FAQ

When is Hazard: The Journey Of Life going to be released?

Soon. Creating a game as big as Hazard by yourself takes ages, but it’s not far off anymore. Hopefully in the coming months in 2010.

How much will it cost?

The price will be reasonable, but it won’t be free.

Is there a walkthrough for Hazard?

Not one that I’ve made. Hazard is a puzzle game, and having a walkthrough destroys the point of puzzles. If you can’t solve the puzzles yourself, you’re not going to have any more fun by reading a walkthrough and knowing the answers. A walkthrough for Hazard would also break the “discovery” elements of puzzles and make everything feel arbitrary. Given that puzzles in Hazard are all thought based, not sequence based, once you know how to solve something in Hazard once, you never need to work it out again.

There are a few walkthroughs on YouTube of the demo, though even the people who posted them know that the walkthroughs completely destroy the purpose of the game. The description of one of them (the most correct one) even describes the video as “The easiest (but the lamest too) way to complete the game “Hazard – Journey Of Life” (demo) without getting any experience and the title “journey of life” (I mean, the main point of the game).”

What are the main differences between the UDK Showcase demo and the full release?

Plenty of changes. The UDK Showcase demo only gives you the start of the game, and was a work in progress version. The final release has more content, way more puzzles, extra weapon abilities, far more polish, is more optimised and takes you through the entire philosophical journey.

I have an NVidia graphics card and I can’t play Hazard for long without it giving me a blue screen. Is there a fix for this?

Yes. As this letter I wrote points out, I also faced this issue, and the fix was simple. This is a driver bug, and you need the latest NVidia drivers. You can find them on the NVidia website.

I have the UDK Showcase demo of the game and I need to remap my controls manually. Help?

Go to the UTGame\Config folder, within where you have installed the demo:
    e.g. C:\Hazard - Journey Of Life Demo\UTGame\Config

Find a file called DefaultInput.ini

Make a copy of it, in case things go wrong. 

Scroll about 3/4 of the way down the file, until you find a section that looks like this:

;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
; Hazard Bindings
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.Bindings=(Name="SpaceBar",Command="GBA_Jump")
.Bindings=(Name="W",Command="GBA_MoveForward")
.Bindings=(Name="S",Command="GBA_Backward")
.Bindings=(Name="A",Command="GBA_StrafeLeft")
.Bindings=(Name="D",Command="GBA_StrafeRight")
.Bindings=(Name="LeftMouseButton",Command="GBA_Fire")
.Bindings=(Name="RightMouseButton",Command="GBA_AltFire")
.Bindings=(Name="MiddleMouseButton",Command="StartTriFire | OnRelease StopTriFire")
.Bindings=(Name="Escape",Command="ShowMenu | onrelease CancelExit",Control=False,Shift=False,Alt=False)
.Bindings=(Name="LeftControl",Command="StartTriFire | OnRelease StopTriFire")
.Bindings=(Name="LeftShift",Command="Walking")

Change the keys listed under Name="KeyName" to match what you want your keys to be.

Make sure you change the keys, not the commands.

What are you making next?

Something that is absolutely nothing like Hazard. There may be news on that in the coming months, but it depends on how the prototype is developing for it.