Alexis and I talked a lot about BOOK OF HOURS this sprint. We even started talking music with our Canadian maestro Maribeth Solomon, saying things like “The Ivory Dove remembers everything” and “IT’S ALL GOING TERRIBLY WRONG” and “can you make a song for the deep and secret murky fecundities of the sea”. Getting the first musical feelies back is always a real cornerstone in development, so I can’t wait to hear what Maribeth comes up with!
Meanwhile: Alexis has been building BOOK OF HOURS, but he’s doing it inside Cultist Simulator. This might sound like a long way to go about things, considering that BOH will look almost nothing like Cultist, but we want to reuse as much of Cultist‘s genetic material as we can. It’s very tempting, when you’re making a new game, to start over with a FRESH CLEAN code base in which you end up making weirdly parallel mistakes. We want to take advantage of the lessons we learnt making Cultist.
As Alexis puts it: consider BOOK OF HOURS a butterfly. Better: a moth. A Madagascan sunset moth:
(This gorgeous beast has a wingspan of nine centimetres. Local tradition has it that the souls of the dead take this form. Its colour comes from optical interference effects on the wings, not pigment. Its Wikipedia article claims that consumption of Its caterpillars’ silk causes a euphoric high; there’s a suspicious lack of citations on that, but, well, you never know.)
As you know, holometabolous metamorphosis is one of the most ghastly things in nature. (Can you tell this is Alexis yet?) 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. (Oh my god.) 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 arts 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.
AREN'T YOU GLAD YOU'RE WAITING FOR THIS LOVELY RELAXING LIBRARY GAME ABOUT PHAGOCYTOSIC LEPIDOPTERA? More on the blog, and our season one finale of the Skeleton Songs podcast, all about apocalypse. Enjoy! <3
