Hiveswap



Hiveswap is an upcoming video game set in the Homestuck universe. The story involves a human girl, Joey Claire, who is sent to the planet Alternia after she finds and accidentally activates a mysterious device in her attic. To return home, she must work with a group of troll rebels to prevent the activation of a doomsday weapon that threatens both of their worlds.

Hiveswap will be released for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux as a four-part episodic game, with the first installment scheduled for release in mid-2015. The game is the first project from What Pumpkin Studios' game development division in New York, which took over development following the departure of original developer The Odd Gentlemen.

Production history
The project was announced by Andrew Hussie on September 4, 2012, and a Kickstarter campaign was launched to raise $700,000 to fund its production. The funding goal was met after just 32 hours; when the Kickstarter concluded on October 4th at 2:26pm EDT (18:26 UTC), the final total was $2,485,506 from 24,346 backers. Hours later, What Pumpkin launched a PayPal option for pledging that ran for two weeks and closed on October 18th. With the additional funds from the Paypal campaign, the total funds raised surpassed $2,500,000, however an exact figure was not given. However, it likely isn't that much higher, seeing as Hussie still used the value "2.5 million bucks" to refer to the entire funds.

Game development was initially scheduled to begin following the conclusion of Homestuck, then projected to end sometime in 2013. However, as the initial pre-development work began, Hussie learned that the game's release would have to be delayed significantly unless he began to write and plan it as soon as possible. As a result, Hussie put Homestuck on hiatus after finishing Act 6 Intermission 5 so he could devote his full attention to working on the game. The hiatus lasted about two months, beginning on April 14, 2013, and ending on June 12.

Andrew Hussie has mentioned that the adventure game was one of the projects he would be working on during the gigapause which started following the October 16th, 2013 update, and in the January 24th, 2014 news post, he mentioned that, during the first 3 months of the gigapause, he had been focused on writing for the comic and adventure game.

The Odd Gentlemen issued a press release on their Tumblr on June 21st, 2014, revealing two pieces of concept art and one character model.

However on the 30th of October the same year, Hussie released stating that the game would 'continue production in-house' under What Pumpkin Studios, with the aforementioned Odd Gentlemen press release having since been removed. 14 pieces of concept art were revealed as well as three gifs of a new character in the game. In this update Hussie also revealed the plans for another game and to release the games episodically.

Trivia

 * The game exists for the sole purpose of keeping wiki editors busy.
 * The concept art for the circus area resembles the art style of some of Andrew Hussie's earlier work, such as And It Don't Stop and Whistles.