Harold Halibut news & patch notes

- Fixed bug with colliders in Chapter 5 that were introduced with the last Patch

Dear inhabitants of the FEDORA I, we have discovered something super cool: The first patch for Harold Halibut is now live! We focused on fixing some of the most prominent bugs, like the Forschergeist Achievement and Harold being stuck at certain interactions, alongside some more tweaks and graphical polish. For detailed information, please have a look at the changelog. We hope these fixes improve your overall experience of the game. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33550286/b1e94d186f67b31452f1782f4f290b929442943d.jpg Changelog:

• the Forschergeist achievement wasn't triggered despite collecting all notebook pages, this is finally fixed now - assuming that you had already all notebook pages up to the epilogue, it will be enough to just load the epilogue checkpoint and collect the ones during epilogue. Once you have aquired the last one, the achievement/trophy will pop
• When loading a checkpoint without exiting the game, the notedbook pages weren't reset, so there could be duplicated entries etc. This was only "visually" the case (internally the game behaved according to the state saved in the checkpoint). This is fixed now.
• the "Chris watches TV" notebook page could easily be missed, we made it easier to get it now.
• the subtitles weren't displayed during 2 montage cutscenes towards the end of the game, which is fixed now.
• Dialogue options for the password-door & the second "letter-reading" with Buddy weren't correctly translated and invisible when using a language with non-latin characters. This is now working as intended.
• fixed a rare bug where Harolds arms could get stuck at the microscope or sample.
• fixed a potential blocker that could be triggered when going straight to Weeoo without talking with Mareaux and obtaining the final task before.
• fixed some issues with skipping dialogues
• collider adjustments
• tweaked Dead Zones in Doppeldecker & RFZF to reduce motion sickness
• minor visual polish
• further minor fixes and improvements

An important info to the Slow Bro Achievement: The Timer doesn't count in menus (which is why the playtime shown by steam and your actual playtime will likely not match). In case you are at the end of the game and the achievement hasn't triggered yet, you can just stand around (or sit in the cozy Lounge until you get your achievement :) We are thinking about ways to improve upon this as this confused a lot of our lovely players :) We are already working on the next patch which will also contain a surprise for our Italian players ;)

Dear fishies and friends, We are excited to announce that we are a part of the Official Selection of LudoNarraCon, a digital festival celebrating narrative games! The event takes place May 9-13, and is hosted here on Steam 🐠💨 We have prepared a livestream for this ocassion, where Onat, the game's director is going to play through the first 1,5 hours or so of the game and share some details about the game itself and how we made it with you ☝️🤓 The stream will be set to loop for the duration of LudoNarraCon from 9-13 of May if you can't make the start time. 📍Harold Halibut Steam page and on the official LudoNarraCon stream ⏱️May 9, 10am PDT Don’t forget to follow us on our social channels not to miss any updates: X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Youtube. Blugulugl Symbo ❤️ {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33550286/6c28b1ece3c86e29b8686e1e4e61f6c85230489a.png

It all started on a rainy night in 2010 with a group of friends and a dream… Making this game wasn’t easy! We used over 10kg of clay just making our various puppets and over 50kg of plaster for our sets. Even just Harold’s room underwent many iterations through the years: So we’re excited to be here, finally releasing Harold Halibut. You can finally go get the game and play it for yourself with a 15% limited time discount. It took over a decade’s worth of dream-chasing, so please enjoy discovering the world we built for you. 🚀 PS - We made a brand new trailer to celebrate us launching the game! It features some of the nice things people have said about Harold Halibut so far, so give it a look here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG-qawEdl7c

Hallo! After 10 years of development, we’re so excited to share that Harold Halibut has a launch date. You can expect to play our game on April 16! That’s in less than three weeks! You can check out our trailer here - we made it for the Future Game Show Spring Showcase, and it shows some new scenes that hint at the game’s story. If you are interested in Harold Halibut and have not had time to wishlist in the past ten years (it happens to all of us), please consider wishlisting to get a notification on our release date! https://store.steampowered.com/app/924750/Harold_Halibut/

Devs get unsuspecting friends to play the demo for the first time with them

Devs get unsuspecting friends to play the demo for the first time with them

Hallo! Big news today as we just put out our first official Harold Halibut demo!!! 10 years of crafting puppets and sets, 3d scanning and game-making leaves us really excited to finally share a glimpse of the game in anticipation of the big release this year. You can play it right now, it covers roughly 1.5 hours of the very beginning of the game, some people have needed 3 to get through :) It’s a bit of a tease because even though the demo is fairly long it ends right where the game starts to really pick up! It's also a larger download size because we wanted to keep the full 4k quality! We also opened a TikTok account recently where we'll be showing a bit more of the behind the scenes process so go give us a follow there as well! Please Wishlist the game if you haven’t already so you’re sure to be in the know about the big release, we’re giddy to find out how you like it! https://store.steampowered.com/app/924750/Harold_Halibut/

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! 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: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33550286/9790048096655896f31e9c55dc80b6e8161f936a.jpg

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. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33550286/a653a99d31ef8cfb2ec05215fd5dce94bc361f4c.jpg 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. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33550286/d013768862dae33a54bd38e15aa7bdb727337f80.gif ___ 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.