Hadean Lands has a Steam "coming soon" page

store.steampowered.com/app/376240

Note that there will be DLC! store.steampowered.com/app/477260/ Note that I am not just selling you a chunk of the game for extra money.

Planned release date is June 20th. PataNoir will beat me by a few weeks, but, on the other hand, I’m launching with Mac/Win/Linux covered…

You might want to tell people it’s already available through the Humble store, which is where I purchased it just now.

Though I wish it had been available through GoG, which is my indie store of choice.

We clearly need a XYZZY award picture.

I want to keep the Steam page focused on the Steam launch.

If you got HL as an Itch/Humble download, either through being a KS backer or by purchasing the game there, you can now download the new version of the game as a free update. Check your account at humblebundle.com – you should see downloads dated May 31st.

(There are separate downloads for Windows 64-bit, Windows 32-bit, Linux 64-bit, Linux 32-bit, and MacOS.)

(If you have a 32-bit Mac, you’re out of luck. That would be like MacOS 10.6 anyhow, which is too old.)

Here is where I remind people that the launch date is Monday, June 20th.

I also wanna thank everyone who has road-tested the Lectrote interpreter over the past few months. That’s the critical technology that made this release possible.

Oh yes: when the day hits, I’m going to repoint hadeanlands.com/help to the Steam discussion forum. (Currently it points at the HL help thread on this forum.)

I went back and played the new 2.0 version.

  1. Would it be possible to add the asterisk to uncompleted rituals in the journal?

  2. What about adding “doors” and “things” to the journal? (Maybe allow clicking on them to “GO TO” them?!)

  3. I don’t think I noticed before today that you can’t use Ctrl/Command-F to search the transcript in Lectrote. (Presumably because its transcript truncates after two hundred lines or so? But I really do wish that worked…)

  4. You probably don’t want to make another version, but I have always wished HL supported a “retrieve” command. I constantly type: “go to rosemary. get it. go back” and would love to have a convenience command, “retrieve rosemary” that would do that for me.

Thanks for testing it!

I don’t want to touch the code a week out from launch, as you might expect. But I am saving up ideas for the inevitable post-launch update.

Asterisk in the ritual list in the journal: yes, it’s possible. Probably a good idea. It does cost a little bit of time per turn but I don’t think it’s a significant amount on the desktop.

Adding doors and things (and places?) to the journal… I envision the journal as a sidebar source of information when you’re going through a ritual. Something to glance back and forth at. It’s not a direct mirror of the RECALL verb. If you want to remind yourself of a list, that’s easier in the game window.

I see the use of a “GO TO” click in the items list, but it feels tacked on.

(You really want the items in the recipes to be hyperlinks, but then I’d have the whole mess of tracking when the player has figured out each obscure synonym. Too much work. Sigh.)

Search: I never thought about it! The app shell I’m using just doesn’t expose Chrome’s search widget. I’ll look into that.

It’s true that the game window only keeps 200 lines (paragraphs) of history. This is conservative, because at some point performance goes to hell and I haven’t done any testing of when.

As for a “retrieve” command… I know what you mean. (Last weekend I played through the game, in one evening.) But the Inform code is really, really locked down at this point. I am aiming to never recompile that again. Sigh. Again.

Well, then let me at least suggest that something in the game menus should suggest typing COMMANDS. The intro says nothing about it; even when you finish the tutorial, it doesn’t mention that you can type COMMANDS for more commands.

And if you do type “HELP” in the game, it initially offers you the tutorial. You have to type HELP outside the first room to get it to suggest “COMMANDS.”

So, overall, it would be great if there were something as helpful as hadeanlands.com/how/ embedded right in the game.

That is as designed. You can’t give people two tutorials at the same time, good grief.