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Hero-U Demo

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I just tried having a go at the Demo. Considering the way things have been going with this project, I wasn’t expecting much, yet my immediate reaction was utter disappointment, it’s like the Cole’s have completely lost their touch. It just doesn’t look very professional, but rather like something you’d expect from a freeware. The background art is somewhat decent, I guess (though I really don’t like the isometric view), but the character art and animations looks, quite honestly, terrible, and this must be the prime example of a game where backgrounds and characters doesn’t blend well together. I backed Hero-U as a thank you for their games of past, but when I did, I expected them to be able outclass the graphics of the average freeware. I honestly don’t understand what happened here, the concept art shown in the beginnig of the campaign looked amazing! Whoever decided to ditch that and instead do this isometric… thing, should not be allowed to make decisions. The music sounds allright though.

The Demo is for backers only for now. Anyone else tried it and had a different opinion?

     

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I have several thoughts on this that I probably shouldn’t utter publicly.  Suffice it to say that I am breathing a sigh of relief that I chose not to back this one.

     
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I assume their lack of fulltime development team is shining through? I’m just guessing, as I’m not a backer in this, so I’m basing it all on the feeling I got from their public updates.

     
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Dag - 18 November 2013 02:17 PM

Anyone else tried it and had a different opinion?

No.  Thumbs Up

The player’s task is to find one particular item in one room. But I was unable to use the few objects which I had picked up. I could open my inventory, that was it. Right-click, left-click, click-and-hold, nothing worked. I was still wondering how the hell I was going to separate the item in question from that other thingy when the game had already done it for me! Mission accomplished. End of demo.

I laughed once. “No! Not the comfy chair!” Sue me. I’m a Monty Python fan.

 

     

See you around, wolf. Nerissa

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Dag - 18 November 2013 02:17 PM

I just tried having a go at the Demo. Considering the way things have been going with this project, I wasn’t expecting much, yet my immediate reaction was utter disappointment, it’s like the Cole’s have completely lost their touch. It just doesn’t look very professional, but rather like something you’d expect from a freeware. The background art is somewhat decent, I guess (though I really don’t like it, nor the isometric view for that matter), but the character art and animations are, quite honestly, terrible looking, and this must be the prime example of a game where backgrounds and characters doesn’t blend well together. I pretty much only backed this as a thank you for their games of past, but when I did, I didn’t expect them to come up with this visual monstrosity that would turn me completely off after 5 seconds of gameplay. The music sounds allright though.

The Demo is for backers only for now. Anyone else tried it and had a different opinion?

Your description is exactly why I didn’t back it in the first place, it didn’t look like it had much chance of being very good. I know it’s not good to judge entirely on appearances, but I’m happy I did now because it looks like I was right.

     
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tomimt - 18 November 2013 04:39 PM

I assume their lack of fulltime development team is shining through? I’m just guessing, as I’m not a backer in this, so I’m basing it all on the feeling I got from their public updates.

Let me just say that I’ve seen freeware projects of SIGNIFICANTLY higher quality, which also lacked a full time development team, among other things.  It’s basically a one room demo, the same that’s visible in the recent teaser trailer, and you can click on a few things, but the interface doesn’t seem to be fully programmed yet and there is at least one major bug that makes it impossible to actually finish it if you accidentally do a certain thing.  And as others have said, the graphics leave a lot to be desired.

     
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Lambonius - Please post info about that “major bug” so we can fix it.  There is a bug report forum on http://www.hero-u.net, but here is also fine.  Don’t worry about spoilers - The demo is intentionally super-easy and the “puzzle” will change in the actual game.

We agree that the animation is unsatisfactory, and we are switching to an entirely different approach, as well as new character designs.  We’ve also dropped the programmer who spent four months on that animation system.  However, personally I think it’s “not bad” rather than “awful”; I would not mind playing a game with the current animation if the story was good.  The new animation is a big step upwards, but still not AAA game quality; our budget is $550K, not $25M.  (By the way half of that $650K is out of our pockets.  The Kickstarter campaign covered half of the total development cost.)

Sorry you didn’t like the demo.  This is one reason we hate to show unfinished work; people react as though it’s the game.  In the “real” Hero-U, backgrounds will look slightly better and the characters much better.  The user interface will be very close to what it is now except for improvements such as the cursor changing over an interactable object.  So the feel of the game will be similar to the demo, but looking a bit better. If that isn’t good enough, then it won’t sell, but it will be the best we can accomplish on 1/100th of a AAA game budget.

Still, it’s sad to hear that people here dislike our prototype room.  Dag, give it time - I think almost all adventure games look and play badly in the first 5 seconds or minutes.  It’s only when you get into the story, characters, and puzzles that they become fun.

@Lambonius: Ref “one room demo”, that’s all this is intended to be.  It is a technology test and a full vertical slice of the game.  We will release more tests, including a combat simulator, as we go along.  I can tell you that every game we have ever worked on sucked badly at the beginning.  The first Hero’s Quest artwork would have made you puke; the art in this demo is 100x better.  But through a lot of time, hard work, creativity, and polishing, we’ve eventually managed to turn game dross into gold… with *every* game we’ve ever made. Not many designers can say that.

Lori and I are putting two years of our lives, and committing to loans equal to the Kickstarter funding, so that we can make this the best game we can create.  You chose not to put in even $20 to help us with the game; you have no skin in this and your criticism is empty.  I will be interested in playtesting your game when you decide to create instead of criticizing.

     
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Please post info about that “major bug” so we can fix it.  There is a bug report forum on http://www.hero-u.net but h,ere is also fine.  Don’t worry about spoilers - The demo is intentionally super-easy and the “puzzle” will change in the actual game.

If you muck around with the vase (I ended up taking the vase when I noticed this bug), you will not be able to interact with anything afterwards. You can walk around, but right clicking on objects that previously brought up the options UI no longer works after this.

I didn’t pledge to this project myself (but I never pledged to any project until Bolt Riley, and I don’t really play games nowadays aside from testing the ones I work on. I personally don’t like the concept of Kickstarter), but for what is a well contained demo, I am a little surprised this bug wasn’t picked up on during testing. There was also a little bit of glitchiness with the pop up interactions UI (I believe that occasionally it would pop up from the wrong object; the best thing to do is click on all sorts of random objects everywhere quickly). It would have also been nice to see the inventory UI working, but I suppose this is still in progress.

I agree that graphics aren’t everything (e.g. I really liked Castle of the Winds, which was actually a roguelike), but they do make the first impression on whether people decide to purchase your game or not, so hopefully you are able to get them to a standard which people are happier with. I think it is most important getting it consistent in style between the environments and the characters, so that nothing sticks out awkwardly.

Hopefully you will be able to get the right sort of talent on board to make this game look and play out to high quality.

     
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Ah, thanks for the info.  The actual bug is that the vase interaction menu should be dismissed when you take the vase.  Since it is no longer in the scene, the animation action fails on it when you then shake it.  I’ll let the programmer know so we can fix it in the game.

     
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Mr. Cole, I don’t know anything about developing games, I’m just a player who found the demo disappointing. (BTW, you should have told us in the update that the inventory does not function properly.)  Why waste your valuable time and money on an intentionally supereasy demo with a non-puzzle that will not even appear in the game, when you are “in the process of a major upgrade to Shawn’s appearance and animation”?

You say you “hate to show unfinished work; people react as though it’s the game”. Well, that’s what a demo is for: to give us an impression of the game. If you found aspects of this demo unsatisfactory, why invite us in the KS update to show it to family and friends.

Sorry to be so blunt. I’m looking forward to the improved version.


     

See you around, wolf. Nerissa

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Karlok - 19 November 2013 04:47 AM

Mr. Cole, I don’t know anything about developing games, I’m just a player who found the demo disappointing. (BTW, you should have told us in the update that the inventory does not function properly.)  Why waste your valuable time and money on an intentionally supereasy demo with a non-puzzle that will not even appear in the game, when you are “in the process of a major upgrade to Shawn’s appearance and animation”?

You say you “hate to show unfinished work; people react as though it’s the game”. Well, that’s what a demo is for: to give us an impression of the game. If you found aspects of this demo unsatisfactory, why invite us in the KS update to show it to family and friends.

Sorry to be so blunt. I’m looking forward to the improved version.

This is probably one of hte best examples why I dislike Kickstarter or crowdfunding. No one understands how game development works, so when a demo is given out, its damning when there is a bug. Look at SpaceVenture, everyone here riled up with anger until I stated ‘its just a demo/beta/alpha’. These will be buggy, its apart of development. Investing money in a project accepts the possibility of failure and all the roadblocks that come with traditional development. Its like my boss yelling at me for something that looks shitty even if I just spent 10 minutes on it and not even close to finishing.

     

Stuart Bradley Newsom - Naughty Shinobi || Our Game: Shadow Over Isolation

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Monolith - 19 November 2013 01:36 PM

This is probably one of hte best examples why I dislike Kickstarter or crowdfunding. No one understands how game development works, so when a demo is given out, its damning when there is a bug. Look at SpaceVenture, everyone here riled up with anger until I stated ‘its just a demo/beta/alpha’. These will be buggy, its apart of development. Investing money in a project accepts the possibility of failure and all the roadblocks that come with traditional development. Its like my boss yelling at me for something that looks shitty even if I just spent 10 minutes on it and not even close to finishing.

It’s better to say something even for the price to come as rude or ignorant or even completely wrong while there’s STILL a chance for your voice to be heard and to change something, then to stay silent until the game is released.

     

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diego - 19 November 2013 01:45 PM

It’s better to say something even for the price to come as rude or ignorant or even completely wrong while there’s STILL a chance for your voice to be heard and to change something, then to stay silent until the game is released.

I disagree. There is a difference between disgruntled customer who doesn’t understand that things will go wrong in development and a person looking for problems in hopes of helping the dev team to fix it. Being rude, disgruntled, apathetic is just wrong and makes the rest of the community to looks up to crowd funding look bad. There are plenty of projects where develops chose publishers over crowd funding because of that cold hard fact that its harder to work for an uneducated community than cold hearted business person who’s just looking to make money.

     

Stuart Bradley Newsom - Naughty Shinobi || Our Game: Shadow Over Isolation

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I think in SpaceVentures case it was beneficial though, as the user feedback got the Two Guys to rethink the UI and the feedback it gives to the user, especially in the swipe gesture interactions. And the scrutiny that was given to the demo helped them find a lot of bugs and issues that they hadn’t noticed before either.

     
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Being rude doesn’t help, but giving constructive feedback that is honest, direct and detailed can be very helpful. When releasing a demo, you should note to your players that yes, it isn’t the complete game, and things are still in progress (though many will treat it like this isn’t the case regardles). And yes, there may be bugs but as a dev, you really hope there aren’t and you caught them all before releasing.

That said, ideally, a demo should represent the final product in all areas as much as possible: art, animation, interface, voice acting, and so forth.

So, here’s my feedback as a backer and as a dev:

I was hoping for more after a year of development and the amount of money being put into the game. A bug isn’t a deal-breaker—those happen, it’s been pointed out, it’ll get fixed, we’ll all move on with our lives.

For me, the biggest disappointment was the animation. Namely, that there’s hardly any, and what’s there is very stiff and didn’t look that great (it’s been noted elsewhere that the sprite changes size between animations, looks like he’s limping when walking at an angle, etc). Also the *only* animation on the main character is the walking—no bending, no turning, no expressions (not even in the portrait of his face that appears when he has lines), no interactions with objects in the room. When an objects moves, it does so on it’s own. The drawer opens without Shawn touching it, the vase falls without being touched by him or with an animated reaction to it breaking. There’s more animation on the angry owner of the house and his bunny slippers than there is on Shawn (and those animations also aren’t that good).

I wasn’t a big fan of the sprite art style, either. It did clash somewhat with the backgrounds. The fact that the entire interface wasn’t in there was unfortunate—the inventory doesn’t work, and the stats sheet, etc, aren’t filled in.

I did like the backgrounds, speaking of, the parallax scrolling, and the nostalgic style. The music was nice as well. It would be great to have voice-acting in the game, too, to bring life to the dialogue, particularly in its humorous moments.

The Coles have posted that the animation system is being redone, however, so I am hopeful for improvements the next time we see a slice of Hero-U, and I certainly wish them all the best as they keep working on the game and look forward to the final product.

     

Katie Hallahan
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KatieHal - 19 November 2013 02:46 PM

I was hoping for more after a year of development and the amount of money being put into the game.

wellll, heres the thing about that. In a recent update they said the following: their initial estimate was that the game would cost 550k to make, but they set the goal at 400k because they wanted to be sure the number was obtainable. Apparently only after the funding was over did it occur to them that theyd have just 270k after rewards and fees.
In short: mistakes were made.
And I think much of this year was spent adjusting to that and coming up with a plan to move forward.

     

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