We are incredibly pleased to announce the release of Update 1.5, dubbed “The Charnel House”. In addition to containing application updates as the previous updates have, this release marks our first so far that contains additional content since we first launched in late September. We are still on track to release Issue 2 in January, and there will likely be more tweaks to the app in between, but we didn’t want to go for too long without giving you something new and interesting to tide you over. Hopefully this lives up! The Charnel House is a three-page short that focuses on the character of John Moore, taking place a few hours after the events of Issue #1, Following Portents. Pencilled and inked by Heath Heil, it introduces two new members of our team: Ester Salguero (colourist) and Javier Puga (letterer), so it should nicely bridge Issue #1 and Issue #2! This update also includes the following:

New Content

• The Charnel House: A new 3-page short story set in the world of Half-Life: A Place in the West!
• A 2+ hour video commentary about the making of Issue 1, including script excerpts, concept art, and comic pages in various stages of completion (rough sketches, pencils, inks)
• We’ve added a new background menu.
• Dreyfus’s speech bubbles in Issue 1 have all been changed in both the English and Russian to better reflect his alien nature.

New Features

• Six new achievements!
• The credits page has been remade, as our team has grown considerably.
• The options page now contains a volume setting for the background menus.
• The options page now displays all available keyboard shortcuts.
• Added more keyboard shortcuts.
• The zoom range has been expanded for further exploring the detail of the pages.
• Volume and Zoom Settings now save between sessions.
• Sounds for clicks and hovers have been added to the main menu.

Bug Fixes

• Scrolling via the keyboard is now much smoother.
• You should no longer be able to get into a broken state by interrupting animations.
• Background audio should now fade correctly.
• Resolved issue where arrow keys sometimes didn’t work.

Extras

We’ve created a Combine font! This font is derived from the typography around the Combine Adviser’s neck.
You can download the TTF here and use it for whatever your heart desires. No credit is necessary (since we didn’t design the original language), but we’d love to see what you come up with using it! If you make Half-Life fanart with it, shoot us an email at aplaceinthewest@gmail.com or a twitter mention (@halflifecomic) and we’ll include it in a future update.

A Quick Note on Virus Warnings

Please be aware that we have added a plugin to our application called Greenworks which is what the app uses to connect to Steam (since our app is not written in C++ and cannot access the API directly). We only use this for unlocking achievements. There are some instances where Avast will falsely detect a part of this plugin as containing a virus. This has been documented and is being worked on. We wanted to call this out ahead of time because we don’t want anyone getting the idea that there actually is a virus here. If you are in doubt, always take the necessary steps to protect your computer first and foremost. Let me know if this poses an issue for you and I’ll see if we can come up with a workaround in the meantime. I am really hoping to have this resolved before the release of Issue 2.

A Quick Note on File Size

Adding the video commentary has increased the size of the application. Even compressed, the file comes to about 2gigs. This doesn’t sound like a lot when compared to some AAA release titles, but we’ve wanted to keep the app small and accessible, and it occurs to us that this may be too large for some users who may not be interested in the commentaries specifically - especially when considering that we may have commentaries for each issue! We are investigating some other options for handling this, such as maybe treating it as Free DLC. Please let us know how you feel about the size, content, whether it’s something you want more of, etc.

Last thing!

Finally, we benefit enormously from your feedback and do our best to factor it in for future releases so as ever, please do let us known what you think of everything, on either the Steam discussion board or via email: aplaceinthewest@gmail.com. Thank you - and enjoy! We’ll see you again in January for Issue #2.