Halfway Development Update #2 Posted by bach, 03. March 2014

It’s well past time we crawl out of our game development caves and let you know what we’ve been up to! 🙂

I’m sure most of you are aware we’ve blazed way past our original timeframe of releasing Halfway during Q4 of 2013. There’s really one simple reason for that: The game just needed more time to mature. In fact, Halfway is still shaping more into the game it should be with every passing hour. It’s a wildly challenging and sometimes taunting task. But we’re more confident than ever that the final game we’ll be worth the wait. And we certainly haven’t always felt that way throughout development (Just being honest here!)

So .. what’s the actual progress we’ve made in the last couple of months?

We’ve overhauled the entire AI making it super smart (things like reacting to noise). We designed more then 15 levels. And if we’d have kept all the iterations needed we’d probably have about quadruple the amount. We re-introduced the ring menu and made various other UI tweaks. We’ve added ALL player characters to the game, totalling 8, and also added all enemy types except for one (Fun fact: All the units take up about three 2048×2048 textures by themselves, that’s A LOT of lovingly placed pixels). We added more than 100 unique items to the game all with charming names such as “The Devastator”. The music has morphed and shaped into something new and very very atmospheric. We fixed a lot of bugs and added a lot of bugs. And we could go and on.. But much better then as listing everything here we’re just going to show you what the current state of the game is in moving pictures. About two weeks ago we did a 90-minute live stream with Tiyuri from Chucklefish playing Halfway:

You might wonder why Chucklefish would be streaming our game. Well, the exciting news is that we’re partnering with Chucklefish to bring Halfway to as many people as possible. In more traditional words: They are publishing our game. But, Chucklefish are about as different from a traditional publisher as you could possibly imagine. Simply put, they are brilliant at what they’re doing (heard of Starbound? ;)) and we are super excited to get to work with them. This truly only means good things for Halfway, and for us.

So what’s next?

We’re of course still working hard at finishing the game as soon as possible. We’re not going to give a time-frame until we can guarantee it. But it’s in our own interest to get it out to you as soon as we can! Stay tuned for more details as things unfold 🙂

To finish up this development update, we have a couple of recent screenshots:



(click to enlarge)



(click to enlarge)