Happy Tuesday, guys! I’ve got some more exciting publishing news– last one for a bit, actually, but it’s exciting stuff!

Halfway is a turn-based strategy RPG taking place a few hundred years into the future. Humanity has branched out and begun to colonise new worlds and until now, they were alone.

In Halfway, you take control of a small team of survivors faced with a violent invasion onboard the colonial vessel Goliath. As their leader, you will guide them through the dark and cramped corridors of the ship in an effort to reclaim control of your ship.

If you have any hope of surviving, you’ll need to fight for your life, face your fears and outsmart the enemy!

Halfway will be released on Steam and Humble Store next Tuesday, 22 July 2014 for Windows, Mac and Linux with modding support in the form of a campaign editor coming out soon after release. The game will cost $12.99/£9.99 with a -10% launch discount. Go check out their new website and participate in discussion over on their new forums. :)

Key Features

• Tactical turn-based battles are at the core of Halfway. Use cover, position, equipment and skills to your advantage in your battles.
• Unique characters: Your team is formed of unique characters you pick up along the way. Each one of them brings their own story, skills and experiences to the journey.
• Find yourself in the middle of an engrossing story-line. Step by step you’ll uncover the mysterious events that took place and what it means for you and all of humanity.
• Mod support coming soon! Map and campaign editor soon to be released.

Halfway was developed by Robotality– an independent game development studio founded at the beginning of 2013 and consisting of two brothers, Simon and Stefan Bachmann. They’ve worked together for the last year and a half to produce a fantastic (and gorgeous!) strategy game. Check out the launch trailer:

More information:

Halfway Website
Robotality Blog
@Robotality on Twitter

Halfway on Steam

Today’s been a typically busy Monday so we didn’t get around to making any flashy GIFs, but here are a few highlights of the day’s development:

• I’ve been fixing bugs with flying monster behavior, working with kyren to make some big improvements to the Lua entity queries, and playing around with skill balance for small monsters
• Kyren is continuing her rework and optimization of the tile rendering system
• OmnipotentEntity is updating and improving the status effect and character status system
• Supernorn added some new, more military-styled human armors
• Armagon added more microdungeons to improve underground variety
• GeorgeV is still working on some major progression-related art that I probably shouldn’t spoil
• …lots of other bits that I’m sure I’m forgetting. Good night, everyone!

EDIT: Didn’t see Omni’s post when I wrote this so there’s some overlap, but better two posts than none I suppose!

Friday and today I spent most of the day conceptualizing and designing a major change to how Stats and StatusEffects are handled, to make them simplier, data-driven, and lua-capable. I sent it to the other coders for review before I start replacing our current system.

I’ve been kind of out of the loop with most of what’s happening with the rest of the team as a result. Reading through the commit logs, it looks like kyren was doing some cleanup and optimization around how entity lookup queries are handled. Likely as a short brain break because it looks like she’s still tackling TileRendering. It looks like Armagon is adding a bunch of interesting microdungeons for Apex inhabited worlds. And it looks like community member Kawa’s patch to make human hair accessories match undy color was accepted and pushed by Metadept (Thanks Kawa!) And a few other things.