You approach the moonlit shack, tiny animal-bones crunching beneath your boots. The man sitting by the fire outside looks more dead than alive: haggard, ancient, decayed.

A question comes unbidden to your lips. “What happened to you?”

“Indie game development,” he whispers in reply.

A Swarm of Small Improvements

I finally finished HOMD’s main story on Monday! Every last branch, epilogue, easter egg and ending, in the bag. I’ll work on adding the text to the game next week. All 90,000 words of it! (Bringing HOMD’s total word-count up to ~400,000, or two Moby Dicks).

Since then, I’ve been spending my time working on a variety of nice little features, improvements and bugfixes. (As well as getting rather drunk with the Failbetter crew to celebrate the release of Zubmariner, which you should buy now if you haven’t already.)

For example! I’ve added a few little environmental details to the walls in different areas of the House:

 

 

And I’ve added some juicy rewards for achieving a high Reputation in any of the various cities. With a high enough Reputation, you can start moving in aristocratic circles:

And last but not least, you can now alter text size, tailoring HOMD for the reading experience you prefer:

(I’ve also rooted out some boring miscellaneous crash bugs, initialized some uninitialized variables, and made the game keep track of quests in a way that’s hopefully much clearer to the player.)

Crew Character

The crew are the heart and soul of HOMD, along with the House itself. Meet Penpusher, one of your possible Recordkeepers.

Penpusher is one of the carchar, the shark-men who were stolen by the House from some aquatic world. Unlike his big toothy brethren, however, Penpusher likes nothing more than to settle down with a good book. He’s an excellent and enthusiastic Recordkeeper, but you should keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t dabble too recklessly in the occult…

Reminder! HOMD is now on Steam. Add it to your wishlist! Mention it to friends! Sing its praises in an unholy tongue!