Hero-U: Developer's Blog

You know that Spring has sprung when Winter withers and Daffodils dally daily with boisterous bees. It’s the sensational season of fabulous flowers flowing in the blowing, blustering breeze. There’s no snow so go enjoy the show… it’s a Spring thing. Have a Spring fling!

But what has this got to do with games? Well, if Spring has sprung, then Summer will soon sizzle. Summer Daze at Hero-U is on its way. For next Summer, that is. Games grow slowly.

Summer Daze is a interactive adventure tale set the semester before Shawn finds his way to the Hero University. The Summer session is almost over and the Harvest Festival is approaching. Somebody has to be in charge of making sure the festival is a success – whether they want to or not.

You get to play as either a Rogue or a Wizard who is assigned the task of running the festival. There are other students at the school who may or may not help you. You need to find ways to recruit them to your team. It’s all about finding friends, fixing a festival, and having fun.

Daze of Details

The initial game design has begun on the project. Our animator Al Eufasio set the style and designed all of the characters. We’re going with an elegant 2D illustrative style with a bright palette and tone that fits this lighthearted story. Artists John Paul Selwood is creating the backgrounds and the character closeup “talkers” for each emotion. Programmers Cidney Hamilton and Judy Feng are turning our Composer tool into a general purpose game input tool. This time we are using the Ink scripting language with Unity to turn Composer scripts into the game. We have another type of composer – musician Paul Korman – creating the music and soundscape for Summer Daze.

So we’re off to a great start.

Summer Daze has the choice of two main characters – Tilly Appleberry or Ifeyo Kinah. They are very different people. Tilly is a carefree Rogue who gets through life with a twinkle in her eye, a grin on her face, and a talent for mischief. Ifeyo is a serious Wizard student who loves to study magic.  Each main character will interact with a unique cast of characters and face very different challenges to put on the Harvest Festival.

We’re focusing first on Tilly’s tale. We want to have Tilly’s game fully designed and programmed before the end of this Summer – just in time for a fall Kickstarter to help fund the rest of the project. That will include Ifeyo’s story and other features depending on how much we raise.

May Play

We will do a Play through of QG3: Wages of War on Saturday May 4 from 6 pm to Midnight PDT (starts at 1 am UTC on 5 May). Roberta Vaughan will again be our host for a night of games, contests, and prizes. Join us for the Live Stream! See how well (or poorly) we play our own games. Count how many times we manage to kill our unfortunate hero.

We have a variety of prizes for the contests. A big thanks to Julia Minamata, Bruce Brenneise, Al Eufrasio, Jim Ferguson, Himalaya Studios, Brandon Blume, and Simon Melkman for providing prizes.

How well do you remember your Quest for Glory trivia? We’ll put that to the test.

The Musical Maus

Maus Merryjest has recorded Rogue to Redemption’s Aeolus singing his love songs. Here’s his version of “Katie.”

Be sure to join our May 4 Play-through on YouTube. We hope to talk to you there.

We have just released Version 1.5 of Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. This is a small change in nomenclature – We might have called it Patch 5 previously – but it contains some big quality of life improvements to the game.l

Version 1.5 includes:

• Added a version label to the Start Menu, especially for GOG players who do not get automatic updates.
• Fixes to the “pacifist” route against the Wraith King.
• Using the Null runestone against the Wraith King will now behave more logically.
• Thomas can only be given the One and Only Ring once.
• Cleaned up an inconsistency with “Lockpicking” and “Tool Use” in the user interface.
• Improved appearance of the Tentacle Monster.
• Tweaked sound effects and particle effects on monsters.
• Fix combat bug with traps and messages not reporting the same damage amount.
• The Cloaker in the Catacombs now properly registers as magical.
• Only allow Shawn to greet the Librarian once per day.
• Fixes to bulk sales of the Dried Fish and Empty Wine Bottles.
• Tweak to early game quests and sound effects.
• Fix nonsensical tooltips for some late-game monsters.
• Hundreds of typos and minor scripting bugs, pointed out by our players on Steam and on the forums. Thanks, everyone!

Steam and GoG Galaxy users will update to the latest version of the game automatically. If you downloaded Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption from Humble Bundle or BackerKit, you will need to manually download the latest version from that site.

It’s Valentine’s Day, that special day of the year where everyone tries to sell you candy and flowers. It’s the traditional guilt trip for forgetful lovers and slap in the face for lonely hearts. Well, if you are forgetful, we have the perfect gift to give your loved one. If you are a lonely heart, you don’t have to be lonely THIS Valentine’s Day. We want to share the love of games and friends with you.

Valentine Cards

On Facebook, we’ve been sharing Valentine treats for weeks as we posted our Valentine cards to fans. I created 32 individual Valentines with characters from our games. We had a sneak preview of many of the characters from our next game, “Summer Daze at Hero-U,” as well as some of the cast of the upcoming “Hero-U: Wizards Way.”

Valentine Special

This was leading up to our Valentine’s Special. On February 14th at 6pm PST, we will be livestreaming our play-through of Quest for Glory 2: Trial by Fire. This was the second computer game we made for Sierra On-Line. It was the last of the sixteen color, typed-command games in a world where 256 color point and click interfaces were just starting to storm the market. Trial By Fire was retro the day Sierra released it.

The Live Stream on Feb. 14, 2019 on YouTube. Or maybe somewhere else; we’re new to this streaming business. If we get moved, we should be able to post a comment at that URL with the correct place to join the stream.

In addition to the amusement of watching us run away from monsters and listening to us as we wonder who designed this game – and why? – we will be answering questions and chatting along with everyone who joins in the fun. It’s audience participation at its finest. But that’s not all…

Our Master… Mistress of Ceremonies, Roberta Vaughan, will be hosting contests throughout the evening. We will have Trivia questions, Riddles, Guess the Meeps, and a raffle. And what are contests without prizes? We got prizes, wonderful prizes, thanks to many of our friends and fans.

From artists Bruce Brenneise, Julia Minamata, Jim Ferguson, Simon Melkman, and Chris Warren, we have some unique giveaways that are truly special. We have Hero-U gifts, too. And for the grand prize of the evening, we will be giving away a boxed copy of Trial by Fire.

Contest prizes:

A Signed print by Bruce Brenneise

QFG2 scene and map by Jim Ferguson

Custom EGA portrait of the Winner  by Julia Minamata

The QFG1 children’s storybook by Simon Melkman

A Pegasus Ornament by JP Selwood, artist for Hero-U

A Hero-U stein and hat

A Steam code for Mage’s Initiation: Reign of the Elements

Grand Prize – a signed QFG2 Big Box – only donors will be eligible for this drawing

Speaking of boxes…

Beautiful Box

We just got our first copy of the Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption box. Like a Valentine’s candy box, it’s packed full of goodies and treats. We’ve got the Technical Manual, the music and game CD, a letter jacket patch, a new keychain, a Kwirk button, and a Lucky coin. They all look great. These will be sent out to our Kickstarter backers who prepurchased these boxes as soon as we verify the addresses and emails. We don’t want them to miss their prize.

If you didn’t get a chance to preorder these boxes, we will be selling the complete set eventually.

More Magical Gift Giving

Still looking for that perfect Valentine gift for special friends? Himalaya Studios has just released their game “Mage’s Initiation” on Steam. It’s a magical Adventure Game inspired by Quest for Glory. Mage’s Initiation was developed by some of the same people who made the “Quest for Glory 2” full color remake. It has artwork by JP Selwood, our lead Hero-U artist. Give the Gift of Games, and support the good people at Himalaya who want to make good games.

Special Valentine Surprise

What’s Valentine’s Day without a silly love song? And what could be sillier than a song by our resident Rogue to Redemption Bard, Aeolus? So for our extra special Valentine treat, here is a mini-video of “Loving Esme” as sung by Maus Merryjest. You can watch the video here.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!

Last year was a big one for Hero-U. After five years of development and more than six months in Beta test, we finally shipped Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. We did everything we could to make the game great. Our fans loved it. We are very proud of the game. Yay!

However, after the cheering was over, there was a lot more work to be done. Six months after launch, we’re still working on manufacturing and shipping, the art book, hint and strategy guide, yearbook, foreign-language localization, publicity, and much more.

We are continuing to update the game to make it even better and to improve the player experience. Players can adjust movement speed to their liking. The Wraith in the Catacombs is a now a more formidable opponent that can be defeated only by the cleverest and most cunning of Rogues – or by an extremely experienced Paladin with a flaming weapon.

Conference in London

In 2018, we were invited to show off Rogue to Redemption at the Casual Connect conference in London, England. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet with one of our fans in Germany and to do some sightseeing in London.

Halloween Treats

We would never have made the game without your help and support. So to thank you for making this game real, we put on two marathon livestream playthoughs. For Halloween, we played Hero-U for 12 hours straight while we chatted with fans about the game. You can see it on YouTube .

New Year’s Eve

Then, with Roberta Vaughan’s help, we put on another marathon linestream on New Year’s Eve as we played “Hero’s Quest.” During the course of the event , we gave away ornaments, t-shirts, and even a signed boxed copy of the original Hero’s Quest game. You can view that on YouTube. You can watch as we laugh, cry, and die – many, many times. I even rage-quit once – those darn 1990’s adventure games!

2018 Conclusions

Last year was filled with triumphs and achievements, but it definitely had some sobering reality checks. The indie game distributor Steam had a bug in their system that listed us as “Steam is still learning about this game,” and would not let anyone vote Hero-U for “Best Game”. They’ve only recently fixed that after hundreds of developer complaints.

Making Rogue to Redemption was expensive. The two Kickstarters paid about half of the actual costs of developing the game – assuming that Corey and I did all our work for free. Unfortunately sales of the game have not matched our expectations. We have yet to break even or come close.

This does make us question whether we can afford to keep making games like Rogue to Redemption.

You can help by posting about the game on social media and sending your friends to Hero-U.com. Word of mouth (or of the web) is by far the best way to help us make more games. We’ve made it a little easier by reducing the price to $19.99 on all stores. We’re also working on a few foreign language localisations that we hope will help more players in other countries discover Hero-U.

New Beginnings in 2019

Our next game will be Summer Daze at Hero-U. It has a very different art style from Rogue to Redemption because it is a different sort of game. It’s a 2D Interactive Story game set at Hero-U. You will have the choice of which character you want to play as you try to put on the university’s Harvest Festival. Running a festival is harder than it seems, and you’ll need to recruit a lot of help to do it. But it will still be full of fun with plenty of puns!

Hero’s Feast

We also launched our new website Hero’s Feast. This will be an interactive website devoted to the recipes of the world of Gloriana. We want to encourage fans to submit recipes and test the recipes. We’ll have regional dishes from across the world and from the pages of history. Our host, Kalbin, will be happy to help you raise your culinary skills to the next level. Join our Hero’s Feast Group on Facebook.

Be our Valentine

On February 14th, we will hold a mini-marathon Live Stream and chat from 6pm to Midnight PST. We will be playing through Quest for Glory: Trial by Fire in all its original 16 color glory. Roberta Vaughan will be here to host our games, contests, and give-aways.

Prizes, Prizes, Prizes! Compete in our Trivia or Riddle Contest, and you may win a great prize, We’ll give away artwork donated by Jim Ferguson, Bruce Brenneise, and Julia Minamata. We have an amazing QfG children’s book created by Simon Melkman. We have the 2018 Yule Ornament, a Hero-U stein, and a Hero-U hat for the lucky winners.

People who donate to the “Keep Lori and Corey Making Games” fund will be entered into a drawing for a boxed version of Quest for Glory: Trial by Fire. You can donate directly to our PayPal (paypal@hero-u.com). Or you can donate during the event by clicking the link on the video feed.

Special thanks for art prize donations to:

Bruce Brenneise: www.brucebrenneise.com

Jim Ferguson: www.jimfergusonmakingascene.com

Julia Minamata: www.thecrimsondiamond.com

We hope you’ll join us for this special evening. For more information, see our Facebook page.