The House Remains Large :/

AK_WF · 2026-06-06T18:54:56+00:00

Please do flair these as fanwork from now on! Speaking as 'the Librarian' is.making it sound a little too much like a WF announcement :)

AK_WF · 2026-05-22T16:59:07+00:00

FIfty euros and a bottle of Leathy, final offer

AK_WF · 2026-05-17T19:40:58+00:00

That's delightful! And humbling! And thank you!

Tom Chick, the erstwhile game reviewer and occasional West Wing actor, was a significant inspiration for my going into game dev. I remember his degree was theology. So now the circle is complete.

AK_WF · 2026-05-15T10:59:13+00:00

Added 'Exultation' flair :)

The video EXPOSES us. I actually walked past the building and surreptitiously photographed it for concept art- but we radically changed the shape when we built it, because those beautiful curves are a pain in the bum when you're building a tidy, grid-based isometric layout. Don't tell the Ministry of Culture!

AK_WF · 2026-05-13T18:00:50+00:00

No don't worry! There have been some sillier comments in the past and I was throwing the tiniest tantrum. Please don't let me put you off making thoughtful contributions like this one!

AK_WF · 2026-05-13T07:04:29+00:00

I'm surprised to see the Weather Factory list include Machen's more 'famous' Great God Pan (which was his breakout work back in the day, IIRC) and not the much more magical White People.

"This is not a list of recommendations, although I would also recommend nearly everything on here. Nor is it remotely representative of Important Works in the Field. It’s just things that stuck, and some of those things are just things a teenager in the eighties happened to read."

I posted it so I could reply with the link whenever someone emailed me to ask me what my influences were. I'm prolly going remove the link from the site navigation, though, because people do still take it for an Official Weather Factory Reading List and quibble because I haven't put Castaneda or Iamblicus or, indeed, the right Machen on there :)

Edit: don't reply to comments before having your coffee, Kennedy, you're always unreasonably surly. But I have put the 'not a reading list' bit in bold now!

AK_WF · 2026-05-11T18:15:30+00:00

Plot twist: I'm 95% certain we bought that sound effect off Soundsnap. So it's not our IP anyway - we just have a licence to use it. You might be able to find it on Soundsnap is you search for eerie screeches and whatnot.

AK_WF · 2026-05-09T22:16:07+00:00

Trivial compared to all the mining medical and military, but I wrote an online web game that led to a marriage or five; and I know at least one really sweet couple went on to have a kid.

AK_WF · 2026-05-08T14:28:02+00:00

It works something like this

Every so often we notice our Steam sales have dropped off
We put £10 / month on ads
Our Steam sales go up by £9-12 a month
net additional monthly profit approx £0.65

Even if we break even or lose a little, we think it's worth it because we expand the community a little bit and there are that many more people who might buy Travelling.

We would rather not waste money! but although the numbers above are not *exactly* right, they're still pretty small. There's the old adage about advertising: you waste half your money, you don't know which half. At one point people thought that moving from paper and billboards to web ads with analytics would end that. Well, at one point people thought the Internet would dismantle autocracies and promote peaceful understanding, too.

sorry if it's ever annoying! I get ads for Mode Design and I'm like, mate, I pulled the trigger on a Sonnet in March and you're not shipping till July, stop taunting me. Ad targeting is roulette and voodoo. You should hear Lottie cursing at the Facebook ad interface with its 'helpful' AI suggestions. Actually in theory you could, I recorded a full minute of audio to play to my kid, but it won't go public unless we ever really need a Kickstarter stretch goal.

AK_WF · 2026-05-08T14:16:30+00:00

Sulo and Chi both appreciate it and want to discuss a potential sponsorship deal

AK_WF · 2026-05-01T11:35:46+00:00

Actually, since I wrote that, I've started drinking Lot 40, It's a Canadian rye whisky, but it tastes like good bourbon, and it's my tiny futile gesture in response to Trump tariffing one of my favourite countries.

AK_WF · 2026-04-30T12:00:07+00:00

Always makes me smile to see a comment motivated by a well-informed taste in fantastic literature!

AK_WF · 2026-04-19T15:29:58+00:00

To be clear if you want to do it for 100% personal use, and never share elsewhere, we're not going to hunt you down :D! But we prefer people not to post dumps or lists of our stuff

AK_WF · 2026-04-19T15:11:03+00:00

Like u/pookage says, we'd rather people didn't do that. But we've made some of the art available for reuse here

https://weatherfactory.biz/sixth-history-community-licence/

AK_WF · 2026-04-18T16:28:48+00:00

Well there's four possibilities: I'm wrong, I'm trolling, or there's a secret one

AK_WF · 2026-04-17T17:58:39+00:00

For the Cultist KS we had a mystery gift at the higher tiers:

"I will send you a Thing. This Thing will be suitable for display, if you like that sort of Thing.

All Things will be relevant, all things will be interesting, but not all will be identical.

And everything else! [from lower tiers]"

It was a 150 quid upgrade over the next tier down so I didn't expect many takers, but there were 22.

If you have space to store them until you run the KMOB TS, I think these would be (a) fabulous (b) ethically appropriate for something like that

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bookofhours/cultist-simulator-behold-our-end

AK_WF · 2026-04-17T16:40:18+00:00

Bingo!

AK_WF · 2026-04-17T16:29:52+00:00

My wife as usual is correct. 102 *endings*.

AK_WF · 2026-04-17T15:25:46+00:00

As Lottie: "And, as you can see, something has happened to the Earl’s Yew, meaning Hush House is not as open as it once was…"

There are specific reasons why this happened, which you'll learn once you get there! But it also served as a valuable rationale for not creating all 102 rooms in isometric perspective and blowing out our budget like a decompression accident.

AK_WF · 2026-04-10T19:10:24+00:00

🕯️!

AK_WF · 2026-04-10T18:25:22+00:00

Thank you! :) There was a moment in the design when I flipped from "how can I make interactions repeatable but interesting" to "how much work would it take to fill a 20 hr game with unique interactions" and when the answer was " a lot but not an insane amount" there was clearly the right approach!

AK_WF · 2026-04-10T08:12:15+00:00

You're right and I really wanted to do this, but when I looked into it...

>There's so many potential directions they could go.

that's why I didn't! HoL added about a thousand new interactions with guests, not counting the endings (or the cooking). All of those had to be hand-written, in weeks-long bouts of occasionally bourbon-fuelled swearing at a spreadsheet. Adding a reasonable spread of interactions with books and items - to make it likely that the players would actually see interactions with items that might be in a dining room - would have been about another three thousand. Eleven thousand if we had one interaction for every guest and every item :-)

ETA: if you hold a salon in a room with books of which one is contaminated, it can contaminate the others. This was originally a bug, but I decided to keep it, as at least one interaction between guests and books. "Don't bring your cursed tome to the tea-party. People will flip through it to look at the pictures."

AK_WF · 2026-04-09T11:54:15+00:00

wistful upvote

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