Happy grimmest month of the year, Beloveds! I have an announcement that might cheer you up. I’m not going to go into detail, but I *am* going to confirm that we’re working on some ✨ NEW CULTIST CONTENT ✨ that I’ll be able to talk more about next sprint. For now, I’ll leave you only with its working title:

EXILE.

Stay tuned.

This sprint Alexis released a loooooooooooong post about the State of the Factory: Year 2, which goes through all the ins and outs of Weather Factory in 2019. If you’ve interest in the realities of being a smol indie dev and you’re not afraid of data, it’s for you! If you’re less about numbers and more about words, you can always check out Alexis’s mega-reading list of his major influences instead.

We also released our second episode of Skeleton Songs, this time on all manner of weird mythological beasts from legend and literature. Alexis talks a lot about eagles and Christian metaphor and rubbish unicorns and I talk about last sprint’s Blatant Beast and wendigoes. You can listen to it on all the usual podcast-y places (Spotify, Apple, Google, Stitcher, iHeartRadio…), all of which you can find handy-dandily linked here. Enjoy!

There’s actually a lot more intelligent stuff in there than there is about excrement, but I understand social media revolves around ‘humour’ and ‘fun’ so I’m just trying to fit in.

This sprint I can also share a first look at our new direction for BOOK OF HOURS. I’m not a proper concept artist, but this should give you a good idea of what we’re thinking. A side-on cross-section view of Hush House, where you control and interact with your Librarian and their Assistants and your Visitors as you delve deeper and deeper into the belly of rock beneath you. Call it a gentle sim with an occult twist. It’s still going to be narrative-driven and text-based, of course, but we’ve moved away from Cultist‘s minimalist tabletop.

Coding’s going really well.

More on this later down the line. For now, we’ve paused BOOK OF HOURS‘ prototyping so we can work on EXILE, and will get back to it in a couple of months. BOOK OF HOURS will then be our main focus moving forward.

This sprint also marked the arrival of an unusual new member of the Weather Factory family. By ‘new member’ I mean dystopian overlord from the future and by ‘family’ I mean cult. Meet: GLOMETHEUS! He who brings lasers to mankind.

He is, of course, a class-four 3D laser-printer technically called a Glowforge, but he’s just Glommy to us. We’re experimenting with laser-printing for new merch and already have some pretty interesting ideas. Let us know if you have any suggestions!

Speaking of merch, I’d like to put some concerns to rest about our upcoming tarot deck. I saw some fears on Reddit that we might have quietly axed the project. WE HAVEN’T! It turns out it’s really hard to print and cut coloured images on black backgrounds – I could bore you with the physical realities of die-cutting white card that’s been coloured black, but I love you too much – so the TLDR is I’m shopping around for a new producer who can make ’em look nice.

To make up for the delay, here’s the whole deck as a 78-card premium tarot of the Hours. SOON.

I leave you with news that I’m trialling some themes in our monthly newsletter. This month’s theme, being cold and grey and miserable, is love. So if you fancy a quiz which’ll definitively, scientifically tell you whom you should romance next in Cultist Simulator… make sure you’re signed up.

‘Til next time! 😘

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