Hi there! For this blogpost I’ll assume that there are some people in the world who are anxiously awaiting the release for HA/CK Remastered, and explain what’s taking so long.

So, what’s taking so long?

First, the good news - the meat and bones of the game I consider finished, but various bug fixing and playability improvements are taking longer than expected. Shoutout to the awesome people helping me playtest this release before putting it out for the huge masses of potential players to scrutinize.

I am looking forward to making the release as polished as I possibly can, adding many playtester and community suggested fixes and improvements in the game. For example, playtesting with people not familiar with puzzle games showed, that while the later levels were intuitive to understand, the new and reworked tutorial still was a bit daunting, therefore that is an area I still have to work on, providing hints to the player, making sure not to spoon-feed the answer.

Another thing, which is proving to be a real challenge to implement well, is an in-game resolution selection option. I’m sure everyone will appreciate the freedom of choosing their preferred screen mode, and this is one step forwards to decoupling completely from the Unity launcher window, relying on it solely for control rebinding for now.

Speaking of new gameplay features - playtesting showed that softlocking a level in HA/CK is easy and frustrating, nobody likes restarting a level. As a result, I introduced a new element to the game. Every cube now has a parent platform, to which it’s related cube can be transferred back by hacking it. This solved many softlock situations, and, in one case I observed, opened an opportunity for completing a level faster, though that I will leave for you to discover.

Thank you for reading, have a nice morning/day/evening/night and consider following me on Twitter, if you are interested in HA/CK or my ramblings! https://twitter.com/gampixi_LV

HA/CK Remastered will be coming out on Steam as soon as it’s ready - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1002540/HACK/