Hi everyone, We are incredibly excited to release the second chapter of the fan-made comic Half-Life: A Place in the West, titled “A Very Modern Major-General” today as DLC. We sincerely apologise to readers for the unexpected delay last month, but at the 11th hour we were taken by surprise when Valve granted us use of the Half-Life license. This means that, starting with the second chapter, A Place in the West will now move into a paid DLC model. The hopefully minimal price tag is intended to alleviate our production costs - for further elaboration on this point, do scroll down. We cover it quite extensively! We’d like to thank Valve for the opportunity, and we hope our readers will embrace the change, too. We have also made the first 5 pages of Chapter #2 available for free as a teaser. The app will automatically update to make those accessible. "A Very Modern Major-General" picks up where the first chapter left off - we rejoin Leyla Poirier, Albert Kempinski and the vortigaunt Dreyfus as they enter the strange city of New Franklin. Introducing a host of new characters and fresh intrigues, this chapter comes in at 50 pages and includes 5 new achievements! The second chapter has been the result of a year of work, and has involved several changes to our team. Our artist from Chapter #1, Heath Heil, has stepped back to focus on raising his daughter. While Heath still did the penciling for chapter #2, he was also joined in this chapter by Ivan Miranda on inking, Ester Salguero on colouring, and Javier Puga for lettering. We also had the pleasure of working with Jiedi Chen and Daniel Gerhard last summer on some additional art which makes its appearance in this chapter. So, please, go and read it, and as always, let us know what you think.

What are we working on now?

I’m continuing to champion our work on translating the comic and working with some very talented people to make the comic available in more languages. Because of the amount we are translating (80+ pages!), we unfortunately don’t have anything to release quite yet, but I can assure you that we’re working on getting these updates prepared. We still have a considerable amount of lettering to do, but my hope is that by early Summer we’ll have at least the following languages released: Brazillian Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, Spanish, and of course the Chapter #2 updates for Russian. This is not by any means all of the languages we’re working on - we have others which are in varying states of completion. This also does not mean that we are not still looking for more people to help out. Many of the languages we’re hoping to support only have one person working on the translations and it’s very difficult to do since there is both a lot to be done and you don’t have someone to bounce ideas off of or get feedback from. If you’re interested in helping, please do reach out! Additionally, I’m still making improvements to our application. I have finished a large rewrite of it that will allow for better language support. You’ll be able to preview this effort in today's update! Simply go to the options menu and select Russian from the new Languages option, and you'll be able to get a taste for how we imagine it working going forward. The other major features that I have lined up for the immediate future are adding the option of using a two-page view, the ability to save your place, controller support, and hopefully finally(!) getting windowed mode to work correctly on Windows. As always, please let me know if you find any issues with the latest build. Meanwhile, while our artists are on a well-deserved break, Ross is working on writing the script for Chapter #3, which brings us to another announcement…

Restructuring Chapters

Those of you who have listened to the Commentary we made about the creation of Chapter #1 know that we try to be pretty transparent in talking about the mistakes we have made. This process has been a huge learning experience for us, and we continue to learn more and more every day. So, with that in mind, let’s talk about another mistake we made. When we first decided on six chapters, it was before we had even written the script for Chapter #1. We had a rough outline for the overall story, and figured we would flesh out each chapter as we came to it and they’d have varying page lengths. This sounds reasonable in theory, but has also resulted in the situation where we’ve been planning on Chapter #3 to be 80 pages. While this is a great chunk of story, the big problems with this are that it means you all would have to wait at least a year to read it, and it also runs the risk of burning out our artists since it becomes a massive project. These are both things that we find unacceptable. Instead, what we’ve decided to do is retool our idea of Chapters: A Place in the West will no longer be 6 chapters, but will be “some number of chapters that fit what we’re trying to do”. Each chapter will instead be roughly an equal length (~25-30 pages), and we’ll release multiple chapters per year… like an actual comic. This does not change the amount of content or story, so don’t think we’re just trying to milk it for length - it’s simply a restructuring of how much we release, when we release, and how we approach chapters. We want to get more into your hands sooner, and we feel like this is the best way for us to do that. In our prior approach, the plan would be that we’d work on Chapter #3 for all of 2017 and you’d get it sometime Q2 of 2018. Instead, now the plan is that you'd get Chapters #3 and #4 later this year, and Chapter #5 in Q2 of 2018. Because this leads to some uncertainty as to how many chapters we’ll have, I’ve changed the app slightly to no longer give the names or numbers of future chapters. To give you a rough estimate, it will be something around 13 chapters, with the plan now to release 3 per year, instead of 1 large chapter. Again, it doesn’t particularly affect the total amount of content, nor the time that the entire run will take, but is primarily a change in distribution.

Going to paid DLC

We know that this decision will be polarizing and we want to talk openly about why we’ve decided to make the comic’s later chapters be paid DLC. The simple reason is, it goes along with having smaller chapters as a way that we can get the comic to you faster. Making comics is expensive - all told, the production of Chapter #2 alone was over $25,000. While this isn’t a big number for a studio, it’s important to remember that this has been funded entirely by Ross and myself from our personal finances. This has increased the time we’ve needed to take off between chapters while we build back up our savings before starting production again. With researching in the industry and looking at our own download numbers for Chapter #1, we’ve tried to find a price point where the comic doesn’t feel expensive, yet also gives us the opportunity to be able to speed up production. As previously stated, future chapters will be in the 25-30 page ballpark, in keeping with the traditional comic book chapter format. Chapter #2, on the other hand, is 50 pages. Whilst we do think there is a natural break in the second chapter, we have opted not to split it into two to accommodate the new format, and release the full 50 pages. Future chapters will be the same price, but with Chapter #2 there will be more content, which we think is a nice way to introduce you to the DLC model.

Finally

This is by far the biggest release we've done, considerably larger than our initial launch, and we want to apologise once more for our failures at meeting the announced deadlines or keeping up with communication. We do read everything that is posted or emailed to us, even if we don't always reply, and your feedback is instrumental in the future of Half-Life: A Place in the West. Please do let us know how you feel about the changes, and most importantly, Chapter #2!