier build of Cultist Simulator back in March, and a few new things have been added since then. One is explorable locations, and with enough cultists and money you can send expeditions into spooky hospitals, tombs, and so on. Then they'll demand more money to overcome each obstacle they face, until you've thrown everything down a hole and they all come back dead.

The more arcane combinations of cards are fun to figure out, but in this pre-release build I've had to look up quite a few of the basics. For instance, you can use Passion with Work to create paintings to sell, but then you'll be prompted to add a Lore card as well. Doing so seems to make paintings of philosophical value that are too horrible to sell. It took me a while to realize I could ignore the empty space and not add a second card at all when I just wanted to make some quick cash.

Clues hidden in the text accompanying certain cards point you toward the enigmatic stuff like the rituals that can win the game. It's in this text that it becomes obvious this is a game from two of the minds behind Fallen London and Sunless Sea. It may be less verbose than either of those games, but there's definitely a common tone to phrasing like, "There is a proverb among practitioners of the invisible arts: 'Glory visits the house without walls.' I would like to know about glory."

Figuring out the mysterious combinations that unlock the depths of Cultist Simulator is fascinating, forcing me to experiment with the many uses of Dream and Dread and Furtive Truths. I find myself getting hung up on the more practical side of things, though. I spent so much time trying to min-max my career to keep the cash coming in that I accidentally settled into a comfortable life and retired from the blasphemy caper altogether. I failed at being a cultist and nobody's going to come burn my books after all. What a tragedy.

Cultist Simulator will be available from May 31 on Steam, Humble, GOG, and itch.io.