Harold Halibut’s achievements designed to be “attained in one go” as game joins Game Pass

The Harold Halibut achievements are ready and waiting and, after over a decade in the making — and lurking on the horizon of our list of upcoming Game Pass games for quite some time — Harold Halibut launches into Xbox Game Pass today. We’ve gone over the gameplay and story with developer Slow Bros, as well as the story behind making this handcrafted game, and now it’s time to hear from Slow Bros art director Ole Tillmann, who was kind enough to talk us through the Harold Halibut Game Pass experience and the team’s achievement design process.The Harold Halibut achievements actually arrived well ahead of time, but Tillmann has given more detailed info on the team’s design process. “There’s a limited amount of achievementery you can give out, of course, and we had already come up with a preliminary list of things you might receive achievements for. So we put them into a hierarchy and distributed them as best as we could. Then started tossing some out and adding others to then test them in the game and see how they felt. It was also fun to work with localization on how they’d come out in other languages. Especially for me as the person to literally design the images it was fun,” Tillmann continues, “because that did go through a few iterations. In the beginning I had made these vintage casino chips-looking objects that I painted in many different colors… But once we built them into the game we realized how small they’d really always be, which is how we ended up abandoning the chips and replacing them with miniature paintings. That was a fun final task towards the end of production.”

As for what makes for an ideal achievement list — in Tillmann’s opinion, “Ideally they’re well balanced and make for an added layer of gameplay. For example they should make you engage with the world from a new perspective or go to places that aren’t often sought out. Also we tried as best as possible to not make them tedious, but we were limited as we had to tie a lot of them to the story instead of mechanical gameplay. We don’t have mechanically challenging parts to the game or generally a collectible baseline like coins or stars or loot boxes… Generally we tried to make sure they could be attained in one go and by anyone.”

Aside from achievement design, another great aspect to hear about from a developer perspective, where possible, is the experience of bringing their game to Game Pass. For Slow Bros, the partnership with Microsoft to bring Harold Halibut to Xbox Game Pass came about via “a long term conversation,” which was “ultimately tipped over the edge by [their] story trailer in 2021. It was an amazing opportunity… as it provided the finishing funds for production during dire times.”

One of the chief benefits devs usually agree on about Game Pass is the opportunity it gives players to try out new games without having to buy them. This is both a great thing for players, who can try out a new genre without any risk, and for the games themselves, which, if they don’t fit neatly into one category or another or are difficult to pin down with the short official description, will benefit from a wider audience. Tillmann comments on this too. “The game rewards curiosity and we’re looking forward to all the subscribers that are given a low commitment chance to peek inside and then be drawn in beyond that peek. Since we are somewhere between genres, or genre-bending to some degree, we’re also curious if this will attract new people to the narrative and adventure category.”

As for Tillman’s thoughts on the benefit of subscription services like Xbox Game Pass for the industry in general — “It’s a tough call. Generally it’s positive because it’s a source of funding to make games such as ours in the first place. Harold Halibut is our first game and there’s not a lot of places that will provide support unless it means they’re effectively buying out the game with it,” Tillmann continues. “Generally a fairly unconditional source of funding is amazing of course.”

Harold Halibut is out on Xbox Game Pass today. If you’re looking for more info to help you prep for the game, check out our interviews about Harold Halibut’s gameplay and story and on how the team handcrafted this indie adventure game.