[UPDATE: more here – http://weatherfactory.biz/that-library-game/]

The day before yesterday I was finishing the ultra-hardcore New Game Plus mode for Cultist Simulator, and I thought about how mean it was, and I idly tweeted this:

idea: extremely relaxed Cultist Simulator expandalone



you’re a librarian



books arrive in your occult library and you just examine, catalogue and arrange them, then provide them to visitors



very low challenge, lots of careful board organisation — Alexis Kennedy🕯️ (@alexiskennedy) January 16, 2019

It got a surprisingly good response, so in a mode of cheery whimsy (and I’ll admit optimism) I tweeted this:

crumbs!



OK, if this reaches 1000 RTs I will try to convince @tronbevan to let us make this



prediction: it will top out at 89 RTs and I’ll look like a fool, but I’ve never really minded that 🙃 https://t.co/i717WNPgYn — Alexis Kennedy🕯️ (@alexiskennedy) January 16, 2019

note

(1) my careful positioning of Lottie as Jorkins to my Spenlow and/or my salvation from my own folly

(2) that it crossed 1K RTs just now and appears to be accelerating

The fun thing is that we have a major update due for Cultist in four days, and I’m supposed to be writing the finishing touches for it. TIL: don’t Do A Viral right before a major scheduled release.

So, real talk:

(3) you are all troublemakers (not you, sorry, you didn’t RT it, you’re not a

troublemaker) but actually I really like the idea. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about whether we would ever do a more relaxed game experience. A lot of people over the last decade have said ‘AK, I like your words, please put them in a game that doesn’t want to hurt me’. I would like to do something serenely menacing and peacefully gothic where the challenge is ‘your indexing is out of date’ and ‘the patrons are tutting’ and possibly ‘a cat has nibbled your under-repair book’ rather than ‘YOUR SOUL WILL BE EATEN BY A THING WITH ANOTHER THING FOR A HEAD’

(4) we have a road map until April for Cultist and we had one and a half other projects we were going to do pre-production on real soon. So assuming we make That Damn Librarian Game, then we will need to rejig our planning, and that’s not something we want to promise on a whim. BUT after we get Christopher’s Build / the Major Victories (free update on Jan 22nd, folks!) out the door, Lottie and I are going to sit down and look seriously at how we could make this work. It’s not out of the question that you might see a Kickstarter this year.

As and when we do do more with this, we’ll let everyone know here:

https://weatherfactory.us13.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=97d06a3faac1573fa4330bb7d&id=c3f9b32720

because I’m not sure I’m going to be allowed on Twitter, any more.

(PS! A number of actual librarians, only one of whom got cross, engaged with us on Twitter about this. if you’re a librarian, please feel free to drop us a line at contact@weatherfactory.biz with Interesting Librarian Facts or Things That People Don’t Understand About Libraries That Annoy Us. This is a game set in a fictional alt-universe 1920s library so I can’t promise it will address the challenges of 21st century librification, but I’m interested)

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