Five years ago, a few of us took over the responsibility for hosting the assets and development efforts on Hero6. We thank you all for your support and wish you the happiest of holidays and a prosperous new year. It has been a wonderful ride so far and we look forward to what lies ahead!
2018
Our focus for the first half of 2018 was organization and revision of our various game design documents. The second half of 2018 we spent maintaining and upgrading the code for our game engine. There are some boring administration activities as well. Those include maintaining our build servers, paying hosting fees, migrating our documents to Google Drive, and ensuring we respond to fans and applicant volunteers.
2019
Instead of only covering our progress over the past year, let us discuss our plans for 2019. For starters, we would like to focus on recruitment specifically in the writing department. Recruitment in that area has proven to be a bit of a sticky wicket in 2018 and we are hoping to break the trend with a strong showing in 2019.
Our goal was never to hack together an adventure game composed of fragments from previous attempts. Instead, we want to provide those assets as a stepping-stone for people interested in gaining game development experience without the overhead of project administration. For Hero6, recruiting is a mix of finding volunteers who want to gain experience and adventure game fans who want to help design and implement new adventure games. What we discovered is there are more volunteers for implementation than design. Despite that discovery, we’ve been very fortunate to have some solid design volunteers over the years and are very close to a tipping point in that effort.
Why Focus on Writing?
Our plan was to complete the design and writing process before starting yet another implementation. That strategy has proven unsuccessful for previous Hero6 efforts and we want to learn from those mistakes. Short of formalizing the remainder of the third act, most of this design is complete and we are preparing our storyboard process.
The storyboard acts as a guideline to help us decide what art assets, story details, and dialogue are still required to complete the game. It also completes our self-imposed benchmark requirement so we can begin working on our new implementation. The new implementation would probably kick off with a proof-of-concept demo. That is more of a plan than a promise at this point, but it is something we received many requests for over the last 5 years.
In the coming months, we will start proactively recruiting a new batch of writers to help us reach this benchmark. Until then, the team is off celebrating the holidays with our friends and families. In the meantime, you can satiate your fandom of all things adventure game by attending a special holiday streaming event this New Year’s Eve.
Shout-outs!
The Classic Gamers Guild is hosting a live streaming event with Lori and Corey Cole of Quest for Glory and Hero-U fame. There will be contest prizes for original Hero-U swag, trivia, and a raffle for a signed big box of Hero’s Quest! The event will be December 31st from noon until midnight (Pacific time zone). Contest rules which air during the live stream event. The event will be available through the Cole’s Hero-U Rogue to Redemption YouTube channel.
Finally…
Thanks as always for following the project, and we look forward to keeping you in the loop. If you want to help out with the game, check out the ‘Help Wanted!’ page—and of course, feel free to get in contact with us at any time.
—Your Hero6 team