Hey all! Today marks the one year anniversary of our initial release on Steam! To celebrate it, we’ve released a brand new interlude - formerly known as “shorts” - for free! Titled Nal Sidian, this five-page story delves into the vortigaunt Dreyfus’ past, and explores his relationship to the nefarious Combine. Our plan is to release a free interlude between every chapter going forward. Now integrated into the app’s chapter selection menu, these pieces are very much fundamental to the complete story.
Speaking of the app, this update also introduces some much needed tweaks and updates! We now have improved language support, and we’ve released Chapter 1 and the first interlude (The Charnel House) for the new languages as well! You can now read through the first section of the comic in Czech, German, Spanish, and Turkish! We will be bringing these languages to Chapters 2, 3, and Nal Sidian in the coming months, as well as continuing to add more languages to our selection. Brazilian Portuguese is next and should be out within a few weeks, with more to come!
The translations took us a bit longer to get out the door than we’d have liked, largely because we no longer had the original files for Chapter 1 and had to reletter it, as well as the looming size of Chapter 2. Our original plan was not to release the language updates incrementally, but we feel it’s important for our superb team of volunteer translators to see their work on the page! We’ll be forging ahead with the monster that is Chapter 2, and working towards a point where we’re releasing new chapters simultaneously (or at least nearly simultaneously) across all of our supported languages. The app also now includes integration with our soundtrack, so that you can easily listen to Chris’s ambient tunes while reading. We have a few other features in the pipeline (including controller support) and there will be more updates to come on the app soon as well!

What about Chapter 4?

We’re well over halfway through production on Chapter 4: A Spy in the House of Long, and we could not be more excited about how it’s coming together. Taking place directly after the Pit debacle, 4 sees Sejal Rajani’s Opposition, Governor Moore and Major-General Long come head-to-head in a dramatic confrontation on the edge of the city, whilst shedding new light on the Citadel and the mysterious being wrapped around it. We have always suffered from being slow storytellers, and we’ve been very aware of that over the last several months. With that in mind, Chapter 4 really digs deep into New Franklin and applies pressure to the different groups competing for power. It’s visually stunning, too. The team - which brings back Kristian, Ivan, Ester and Javier - are operating at the top of their game, and between them have created a gorgeous, moody, almost noir-like atmosphere for what’s shaping up to be the best chapter yet. We’re super excited about it, and can’t wait to share it with you all.

What else?

The first draft of Chapter 5 is complete, and we’re hoping to push that into production before the end of the year, for an early Spring release. 5 closes the arcs established in Chapter 3, and kicks off a new trajectory for Chapters 6 and 7 in (we think) spectacular fashion! Key word: “Masquerade”. And of course, you can expect a third interlude between Chapters 4 and 5. As many of you no doubt already know, Marc Laidlaw released a veiled synopsis for Half-Life 2: Episode 3 last month. Ross wrote about it in a blog post titled "Doctor Breen is Dead". It was oddly cathartic. Keep an eye out for more blog posts in the future. You might also have noticed that Chapters 2 and 3, as well as the soundtrack, are now on sale! In light of the soundtrack integration, now might be a really good time to pick that up if you haven’t already. For now, though, please enjoy Nal Sidian and let us know what you think of both it and the app updates. And of course please let us know of any errors you might come across, there are a lot of changes that took place in our app! Until next time!