![]() So if you’re ever playing Cultist, and you resent having to defer a foray into the occult, because you need to get that Work token generating funds… that’s how I felt. I had been looking forward to my contract work, but now I felt it coming up like a wall. And in Martin Nerurkar, I stumbled across another solo indie developer working on a card game of his own, who had a solid appreciation of what I wanted and what I needed, and who wasn’t afraid to press his own point of view.īut still, I was sitting down in front of a keyboard, day on day, writing and coding with no-one to worry about but me, and it was exhilarating. Catherine Unger is a thoughtful, distinctive talent who found a simple but instantly recognisable style that became the hallmark of Cultist, which gave it a visual identity very early on. I say ‘mostly’ because I don’t want to undersell the freelancers I’d found to work with me. I told myself that I needed to get that alpha version ready before then for practical reasons, and that was true, but honestly my real motivation was just getting my hands dirty again with making a game, mostly on my own. More practically, I had that must looming up in October, when my first contract - the one with Paradox Interactive - kicked in. ![]() And it’s a feeling I wanted to get into Cultist Simulator, because it’s a feeling I suspected would resonate with a fair few folk. It’s probably a feeling you’ve experienced, too. But it was a familiar feeling, struggling to find time for the maybe in between the must. I wasn’t really starting from zero again, because I had savings, experience, and a rep, and also because I wasn’t about to become a father. So you’re balancing the sensible with the possible. That thing might some day bring you greater fulfilment or success than your day job… but statistically, it probably won’t. When you’re starting out, the thing you feel you’re really working on has to live in the cracks between your day job. If you want to get anywhere practical with your occult experiments, you’ll need to take your focus away from your day job, and then - if you unexpectedly fall ill, for instance - you might be in real trouble.Īnd this, of course, is the classic indie game developer’s struggle. Do that, and you can start to save up enough Funds to keep ahead of Time’s appetite, especially if you stay late and get promoted.īut the ‘work’ in the Work verb doesn’t just mean working for a living - it also means working magic. And the best way to do that is to go to work every day, which is to say, use the Work verb with a job card and with Health and Reason cards that get exhausted. This happens to nearly everyone when they first play Cultist Simulator. If you don’t have any Health cards left, it’ll give you a personal introduction to the Game Over screen. If you don’t have a Funds card, it’ll snatch a Health card and convert it into Hunger. Every minute, it snatches and consumes a Funds card from the table. In Cultist, there’s a Time verb (‘Time, the sundial’s shadow, passes’) that operates without your intervention. Then I very quickly found the passion project squeezed between the constraints of actual paying work, to keep putting food on the table. When I started work on Cultist, I was working solo on a diversion that grew into a passion project. I had realised afterwards that the parallel probably wasn’t a coincidence. And, of course, in Sunless Sea, the player was trying to cross a dark ocean of unguessable extent, in a fragile vessel with limited resources. We’d made Sunless Sea with a tiny team, dwindling cash reserves, trying to achieve something we’d never done before, with an uncertain goal. ![]() But I began to realise, a little sheepishly, that there was a final influence creeping into the project: my own circumstances. And it was a game about the occult, of course - a game about the terror and wonder of the unseen world. Cultist was mostly intended to be an experimental game - both in terms of some fancy formal stuff I wanted to do, and in terms of the player’s experience, which was going to be all about experimentation and discovery.
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