What Pumpkin Studios is announcing that Hiveswap, a point-and-click adventure game based on the cult webcomic Homestuck, will debut this spring with the first of four episodes for PC, Mac, and Linux. The game's development has been funded with proceeds from a $2.4M Kickstarter campaign completed in October 2012. In Hiveswap, a young human girl named Joey gets sucked through a portal to the alien planet of Alternia. There, she joins a band of scrappy troll rebels and embarks on an epic journey to save the world and find a way home, discovering the true meaning of friendship along the way. This point-and-click adventure has 3D graphics, puzzle-solving gameplay, and an original story spanning four content-packed Acts that will release throughout 2015.

Hiveswap is spin-off of Homestuck (http://mspaintadventures.com) -- an irreverent, 7,500-page webcomic started by Andrew Hussie in 2009 to parody classic adventure games. Though it's based on and loosely related to Homestuckcanon, the Hiveswap adventure game has a completely self-contained story that does not require any familiarity with the webcomic.

"Homestuck itself has always been sort of a mock adventure game, one the reader 'plays' by navigating the story, but what started relatively simply has developed into a huge world with its own lore and backstory," says Hussie. "Bringing all this to an actual adventure game is a natural next step for the license -- one we hope existing fans will love, but that should also appeal to anyone who enjoys the point-and-click style games I grew up playing, even if you've never heard of Homestuck."

Hiveswap is being developed in-house by Hussie's production company, What Pumpkin Studios. The game will be shown to press for the first time at next month's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, with public demos to follow at Emerald City Comicon, Denver Comic Con, and other conventions this spring.

For more Hiveswap details, visit the archived Kickstarter page (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/14293468/homestuck-adventure-game) to learn about the project's origins, or sign up for email alerts (http://hiveswap.com) as the first episode approaches release.

About Homestuck and What Pumpkin Studios

Homestuck is a hit webcomic, created by Andrew Hussie and heavily influenced by audience participation, involving four teenagers who get sucked into a beta version of a computer game and end up saving the universe. The sprawling story is told with static images, animated gifs, Flash animations, and dynamic text across approximately 7,500 webpages at http://mspaintadventures.com, with around 1M daily unique visitors. Multimedia entertainment production company What Pumpkin Studios (http://whatpumpkin.com) creates Homestuck related merchandise and is developing the property's first commercial video game, Hiveswap, for PC, Mac, and Linux.