Mar 6, 2022

Cultist Simulator - Six Letters On Necessity

Last Thursday I released a significant update to Cultist Simulator and sat back, feeling pretty pleased with myself. Most of the work was under the hood - a near-total rewrite - but it included some long-requested QOL features that I thought people would like. I reckoned there were a few minor bugs to tidy up the following day (priority 5 on a scale where 1 is 'EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE' and 9 is 'is that even a thing') but it'd been in beta for several months so I was confident it was stable. I spent the evening watching the MLP movie with my kid and didn't think much of it.

The next morning I fired up my PC and found a Steam forum full of cross, bewildered players, about fifty support emails, and the orange text that puts the fear in every indie dev on Steam:

It wasn't even the bugs that were most upsetting people. It was the rework of the card placement UI, which worked, I rather suddenly realised, about as well as trying to fit ice cubes into a cat. And a 'minor' camera navigation issue that I'd long ago stopped noticing.

I'd fucked up royally and I'd never seen it coming.

How? I'd got complacent. Sure, it had been in beta for months, but there was no compelling reason to play a slightly janky beta. It seems plenty of players had seen the problems and assumed they'd be fixed before I went live. One player had written a heartfelt and articulate critique of the camera and UI issues, but it had ended up as one of six links in a bundle of four emails and I'd missed it.

More insidious still, I was getting pages and pages of high quality feedback from one particular modding group, funnelled through one helpful modding rep with screenshots and repro steps:

so since I'd fixed hundreds of bugs over months of testing, and the bugs had slowed to a trickle, it must be fine? Right?

Okay, it wasn't fine. What I really needed to do - what I should have done - is sit down and play the bloody game for a couple of days and take notes. And before that, I should have formalised the beta test, checked in with specific people, taken notes, like I did with the Exile DLC. If I'd done that, I'd have seen all this stuff and fixed it a week later in a much better state. Lesson learnt. Like I said, I got complacent.

SO let me apologise to all you loyal souls for foisting this nasty surprise on you, wrapped up like a Christmas present. And let me say that the community has actually been very nice about the whole thing. I've had some mildly grumpy mails but loads of supportive, helpful, detailed mails which take time out to say how much they love the game.

--

To business. I spent Friday and the weekend trying to sort out this nonsense, and fixed the worst issues and a bunch of nuisance ones. I'm staying on this next week. The card grid snap is going to get another round of love, and I still have a couple of dozen issues in my list.

If you'd still like to roll back to the old version, you can find instructions on doing that here:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/718670/discussions/0/3182361055551113455/

I'm off to drink me tea. Have wildly coloured dreams, everyone.

AK

PS bonus content:

Mar 3, 2022

CULTIST SIMULATOR: METAMORPHOSED EDITION

Cultist Simulator - Six Letters On Necessity

I'm going to post this for a third and final time, because people always seem to like it:

"As you know, holometabolous metamorphosis is one of the most ghastly things in nature. The larva is driven by chemical imperatives to entomb itself alive in its own final skin. Then the absence of a protective juvenile hormone permits the activation of the imaginal discs embedded in its infant flesh. These spew forth a torrent of enzymes which tear apart most of its cells in a sort of quasi-digestive self-immolation, leaving it as basically a shiny bulging sac of goo in which the discs float, spinning new parts and organs round themselves out of the dissolved ex-caterpillar. When they’ve finished, the imago will explode out of its old skin like a John Carpenter special effect. Its wings at this point are still soft and soggy, with the consistency of used kitchen paper, so it’ll have to hang upside down, dry off and pump hemolymph into its wing-veins before it can take off and make innocent humans coo over its beautiful colours.

Anyway, so the point we’re at is that I’ve spun a cocoon round Cultist Simulator and I’ve pumped enough liquefying enzymes into it that it’s more goo than game at this point. This is progress."

The last paragraph, I'm pleased to report, is now out of date. Cultist Simulator has emerged from its cocoon after its rewrite. After a long period of what I would love to call spectacular buggery, if that didn't mean something else that had nothing to do with bugs, but 'Spectacular Buggery' sounds like a band name or a minor David Foster Wallace novel or perhaps an exhibition at the ICA c.1985, right? Where was I? I've lost my glasses. Here they are. Oh Lottie's bringing me a cup of tea, that's nice. I'm fifty years old now, you know.

CULTIST SIMULATOR REWRITE

It's live. To be clear, 'Metamorphosed Edition' means 'free update', not another thing you need to buy.
Yes, this does mean we're still supporting the game four years after launch. Steam Deck version at some point soon.

Some highlights:

(1) more stable save format.
(2) better modding support.
(3) A lovely glow to show you where the card's going.
(4) Verbs no longer shoulder cards out of the way. I should put exclamation marks after this, shouldn't I, to show how exciting all this is, because that's how people do on Steam updates.
(5) Hey folks, welcome to the latest update, I'm excited to announce we've got a dropzone for verbs!
(6) Some mildly interesting extra behaviour for when things get consumed!!
(7) better font support for Central and Eastern European languages!!!
(8) You can combine DECAYING CARDS in a SINGLE STACK under some circumstances!!!!!
(9) ***RIGHT-CLICK TO SEND A CARD TO A VERB SLOT***!!!!!!!!!!!
(10) An incredibly arcane fix which may resolve a highly specific RNG quirk where the Stag Door wasn't quite random. I can't bring myself to put an exclamation mark after that though.

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who's provided patient and detailed feedback over the last few months, and a wry but also heartfelt thank you to everyone who's provided grumpy or vague feedback.

FAQ

Q. Something's broken what I do
A. Mail us at support@weatherfactory.biz. Although if you have a bunch of mods try uninstalling them first, because otherwise my response after a week when I've caught up with all my email may be 'try uninstalling those mods I can see in the player.log'

Q. Where are player.log
A. If something breaks, you'll probably get the notorious Helpful Kitten Screen. Hit the Log FIles button on that. Or mail us, I have autoreplies for 'where to find log files' on various OSs

Q. New Cultist content pls
A. All new content has to be localised into four languages now, so there's not likely to be any new Cultist content. On the other hand I am now writing this:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1028310/BOOK_OF_HOURS/

Q. BOOK OF HOURS WHEN!!!!
A. It still says 2022, it might be 2023. There's been all kinds of fuckery, as some of you know. BUT we'll be announcing a closed alpha soon.

Q. Can I have a plug for your books
A. No, it's Steam, they frown on that

Q. Oh go on
A. Oh okay
https://secrethistories.net/provocations
https://secrethistories.net/snare

If you don't like Amazon, or want the funky Suppression Bureau embossed edition, try this: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/weatherfactory

Q. What's with those dice in the cover image?
A. They're made out of people. Retired medical skeletons, to be precise. Surprisingly beautiful. If you're looking for a Winter-aspected item, that's them, and if you're looking for a reference to end a blog post, Winter's always good. Or 'like and subscribe', I guess.

AK

Feb 22, 2022

Glimpses through Glass

Cultist Simulator - Six Letters On Necessity

Another set of bug fixes and tweaks for the beta rewrite. This is RC2; between you and me, I think we'll go to RC3, i.e. there'll be more one more update before this hits the main branch. I'll tidy up a few immediate bugs and go back to Book of Hours.

I've mentioned before that this code rewrite is because I'm building Book of Hours inside Cultist Simulator. I originally said 'as a Cultist Simulator mod' but that very quickly became unrealistic. Still, it's right in there:

I've said before that a lot of BH will be CS under the skin, albeit with a different UI and a lot more functionality. Like this:

I hope you can see the point through the fog of horrible placeholder gfx. Dropping a book in a bookcase is not unlike dropping a card in a CS verb slot. Indeed, in some senses bookcases (and crafting stations, and your avatar) are the BH version of verbs. Some of the rules are different: it's not all one big tabletop, for example, so you can't drag books into an adjacent room (or, in most cases, unless your avatar is present in the same room). But many of the rules are the same, which makes things easier for me both from a technical and from a game design perspective.

This means that anyone really keen can dig in and see some very early Book of Hours material. Their eagerness will be matched only by their disappointment, because one of the things that build switch does is include/exclude content, so there is no BH content to speak of, and all the code is super-early. But if you see it, that's what it's there for.

And it's a little easier to see it, because of this:

https://github.com/weatherfactory/cultistsimulator-visible

which is a public branch of the source code for Cultist. I haven't open-sourced CS! This is just a convenience for modders and the curious: it's already possible to decompile the source code from the finished Unity build, and people have been doing this for years, but this makes some extra info (like comments) visible.

It also makes it possible to log issues directly on GitHub. There's a handful of modders and other very engaged community members who've been giving extremely helpful, technically detailed feedback and bug reports, and this makes it easier to do that without routing everything through standard support tickets.

But if you're just a player whose game has crashed and this all looks forbiddingly technical and irrelevant, that's cool, support@weatherfactory.biz is still what you want.

To play us out, some recent ethnolinguististorical business that's fed into Book of Hours:

"Too Long Near The Woods To Be Frit By Owls"

Jan 14, 2022

Notes from Beta: the Phaistos Disc and the Yellowstone Zone of Death

Cultist Simulator - Six Letters On Necessity

This is another pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain release. It's largely

1/ code rewrites to support Book of Hours;
2/ teeny extra features which I like or am trying out pre-Book of Hours;
3/ tweaks for which modders have politely pleaded;
4/ bug fixes because 1/ or 2/ or 3/ have broken other things.

I'll talk more vividly about some examples.

The banner feature of this release is that IT'S NOW POSSIBLE TO STACK DECAYING CARDS!!!!! as long as they're all within one second of different remaining lifetime values, so you can put your 21.4s Contentment card on your 20.8s Contentment card and well done, you've extended the lifetime by 0.6 seconds, ekeing out happiness' embers a sliver more effectively. This is possibly a Statement about Life. Did I mention I turned 50? 'Would you like me to stick my head in a bucket of water? I've got one here.'

Anyway this feature is genuinely a feature but the reason it's in is this. One of our more helpful beta-testers pointed out that card stacks split weirdly under two exotic circumstances; one of which is if you tried to drop a whole stack in a slot, and the other was which (deep breath) if a recipe created a stack of 3 or more lifetimed/decaying cards, like Contentment.

The second one doesn't happen at all in the base game! But it does in some mods, so I have to support it, and to be fair I might some day decide to add it to CS DLC (no announcements here, but you never know) or to Book of Hours. And more generally, weird exotic rare case bugs can sometimes come back to wreak havoc if you don't fix them early. (If you need convincing, read about the Yellowstone Zone of Death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_Death_(Yellowstone) It won't really allow anyone to get away with murder, but it will probably give a judge a bad migraine some day. )

'Split weirdly' means that a stack of n cards would split to two stacks of n-1 cards. This doesn't matter with a stack of 2 cards. It matters a lot with a stack of, say, 5 cards:

So I had to fix this. In the process I found that there was no provision in the codebase for splitting (or creating) decaying card stacks. The assumption is you'd never have a stack of decaying cards. And I remember flagging this with Martin, the contractor I got to help with the game back in 2017, and him pointing out quite reasonably that it wouldn't make sense to need to combine them, because you'd never have two decaying cards with the exact same lifetime, right?

And sure, back then it made sense. This is the thing about four-year-old code bases where the designer keeps having more ideas and then modders keep having MORE more ideas. But now I had to fix it. And the fix was easy. So you lucky people have a new feature for free. Sorry it's not a very exciting one.

I am sometimes[1] asked: AK, why all the penny-ante technical releases? Why not more content? That's what everyone's here for. The answer is simple: localisation. Any content I add has to be localised into Chinese, Russian, Japanese and German, now that the game is available in those languages. And the actual translation of a teeny bit of content takes little time, but talking to loc partners, providing translation notes, chasing, finding mistakes, and following up when our fan base find mistakes[2]. And this is probably a good thing. Or I would still be working on adding more material to original CS and Book of Hours would literally never happen.

But localisation continues to be an ongoing Thing, especially now we have people eager to support fan localisations. I've learnt more than I ever expected to about Unicode, fonts, and text in Unity. ('Would you like me to stick my head in a big bucket of Unicode?') I have had plaintive mails over the last year from Polish and Hungarian players asking me to add better Latin-2/Latin-A support for the special characters in those languages, and I kept thinking, I thought I'd added that? It turns out there was a bug in the fontscript selection, and a problem with the font asset I'd set up in Unity, none of which I'd ever have noticed without being hassled about it. Your attention is waning, isn't it. I don't blame you. Let me win it back with this trivium: Unicode has a code page specifically for the (never-deciphered) characters found only on a disc of fired clay dug up in the Minoan palace of Phaistos on Crete. https://unicode-table.com/en/blocks/phaistos-disc/

(By C messier - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38737955)

More in the actual patch notes if you're interested. In theory this is a second release candidate for the main branch: I think it'll go to a third release candidate while I turn up leftover irritations like persistent card ghosts ('oooooo SHUFFLE oooo') and exotic save conversion bugs. But we're almost there.

--

[1] constantly
[2] or just take exception to a particular translation. And then I have to make a call on whether to go with the translator or the player. Because we have unusually engaged and thoughtful players, this is possible, but often quite involved. Here's an example from 2020.

--
[From: redacted]

Hello,

on some occassions the word "Forst" is used for "Wood", like in 'Way: The Wood' (see screenshot).

"Forst" is most of the time used for a managed and/or commercial wood with forestry and foresters and selling trees and such.
Depending on the lore this might or might not be the correct for 'The Wood'. ;-)

...but in case it is not, the normal, common word for Wood is "Wald", (like it is used in the entry screen).

====

[From: me]

Thanks! Can I dig into this a bit? We should pick and stick to one term, and it sounds like 'Wald' is probably better, but

(1) Our cognate in English, 'forest', originally meant an area set aside for hunting; but because these areas were large and uncultivated, 'forest' took on the colloquial meaning of 'especially large, wild woodland area' and that's how most English speakers would now understand it. Do you think the same applies in German with 'Forst', or is it explicitly managed woodland?

(2) I chose 'Wood' because of the connection with 'wildwood', which has a particular resonance in the UK particularly with the mythic and primal, but also with children's stories. Does 'Wald' have any similar connections or overlaps?

I'd welcome your thoughts. (and thanks for all your feedback: I've just added you to the Special Thanks section)

====

[From: redacted]

Sorry for the long answer. Since the answer has potentially big implications if the term is changed everywhere, I did some research and thought about it in detail to be able to give as precise answers as possible.

(1)
"Forst" in the 7th century was unowned, unused land. Later the term was used at times to distinguish large areas of woods from smaller ones ("Forst": larger, "Wald": smaller). But the term changed the meaning again in the Middle Ages, when landlords began restricting free use of the resources of the "Wald", i.e. banned hunting and harvesting wood for everyone but themselves. Such a restricted wood would then be called "Forst".

Today the term "Forst" is generally associated with some kind of management and restriction and is often a less wild, 'cleaner' version of "Wald" because of it's commercial usage.
(2)
I am a little bit older, so unfortunately I cannot say anything about the associations children today have with forests or what stories or myths they know about it.
As an adult I have some direct associations with the term "Wald", which is probably the direction you are looking for:

- forest burials [a] (getting more and more popular here)
- a historical and mythical battle
- germanic paganism [c]
- use in classical fairy tales [d] (where the forest is dangerous/mythical/a place for transformation)
- home of mythical creatures like forest ghosts, forest goblins, fairies, elves, trolls

Long story short:
Yes, I think there are mythical and primeval connections to the word "Wald".

[a] https://www.dw.com/en/the-green-way-of-death/a-19527764
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest
[c] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_trees_and_groves_in_Germanic_paganism_and_mythology
[d] Brothers Grimm: Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Town Musicians of Bremen, Snow White
(3)
Another theoretical option:
If you really want to emphasize that the forest is untouched by humans, you could also use the word "Urwald" ('primeval forest'). However, "Urwald" is often associated with the Amazon rainforest or any jungle in german. So aside from the artistic choice, the less ambiguous variant would be "Wald".

====

From: [me]

Thank you very much for this lengthy and thoughtful response!

I've made the change and I'll roll it into the next patch.

Nov 18, 2021

Meet the new Tabletop Bundle!

Cultist Simulator - Arabella Dusk

The Lady Afterwards is our Cultist Simulator-inspired TRPG set in the Secret Histories, a 1920s world of apocalypse, yearning and the Hours. The boxed edition sold out in 60 seconds - and then the pre-orders we hastily put up for sale sold out in 72 hours. But the unlimited digital edition is out now, and everyone can get their hands on it with our shiny new Steam bundle!

The Lady Afterwards: Digital Edition is available as a 'Complete the set' bundle with Cultist Simulator, giving you 15% off both games. If you already own Cultist Sim, you'll just be charged for The Lady Afterwards. This is the first time a developer has ever released a digital TRPG like this on Steam, we think!

What's included?

The Lady Afterwards: Digital Edition includes everything you need to play this Cultist Simulator tabletop RPG, all in PDF form. Specifically, that's:

★ The Secret Histories Rule Book, a ~50 page TRPG scenario set in 1920s Alexandria

★ The Lady Afterwards Game Runner’s Guide, a ~30 page mechanics primer

★ 18 clues, including telegrams, lovers' notes, photographs and more

★ 8 customisable character sheets with personalised questionnaires and Egyptian connections

★ A Game Runner's Journal to keep track of players, game-states and evidence

★ A full-colour A3 map of contemporary Alexandria with real 1920s photographs

★ Access to a custom-built mood-music playlist of 1920s songs

A lot of love went into making this - we hope you like it! ♥

The other Secret Histories

AK wrote a recent update on Cultist Simulator's new gateofhorn beta branch update, and we've been quietly revamping the BOOK OF HOURS roadmap to give an accurate idea of what development you can expect in 2022. We'll release that roadmap in the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled...

Nov 5, 2021

Cultist Alpha graduates to Cultist Beta

Cultist Simulator - Six Letters On Necessity

I've been reworking the whole Cultist Simulator codebase so I can use it in BOOK OF HOURS too. And also so that I can provide some additional modder support, and fix a rare but nasty bug in the old save system.

If you've been paying close attention, you'll have seen updates being released on to the alpha branch (aka gateofivory), very quietly, like a semi-retired widower-spy releasing messenger-bats at twilight. These updates are now on the beta branch (gateofhorn). Here's what you should know if you want to go in there:

The card placing system is completely reworked. Tokens now have a shadow that shows you where they'll go. Verbs won't move cards out of the way. There are some graphical rough edges which I still need to smooth out.
there's a new, more robust save format that should be resistant to the very occasional save corruption in the older version. It should transparently import your old save at game start. It will keep your old save, renamed, so you can always revert to the main branch.
there's an improved console and some new modding features, in particular the ability to load your own custom binaries. Which is very exciting for those into that sort of thing, and will sound so much blah to everyone else, I know.
Bugs. The usual beta health warning. There'll be all kinds of oddness with localisation updates until I merge everything back in.

any questions? one at the back there? is there any new content? no, sorry! This is the big disadvantage of loc: the content is basically frozen unless we want to annoy China, Germany, Japan and Russia by not translating new content, or go through a four-strand loc process every time. Hang on for BOOK OF HOURS, which is all new content.

It would also be remiss of me not to mention that Lottie's extraordinary one-shot Cultist Simulator RPG, [i[The Lady Afterwards[/i], sold out in physical form almost instantly but that the digital/pdf version will be available from November 18th... in the usual TRPG PDF places but also here on Steam. There'll be a Tabletop Bundle with Cultist Simulator - a complete-the-set bundle, so if you already own CS, you can pick up a copy of TLA without paying for CS twice.

Dream furiously, all of you -

AK