Hey guys, as you may have noticed, Hack n Slash has a new lower price and bundle option to celebrate today's release of Spacebase DF9. It's fitting, as these games shared a journey from our community-voted Amnesia Fortnight game jam, to being funded by Indie Fund and friends, to becoming Steam Early Access titles, and now being finished games. So if you haven't already grabbed Hack n Slash, you can now do so for the lower price of $13.37 or as a bundle with Spacebase DF9 and both games' soundtracks at $24.99. And as a token of our appreciation to those who supported these games early, anyone who already owns Hack n Slash will be getting a copy of Spacebase for free and vice versa. ENJOY!!

[ 2014-10-27 18:13:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey guys, as you may have noticed, Hack n Slash has a new lower price and bundle option to celebrate today's release of Spacebase DF9. It's fitting, as these games shared a journey from our community-voted Amnesia Fortnight game jam, to being funded by Indie Fund and friends, to becoming Steam Early Access titles, and now being finished games. So if you haven't already grabbed Hack n Slash, you can now do so for the lower price of $13.37 or as a bundle with Spacebase DF9 and both games' soundtracks at $24.99. And as a token of our appreciation to those who supported these games early, anyone who already owns Hack n Slash will be getting a copy of Spacebase for free and vice versa. ENJOY!!

[ 2014-10-27 18:13:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

Woohoo, we just won the big Grand Jury award at Indiecade!! Thanks so much to you the community for helping make the game what it is today. It's a super weird one and the feedback and support you lent us during Early Access was key to the game's success. Hopefully this will help bring some more folks into the game and the world of programming and lead to more crazy mods in the workshop community!

[ 2014-10-10 18:19:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Woohoo, we just won the big Grand Jury award at Indiecade!! Thanks so much to you the community for helping make the game what it is today. It's a super weird one and the feedback and support you lent us during Early Access was key to the game's success. Hopefully this will help bring some more folks into the game and the world of programming and lead to more crazy mods in the workshop community!

[ 2014-10-10 18:19:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is a minor bugfix build that fixes some security holes in the Hack 'n' Slash mod support. Special thanks to SmashManiac for identifying and disclosing the issues!

[ 2014-09-23 23:10:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is a minor bugfix build that fixes some security holes in the Hack 'n' Slash mod support. Special thanks to SmashManiac for identifying and disclosing the issues!

[ 2014-09-23 23:10:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

We've just published a new patch for Hack 'n' Slash with a collection of bugfixes.

Linux fixes

• Linux configuration files, local save files, and mods now saved in a more appropriate location, following the standard used by other Double Fine games. You can now find these files on your local system in the following location: $HOME/.local/share/doublefine/hacknslash
• Subscribed mods now download and execute correctly.

Offline mode

The severe performance issues experienced when playing the game with Steam in offline mode should now be fixed. In addition, the subscription update process will now time out in five seconds if the game can't establish a connection. This should get you into the game much faster when playing offline.

Assorted other fixes

This patch also contains assorted fixes for minor bugs throughout the game.

[ 2014-09-19 22:56:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

We've just published a new patch for Hack 'n' Slash with a collection of bugfixes.

Linux fixes

• Linux configuration files, local save files, and mods now saved in a more appropriate location, following the standard used by other Double Fine games. You can now find these files on your local system in the following location: $HOME/.local/share/doublefine/hacknslash
• Subscribed mods now download and execute correctly.

Offline mode

The severe performance issues experienced when playing the game with Steam in offline mode should now be fixed. In addition, the subscription update process will now time out in five seconds if the game can't establish a connection. This should get you into the game much faster when playing offline.

Assorted other fixes

This patch also contains assorted fixes for minor bugs throughout the game.

[ 2014-09-19 22:56:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hack 'n' Slash is Now Available on Steam and is 33% off!*

Hack ‘n’ Slash is a puzzle action game about hacking -- reprogram object properties, hijack global variables, hack creature behavior, and even rewrite the game’s code! After a successful Early Access period, the game is moving to full release!

And remember, the only way to win is not to play...by the rules!

*Offer ends September 16 at 10AM Pacific Time

[ 2014-09-09 16:00:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

And we’re live! We’re very proud to be shipping the full release of Hack ‘n’ Slash. When I had the weird idea for a game about hacking and pitched it during Amnesia Fortnight in 2012, I had no idea the concept would excite so many people, and I certainly didn't expect that we’d get to turn it into a full game. The Early Access community has been a huge help to the game as well; you all provided fantastic feedback and found really clever ways to break the game. This game wouldn't have been possible without all of you.

Final Dungeon

The biggest change from the Early Access version is the inclusion of the final act. This is where my favorite puzzles and mechanics are introduced: you’ll have to use the knowledge you've developed throughout the game and some clever thinking to break into the castle, ascend the tower, and take down the wizard. It won’t be easy, though; the castle is designed to defend against hackers, and the wizard won’t go down without a fight.

Steam Workshop Support

I’m also really happy that we’re shipping the game with mod support and Steam Workshop integration, particularly because we’re shipping the game with the source code. The Hack ‘n’ Slash engine is flexible in a lot of interesting ways because of the hacking mechanic, and we’re really excited to see the clever things people can produce with it.

Extra Puzzles

And, of course, in a game about hacking, there need to be secrets to uncover. We've tuned the hacking mechanics and added additional puzzles that require clever use of the tools at your disposal. In return, you’ll get some cool new items and maybe discover some important things. Thanks again, and happy hacking!

[ 2014-09-09 10:42:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

And were live! Were very proud to be shipping the full release of Hack n Slash. When I had the weird idea for a game about hacking and pitched it during Amnesia Fortnight in 2012, I had no idea the concept would excite so many people, and I certainly didn't expect that wed get to turn it into a full game. The Early Access community has been a huge help to the game as well; you all provided fantastic feedback and found really clever ways to break the game. This game wouldn't have been possible without all of you.

Final Dungeon

The biggest change from the Early Access version is the inclusion of the final act. This is where my favorite puzzles and mechanics are introduced: youll have to use the knowledge you've developed throughout the game and some clever thinking to break into the castle, ascend the tower, and take down the wizard. It wont be easy, though; the castle is designed to defend against hackers, and the wizard wont go down without a fight.

Steam Workshop Support

Im also really happy that were shipping the game with mod support and Steam Workshop integration, particularly because were shipping the game with the source code. The Hack n Slash engine is flexible in a lot of interesting ways because of the hacking mechanic, and were really excited to see the clever things people can produce with it.

Extra Puzzles

And, of course, in a game about hacking, there need to be secrets to uncover. We've tuned the hacking mechanics and added additional puzzles that require clever use of the tools at your disposal. In return, youll get some cool new items and maybe discover some important things. Thanks again, and happy hacking!

[ 2014-09-09 10:42:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

Today we're ready to roll out Steam Workshop integration for testing! Details below. Please post feedback in the forums!

Downloading and playing mods

You can manage your mod subscriptions via the Hack 'n' Slash workshop. Subscribed mods will automatically be downloaded when you boot up the game. Starting a new game with a mod Select "NEW GAME" from the save select screen. A "mods" menu will appear, and you can add mods that you've created or subscribed to by selecting the [+] option and then selecting a mod. Adding and removing mods from an existing save game Navigate to the game in the save select screen and select the [ Mods ] option. From here you can add additional mods using the [+] option or remove mods using the [delete] option. You can also reorder mods via the [move] option. This controls the order in which the mods are loaded. Some mods may need to be loaded in a specific sequence in order to function correctly.

Example mods

We're also releasing two example mods today. Translation Kit Translation Kit is a mod that makes it easy to create custom translation mods of Hack 'n' Slash. When you launch a game with Translation Kit active, it will scan over all of the scripts in the game using the game's disassembly tools and identify text that's displayed in dialogs and cutscenes. It will then ask you for the name of the translation mod you want to create and will build a directory tree of .translation files that contain string overrides for the code and a mod script that loads these translation files and applies them to the game. ebg13 ebg13 is an example mod created with Translation Kit that applies the ROT13 transformation to all of the translated strings.

What kinds of mods can I make?

Hack 'n' Slash supports very extensive modification. You can overwrite any script in the game's file system and add any kind of content that you want. You can change the base game or create your own game using the engine. You can even use the game's built-in disassembly tools to programmatically analyze existing code and make modifications to it. This is how Translation Kit works. All mods have a patch script written in Lua that is responsible for applying its modifications to the base game. This script can overwrite existing files or add new files to the game's file system. Patch files are initially generated with some documentation on the methods your mod has access to, but we've also decided to ship the main game engine scripts in plaintext so that you can dig around yourself and learn how the engine works. The content scripts for the game itself are still precompiled so that you can't spoil anything just by browsing the directory structure, but you can now browse the core engine scripts directly.

• Right click on Hack 'n' Slash in your Steam library and click "Properties."
• Click on the "LOCAL FILES" tab.
• Click "BROWSE LOCAL FILES" to launch an explorer window.
• Navigate to Data/Scripts.
• Open up any .lua file to see the code for that component.

Please note that this does not mean that the engine is open source. We still retain all rights to the engine code. We're simply trying to make it easier for you to make interesting mods!

Creating a mod

You can create a new mod from the "MANAGE MODS" menu on the save select screen by selecting [ Create new mod ]. You then choose a name for the mod and the game will create a stub patch script for you at: /Hack 'n' Slash/Mods//Patch.lua The stub file will have some documentation comments at the top describing the functions you have access to from the patch. You can also clone existing mods and look at their patch scripts to see how they work.

Cloning an existing mod

You can clone a mod you subscribe to in order to figure out how it works or make your own custom modifications. From the "MANAGE MODS" menu, select the mod to open its menu and then select [ Clone mod ]. Please make sure to attribute the original work if you publish a cloned mod!

[ 2014-08-22 16:12:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

Today we're ready to roll out Steam Workshop integration for testing! Details below. Please post feedback in the forums!

Downloading and playing mods

You can manage your mod subscriptions via the Hack 'n' Slash workshop. Subscribed mods will automatically be downloaded when you boot up the game. Starting a new game with a mod Select "NEW GAME" from the save select screen. A "mods" menu will appear, and you can add mods that you've created or subscribed to by selecting the [+] option and then selecting a mod. Adding and removing mods from an existing save game Navigate to the game in the save select screen and select the [ Mods ] option. From here you can add additional mods using the [+] option or remove mods using the [delete] option. You can also reorder mods via the [move] option. This controls the order in which the mods are loaded. Some mods may need to be loaded in a specific sequence in order to function correctly.

Example mods

We're also releasing two example mods today. Translation Kit Translation Kit is a mod that makes it easy to create custom translation mods of Hack 'n' Slash. When you launch a game with Translation Kit active, it will scan over all of the scripts in the game using the game's disassembly tools and identify text that's displayed in dialogs and cutscenes. It will then ask you for the name of the translation mod you want to create and will build a directory tree of .translation files that contain string overrides for the code and a mod script that loads these translation files and applies them to the game. ebg13 ebg13 is an example mod created with Translation Kit that applies the ROT13 transformation to all of the translated strings.

What kinds of mods can I make?

Hack 'n' Slash supports very extensive modification. You can overwrite any script in the game's file system and add any kind of content that you want. You can change the base game or create your own game using the engine. You can even use the game's built-in disassembly tools to programmatically analyze existing code and make modifications to it. This is how Translation Kit works. All mods have a patch script written in Lua that is responsible for applying its modifications to the base game. This script can overwrite existing files or add new files to the game's file system. Patch files are initially generated with some documentation on the methods your mod has access to, but we've also decided to ship the main game engine scripts in plaintext so that you can dig around yourself and learn how the engine works. The content scripts for the game itself are still precompiled so that you can't spoil anything just by browsing the directory structure, but you can now browse the core engine scripts directly.

• Right click on Hack 'n' Slash in your Steam library and click "Properties."
• Click on the "LOCAL FILES" tab.
• Click "BROWSE LOCAL FILES" to launch an explorer window.
• Navigate to Data/Scripts.
• Open up any .lua file to see the code for that component.

Please note that this does not mean that the engine is open source. We still retain all rights to the engine code. We're simply trying to make it easier for you to make interesting mods!

Creating a mod

You can create a new mod from the "MANAGE MODS" menu on the save select screen by selecting [ Create new mod ]. You then choose a name for the mod and the game will create a stub patch script for you at: /Hack 'n' Slash/Mods//Patch.lua The stub file will have some documentation comments at the top describing the functions you have access to from the patch. You can also clone existing mods and look at their patch scripts to see how they work.

Cloning an existing mod

You can clone a mod you subscribe to in order to figure out how it works or make your own custom modifications. From the "MANAGE MODS" menu, select the mod to open its menu and then select [ Clone mod ]. Please make sure to attribute the original work if you publish a cloned mod!

[ 2014-08-22 16:12:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

In-game menu There’s a new in-game menu that opens when you press [noparse][Esc] on the Keyboard or [Start] on a 360 controller.[/noparse] It lets you adjust the (new!) user settings, and provides the single most requested feature: a way to quit from inside the game! System settings The game now automatically stores system settings. These include keyboard control mappings, fullscreen/resolution settings, and audio settings. Keyboard controls You can now remap the keyboard controls from the game menu. Remap to your heart’s content! Be careful when remapping the buttons for “Select” or the navigation controls - all changes are immediate. Settings From the settings menu you can toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode. The game automatically saves your windowed resolution as you drag the window, and always runs at display native resolution when you go fullscreen. From here you can also control your audio settings, adjusting either the master volume or the volumes for the individual sound categories. Optimizations and compatibility This build contains a lot of optimizations and compatibility fixes. It addresses several issues with load times and crashes to desktop on certain hardware. One major change we made is that we now store textures using a different compression method. We initially shipped with PNG files for all in-game textures, not because this is the ideal choice for a game, but because it allows you to poke around the game’s directories and easily look at or mess with all of the the game’s textures, which was important to us. Unfortunately, PNG’s are a kind of bad choice for a runtime format because they decompress to 32 bit-per-pixel textures in memory, so - for example - a single chunk of background terrain takes up 4 MB in video memory. This is a killer in terms of memory foot print and, on some systems, performance. Typically modern games load textures into one of the S3TC compression formats. This is a much more efficient texture representation that modern graphics cards support natively. We switched to doing this for Hack ‘n’ Slash and it makes the game run a lot more smoothly across a wide array of hardware. Unfortunately, using one of these formats makes it harder to mess with the files on disk. We even experimented with loading the PNG’s and then converting them to an S3TC format at runtime, but this increased load times too much on older systems. We want to make sure it's still possible to mess with the textures with off-the-shelf tools, though: the most efficient texture file format that our engine supports is proprietary to Double Fine, so we didn't use that. Instead, Hack ‘n’ Slash’s textures are stored in the DDS format, which is not incredibly common, but you can find plugins for graphics programs and converter tools online. Furthermore, DDS files are not optimally compressed on disk, so we actually take an additional step of gzip compressing the textures to make the disk footprint as small as possible. So you’ll see that the texture files end with the .dds.gz extension. But tools like gzip and imagemagick will let you convert to an easier-to-edit format. The game engine still supports (and prioritizes) PNG files. You can still a create a PNG with the same name and put it in the same directory as the texture you want to override. It will automatically override it. We'll also continue to support PNG files when we roll out Steam Workshop support. The good news is that, even though the patch is large, the game will now take up substantially less disk space on your computer! Bugfixes Lots of small content bugfixes went into the game with this build. More to come! Please keep the bug reports coming! We’re cataloging and addressing them as quickly as possible.

[ 2014-05-31 00:59:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

In-game menu Theres a new in-game menu that opens when you press [noparse][Esc] on the Keyboard or [Start] on a 360 controller.[/noparse] It lets you adjust the (new!) user settings, and provides the single most requested feature: a way to quit from inside the game! System settings The game now automatically stores system settings. These include keyboard control mappings, fullscreen/resolution settings, and audio settings. Keyboard controls You can now remap the keyboard controls from the game menu. Remap to your hearts content! Be careful when remapping the buttons for Select or the navigation controls - all changes are immediate. Settings From the settings menu you can toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode. The game automatically saves your windowed resolution as you drag the window, and always runs at display native resolution when you go fullscreen. From here you can also control your audio settings, adjusting either the master volume or the volumes for the individual sound categories. Optimizations and compatibility This build contains a lot of optimizations and compatibility fixes. It addresses several issues with load times and crashes to desktop on certain hardware. One major change we made is that we now store textures using a different compression method. We initially shipped with PNG files for all in-game textures, not because this is the ideal choice for a game, but because it allows you to poke around the games directories and easily look at or mess with all of the the games textures, which was important to us. Unfortunately, PNGs are a kind of bad choice for a runtime format because they decompress to 32 bit-per-pixel textures in memory, so - for example - a single chunk of background terrain takes up 4 MB in video memory. This is a killer in terms of memory foot print and, on some systems, performance. Typically modern games load textures into one of the S3TC compression formats. This is a much more efficient texture representation that modern graphics cards support natively. We switched to doing this for Hack n Slash and it makes the game run a lot more smoothly across a wide array of hardware. Unfortunately, using one of these formats makes it harder to mess with the files on disk. We even experimented with loading the PNGs and then converting them to an S3TC format at runtime, but this increased load times too much on older systems. We want to make sure it's still possible to mess with the textures with off-the-shelf tools, though: the most efficient texture file format that our engine supports is proprietary to Double Fine, so we didn't use that. Instead, Hack n Slashs textures are stored in the DDS format, which is not incredibly common, but you can find plugins for graphics programs and converter tools online. Furthermore, DDS files are not optimally compressed on disk, so we actually take an additional step of gzip compressing the textures to make the disk footprint as small as possible. So youll see that the texture files end with the .dds.gz extension. But tools like gzip and imagemagick will let you convert to an easier-to-edit format. The game engine still supports (and prioritizes) PNG files. You can still a create a PNG with the same name and put it in the same directory as the texture you want to override. It will automatically override it. We'll also continue to support PNG files when we roll out Steam Workshop support. The good news is that, even though the patch is large, the game will now take up substantially less disk space on your computer! Bugfixes Lots of small content bugfixes went into the game with this build. More to come! Please keep the bug reports coming! Were cataloging and addressing them as quickly as possible.

[ 2014-05-31 00:59:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hack 'n' Slash is Now Available on Steam Early Access!

Hack ‘n’ Slash is a puzzle action game about hacking -- reprogram object properties, hijack global variables, hack creature behavior, and even rewrite the game’s code! The game is in Early Access so that you can help us improve it before it’s finished. And remember, the only way to win is not to play...by the rules!

[ 2014-05-06 18:03:00 CET ] [ Original post ]