Half-Life: A Place in the West News

Hey gang,



As you may have noticed Steam is hosting a sale on its soundtracks from now until February 14th! This is in part driven by Valve’s desire to decouple soundtracks from their base games, allowing them to possess their own store pages. Once we’ve completed the remakes of Chapters 1 and 2 we’ll be doing the same for both (and any future) volumes of our soundtracks.

In the meantime, they are both available at a discount – check them out here and here! Both volumes were lovingly crafted by the hugely talented Chris Jolley, who has written a blog post over at our website on the creative process.

The track listings are as follows:

VOLUME I
1) New Franklin Part I (2:33)
2) Amb I (1:33)
3) Modern Major General (4:44)
4) Missing Children (New Franklin Part II) (4:28)
5) Amb II (1:38)
6) The Ubdisha Part I and II (6:50)
7) This Winter (2:49)
8) Amb III (1:36)
9) Ghosts (4:14)

VOLUME II
1) The City Dreams (3:55)
2) Kempinski and the Abyss (5:04)
3) The Pit (5:21)
4) Dr Cloven (3:48)
5) The Opposition (3:25)
6) Checkpoint Alpha (4:30)
7) The Abyss Stares Back (4:50)
8) Control (Long & Sejal) (4:42)
9) The Scientist & The Artist (Leyla & Hadley) (3:27)

We hope you love these tracks as much as we do. They very much embody the world of our story.

We’ll check back in with you all soon as the remakes gather in pace – Chapter 1 is complete, and 1.5 is soon to follow. And they’re looking mighty special.

Mike and Ross

Hey gang!

It’s been a spell since we last touched base with you all, so we feel an update is in order. First off, it’s the Lunar New Year event, which means all chapters, including both soundtracks, are now on sale – check ‘em out

A lot’s happened since Halloween, not least the surprising announcement of a brand-new Half-Life game. If you'd told us back in October that come March we’d be playing a VR prequel called Alyx we’d have called you crazy, but here we are.



As for us, we’ve made some pretty serious headway on our plans to remake the first two chapters of A Place in the West. At the time of writing we’re on the verge of concluding production on Chapter 1: Following Portents. If you’ve been following us on Twitter or Instagram you’ll know we’re really excited about this one, and we can say with absolute confidence we made the right decision to go back and remake it. Next week sees production move onto the first interlude – The Vortessence – and once that’s done we’ll be moving straight into Chapter 2: A Very Modern Major-General.



The remake of the second chapter will be far larger than our standard 30 pages. We considered keeping it in line with the others, but given the original incarnation of chapter 2 was 50 pages, and we want to make sure the story has room to breathe, we'll instead be producing a whopping 48 pages for it! We'll be sharing production on social media as we move forward with it.

A reminder that if you purchase the now non-canonical Chapter 2 before the remakes release, you will get the remade copy for free on release day. For anyone who purchases the new Chapter 2 after that, you will also receive the original version.



So, when will you see them in full? We don’t want to commit to a date yet, but we’re confident they’ll land around June of this year, meaning there will be plenty more Half-Life after you’ve properly digested whatever Valve has in store for us with Alyx. It’s a really exciting time for the brand, and we’re looking forward to what it means for the wider Half-Life universe as a whole new generation of gamers discover these amazing games. Games you can now discover for free.

We’ll see you up ahead.

Mike and Ross

Hey gang,

I just wanted to give a quick update on a couple tech things that have come up within the last few days!

As you may have seen already, MacOS Catalina has come out and dropped support for 32-bit mac applications. There are also some other changes under the hood where apps require Signing, now, which is why A Place in the West is currently listed as incompatible with Catalina - we have a 64-bit mac build, just not the signing.

I updated my mac to start testing my fix for this, and in doing so, unexpectedly ruined my ability to build the application for other operating systems. Our current build process uses Wine to create the executables for Windows and Linux, and Wine - as a 32-bit program - is not compatible with Catalina. And, of course, this came up at the same time as a bug where one of the achievements is not accessible.

SO, here's the plan.

1. I'm going to set up a different mac with the ability to compile the app, and get out a fix for the achievement, ideally on Saturday.
2. Once that is dealt with, I am going to fast-track an app rewrite that I've been planning for a while. The bulk of what we have I wrote 3 years ago(!) and I can make improvements across the board.
3. Once that is all resolved, I'll turn my attention back to a proper fix for Catalina.

I would like to also take this opportunity to remind everyone that A Place in the West installs do come with the PDFs for each chapter in your Steam Apps / A Place in the West directory.

If you are someone who uses Catalina and are outraged at this process of events, please do let me know! I am not sure how many people have actually upgraded. And please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, and I very much appreciate your patience during this time.

Best,

Michael

[EDIT]
Update Nov 2nd: The issue with the achievement should now be fixed!

Happy Halloween, everyone!

First off, we’d like to extend our sincere gratitude to our entire readership. We were a little (read: very) worried as to how the news of Chapters 1 & 2 being remade would be received and are genuinely taken aback as to how positively it was embraced. Honestly, we expected to be booed out of the room (admittedly, we still can be), so seeing readers not only accepting of the move but actively supporting it was incredibly heartening to witness. So – thank you, from both ourselves and the real talent behind the scenes, our awesome art team.



You’ve likely noticed the Halloween Sale is now live, and so, as is our custom, we’ve discounted every chapter as well as both soundtracks. If you haven’t checked out the latest releases, now is a great time to do so. As we’ve stated before and will continue to state until the day it’s delivered, if you purchase the now non-canonical Chapter 2 now or at any point prior to release, you will receive the remade copy for free on release day and retain the old one.

As for said remakes, they are progressing very well indeed. We don’t have too much to show at present, but here’s a little something from the first page – Ellen, looking anxiously, no doubt, to see if any purple space jellyfish are hiding under her bed…



We’ll keep updating our Twitter with progress on production and look forward to a proper update come Christmas.

Thanks for reading,

Michael & Ross

We hope you all enjoyed Chapter 6: The Prisoner.

Monday marks our third anniversary of being on Steam! We’ve come a very long way since we initially launched A Place in the West and we’re proud of what we’ve produced, and more than that, incredibly grateful to all of you who have stuck by us and followed us on this journey. We’re here because of you, and that means so very much to us.

We have been very quiet this summer regarding what is coming next for us, and I imagine many of you are expecting the next interlude, or even some indication of when you might see Chapter 7: The Dark Between The Stars. We wish we had dates to give you for those, but we have some rather different news. I’ll just get this out of the way:

We’re remaking Chapter 1: Following Portents and Chapter 2: A Very Modern Major-General. And with those remakes, introducing new interludes for them: 1.5 and 2.5, respectively.

We understand that may not be the news you wanted to hear, but it’s something we’ve wanted to do for over two years now. We consider it to be of paramount importance that we remake them now rather than later. For a comprehensive explanation as to the whys and wherefores, I humbly point you in the direction of the latest blog post, where Ross has gone very in depth on a lot of our feelings.



The short version is simply this: The first two chapters are something we wrote 6 years ago, and were the first thing we ever wrote and produced. We’re hugely grateful to the efforts of Heath Heil and Rachel Deering for bringing our vision to life, but the writing and composition of those chapters no longer represents the quality we’ve come to expect from our work.

And I know you might be thinking, “Won’t you feel the same way about 3-5 in a few years?” And, well, no. There are always going to be things we want to improve upon and change, it’s true, but Chapters 1 and 2 fall far beyond what we find acceptable. Chapter 3 is when we began to hit our stride, to settle into our world and characters, (both tonally and thematically) and to really get a handle on things like dialogue and pacing. As we get further in, the alienation and disconnection from Chapters 1 and 2 to everything else is only growing wider, and we can’t ignore it any more. You all deserve better, and so do feature readers.

The new chapters & interludes, totaling some 80 pages, will be released in the Spring of 2020. The first chapter and both interludes will continue to be free. As for Chapter 2, if you have already bought it, you’ll get the remake for free. If you haven’t bought it yet, you’ll still get both. The older versions of Chapters 1 and 2 and The Charnel House interlude will all continue to be available in the app, under the “Extras” section. We obviously don’t want to take them away from people who have read them, and believe that there is probably some educational value. I expect some of you will find it interesting to compare them side by side.



To give you a sense of what we’re aiming to accomplish with the remade chapters, we’re releasing a new prologue today! It’s ten pages in length (as compared to the original, which is only three pages!) and is designed to better introduce readers unfamiliar with Half-Life to Valve’s world. It comes courtesy of the amazingly talented Kristian Rossi, Ester Salguero, and Javier Puga. It’s free. It’ll be in your Steam directory. It’s on the app. Or you can just go read it and download it here. Your call.

But whatever format you choose, do let us know what you think. We’re always aiming to be as transparent as possible about production, and your feedback is essential. It helps us to improve and hopefully make better comics for you to enjoy.

On that note, we apologise for not having spoken about this sooner. It’s not always easy to know what the right balance is between “making the thing” and “talking about making the thing”. But we know this will likely come with some push back. After all, we’re taking nearly a year out to remake chapters you’ve already seen, delaying the continuation of the story for some time. We know it’s something you might not all be interested in, and that’s why we wanted to wait until we had more things ready, such as the blog post, such as the prologue. We want you to be able to see the difference, and hear why we think it is important. We are incredibly excited by this, and hope you’ll be on board for it.

We’ll be listening very closely to what you all have to say, but we also hope you can trust us to do the best thing for A Place in the West. We’re all feeling really energized by the new scripts for 1 and 2, and we’ll be sharing as much of the production process with you as we can (hopefully more than we have done in the past). We hope that when you do finally get your hands on these chapters, you’ll feel like we do:

That this is the best thing for the story. That it strengthens the narrative we’ve constructed. That it adds to, rather than detracts, from what comes after it. And that it does these characters we have become so very fond of justice. That we’re creating the story they deserve.

Thanks for reading – in every sense.

Mike and Ross