Hello!
We wanted to use this rare moment where we pop our heads out from out of the decade spanning production tunnel and connect with all of you directly! Both those of you who have been patiently following along as well as those who have just found us.
We have this new trailer that premiered during the PC Gaming Show Most Wanted to show as a life sign but also we wanted to signal that we are about to enter the final phase of actively showing this game around until we release it early next year. There will be more and more material surfacing in the coming months and then you'll finally get to play!
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We get a lot of beautiful correspondence from people wondering if we're still around but while we read it all we have trouble keeping up with it because we've just been digging away at finally finishing this tale that is Harold Halibut.
Our last trailer was released 2 years ago and we tagged it "coming soonish" (to great confusion as we went on to learn.) What we meant to signal is that we were going into wrapping things up but couldn't quite tell when the coming "soon" moment would happen as we were just spontaneously cut off from our funding at the time. We didn't want to promise anything but also wanted to let you know we're still here. We have since managed to find the funding to finally finish the game and assemble a team to help us bring it to you.
There will be plenty of reflective material telling you about the details of all the things that happened during production coming out in the future but for the time being we wanted to give you a small update about some of the highlights from the past year:
Zurich 2023
The Museum of Design Zurich curated an excellent exhibition about Game Design earlier this year and they helped us show some of the things we built for the game. It ended up being a very successful show, not just aesthetically but particularly in educating about the diversity in game design as well as its cultural worthiness. Our game's exhibits came in handy to give an awareness of all the little things that are considered, thought about and created by game designers. In the end physical assets bring this to mind more clearly than virtual assets which of course take the same effort but are less easily displayed.
Here are some pictures:
gamescom 2023
Together with our marketing partner popagenda we set up a little stand at gamescom this past summer to show a preview of the game to a handful of journalists. Usually this tends to be a fairly sober thing in the brightly lit, loud exhibition center, trying your best to guide people through the game. But we ended up having some really beautiful, emotional moments with the people who played the game. We were also visited by one of our game's translators which was amazing because they all worked remotely.
Here are some example articles from Gamereactor and Multiplayer.it.
Sound and Music
While we set up a key musical theme and worked on the fundamentals of sound design a long time ago this year we really got to dive into these two essential layers of creating. You can catch a glimpse of the game's original soundtrack in the trailer. It involved a huge array of instruments that venture from classical orchestration mixed with analog synthesizers all the way to small wooden robots that sing together. Highlights for sound design included recording retired computer equipment like floppy disc drives and layering weird instruments like metal tubes suspended in water with tuvan throat singing.
Translation
We worked really hard on polishing the game's translation. A point easily overlooked by the English-speaking community is all the available subtitles. While we didn't have the resources to do voice acting in each language we did get this massive game translated into a total of 9 other languages. Since the game is so narratively focused it was important to get each one right, which we did together with all the amazing translators who work for our localisation partner.
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Thank you for your patience and speak to you again fairly soon. Until then, make sure you have the game wishlisted!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/924750/Harold_Halibut/
-Slow Bros.