Hello everyone!
It’s time for another HAIGLA development update — and this one is a pretty big milestone.
The demo is nearing completion
The HAIGLA demo has now reached its final stage of development.
The main content is complete, and most of the remaining work is focused on testing, localization, bug fixing and smaller improvements before release.
Rather than creating a very limited preview of the game, I wanted the demo to properly represent what playing HAIGLA will actually be like.
Because of that, quite a lot of the systems planned for the full game are already present in the demo.
What will be included in the demo?
The demo will feature a substantial section from the beginning of HAIGLA, introducing the hospital, its strange new reality and several of the game's main mechanics.
You'll be able to explore using HAIGLA's wheelchair movement system, encounter anomalies and entities, solve environmental puzzles and discover how observation can change the world around you.
The demo also includes:
• Two control modes - standard keyboard & mouse controls, or an alternative mouse-only control scheme
• Full settings menu - including graphics, audio, controls, accessibility options and key rebinding
• Multiple languages - localization will be available directly in the demo
• Collectible system - discover hidden NCIAP collection cards throughout the hospital
• Observation mechanics - looking at certain objects can reveal, alter or trigger elements of the environment
• Exploration and puzzles - investigate the hospital and figure out how to progress through its increasingly strange spaces
• Save and checkpoint systems - the demo uses the same underlying progression systems being developed for the full game
More languages are coming
Localization has expanded considerably during the final stages of development.
The HAIGLA demo is currently planned to support:
English
Japanese
Brazilian Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
German
Simplified Chinese
Polish
Some of these languages were added after looking at where people discovering and wishlisting HAIGLA were coming from.
It means a little more work before release, but I really wanted these languages to be available from the demo itself, rather than added sometime later.
The Steam page has been updated
You may have also noticed that the HAIGLA Steam page looks quite different now.
The store page has received a major update with new capsule artwork, new screenshots, rewritten descriptions, updated features and localization information.
The goal is to make the Steam page much more representative of what HAIGLA has actually become during development.
From building to finishing
HAIGLA originally began as an experiment around unusual character controls and limited mobility.
That small experiment gradually turned into a much larger psychological horror game about exploring a hospital copied into a distorted world beneath reality.
There are still bugs to find, translations to check and plenty of small things I want to polish.
But the demo itself is there.
Thank you to everyone following the development of HAIGLA, wishlisting the game, commenting on posts and sharing your thoughts.
More soon!
— THOs Dev