A few days ago my idle twitter-browsing was upended:

Huh. I just checked the Greenlight page for @zarfeblong's Hadean Lands... I somehow missed the news that Valve had started the GL process (@andetkaihetera)

Really? I, um, missed the news too. But a quick glance at the HL Greenlight page showed:

This game has been Greenlit by the Community!

The community has shown their interest in this game. Valve has reached out to this developer to start moving things toward release on Steam.

I was off at Balticon, so I couldn't dig into the matter right then. (Which is why everybody else announced the news before me.) But now I'm back and more or less caught up on life. So here's what I know.

If Valve reached out to me, I missed it. The Greenlight page says "Updated: May 12 @ 7:24pm", and the voting stats stop on May 11. So I guess the game was officially greenlit two weeks ago and nobody noticed until this weekend? O the embarrassment.

The site now offers me a link to "become a Steamworks partner". So I have begun that process. I have filled out a great many forms' worth of tax and banking info, the usual excitement. (And the usual confusion about whether I should use Zarfhome LLC's EIN or my personal SSN, a question which I will never, ever get right on the first try.)

Bureaucracy aside, what does this mean for Hadean Lands? I wish I could just push a button and launch the thing onto Steam. But no -- not that simple.

Here I will take a break from the ever-burbling stream of IF and Myst news, and talk about Javascript optimization.

You could say it's relevant because it came up in a Quixe bug report. ("I tried loading Emily Short's Counterfeit Monkey.... Load time dropped from 29.4 seconds to 10.4 seconds...") IF interpreter improvements are a high priority for me -- particularly if they could be big speed improvements for a fairly small code change. Double-particularly if they imply I've had crappy Javascript code out there for years.

Whoops.

Joe Johnston, who co-hosted various Gameshelf TV episodes with me back in the day, has lately taken to independently publishing adventures and play aids for Labyrinth Lord, a modern revival of circa-1980 tabletop role-playing games (and which all but states on its website that it’s essentially first-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with the serial numbers filed off). You can find them for sale at RPGNow; some are pay-what-you-want PDF booklets, while others make print editions available as well.

His latest work includes Tranzar’s Redoubt, which challenges the players to break into a wizard’s hideout and rob him blind in grand fantasy-grindhouse tradition, as well as How to Hexcrawl, a guide to running traditional fantasy adventures in sprawling outdoor settings rather than familiar square-grid dungeons. Both feature excellent, original artwork by Dyson Logos.

(This news comes via Joe’s own gaming blog, Tabletop on the Desktop.)

We noted last fall that Cyan had started developing a Myst TV series with Legendary Television. Yesterday this jumped forwards a notch:

• Hulu Lands 'Myst' Drama From Legendary TV (Deadline)
• After decades of efforts, Myst TV live-action show to debut on Hulu (VentureBeat)
• (confirmed by Cyan's Twitter account, with a cute photo of the Cyan and Hulu people yanking the big Riven lever)

The show is not yet greenlit. The deal seems to be that Hulu looks over the script, and if they like it, they'll start production on a season of TV (not just a pilot episode). The script is by Evan Daugherty, who is best known for the screenplays of Divergent and Snow White and the Huntsman.

(I've said snarky things about SWatH, but it was memorable and visually striking, at least...)

The producer will be Matt Tolmach; executive producers will include Larry Shapiro as well as Cyan's Rand Miller and Blake Lewin.

We still don't know anything about the script itself. The Deadline article says "It will explore the origins of the island of Myst from the game where a man wakes up on a mystery island..." But it's not clear if that represents any sourced information or if the journalist is just googling.

As a footnote: don't read the comments. I was half-amused, half-disgusted to find that there's a television equivalent of the "what about Android?" guy. It's the "what about Netflix?" guy. Since these articles are about games and TV, both species show up.

I am happy to announce that Hadean Lands can now be purchased directly from the Humble Store. (It's currently listed under New Releases, though of course it will scroll off that page pretty soon.)

This is the same version that's been available all along. (No, I have not done a bug-fix release. I know, it's getting to be time...)

The Humble Store is fixed-price, not pay-what-you-want. The win is that 10% of proceeds go to charity.

You can still buy HL through the pay-what-you-want widgets on my web site. It's still in the Adventure Gamers Store. And of course the iOS version is still available from Apple.

(Have you voted for Hadean Lands on Steam Greenlight?)