The chance to make your own Hotline Miami 2 [official site] murder-mazes has been a long time coming – it was “pretty close to completion” seven months ago – but now it’s had a release date stuck to it. Well, a beta release date. Folk have been making their own Hotline Miami 2 maps via a half-shut back door for ages, but come December 10 it all gets official.



The beta is only launching on Steam for the time being, apparently cos that platform is easiest to debug for, but it won’t include Steam Workshop support for the time being. It will, however, including all content – i.e. sprites and music and whatnot – from the base game, but sadly you won’t be able to stick your own music into there due to copyright shenanigans when it comes to sharing your maps. The music is at least 50% of what makes Hotline Miami games Hotline Miami games, so that’s kind of a shame, but maybe modders can at least provide suggested playlists.

There’ll also be no sprite editor “but other people have already created their own and they work great.”

A final word of warning about the impending beta is that there’s no guarantee anything made it in will work in the final release version, so it’d probably best to treat it as just a toy for tinkering rather than pouring all your energies into it initially. It will, however, be open to anyone who owns the Windows version Hotline Miami 2 on Steam.

So, December 10th, which is two and a half weeks away. A few more details here. I want to see Deus Ex’s Liberty Island remade in HLM’s top-down neon death labyrinth, please.