HeroCraft Prototype Pieces

It's definitely been a while since I have written a post, mostly because I've had few updates worthy of posting about. That and writing articles for EBSCO has kept me busy. So far I've written and published three, with a fourth finished and pending review and the final currently in progress. The topics I've written about are overviews on the Halo series, the Sims series, World of Warcraft, and video games in the years spanning 2000-2009. My current topic isn't actually an article, but more of a research piece on the top-selling games in each year of the aforementioned decade. I digress.

The title of this post is about HeroCraft Prototype pieces! My friend Dennis, a 3D artist, created some designs for the game pieces and had them printed. While this isn't a huge achievement of any sort, it was a nice break to discuss a little art for the game. Dennis modeled up an anvil and sword for the Red characters, a bag of loot and crossed daggers for the Green characters, and a stack of spellbooks with a magic orb on top for the Blue characters. Since this was a test run we weren't sure what the size constraints were; most of the smaller pieces didn't make it out of the acid bath. Lesson learned. Here's a picture of three dice and the half-complete Red and Green tokens. Once I sand them down and paint them they'll replace my bottle caps for playtesting!










My last post (way back in July) discussed some changes I wanted to make to the combat mechanics. After implementing them I also decided to make another suite of changes regarding the Experience Shard portion of the game. Prior to the update the only purpose of Experience Shards was to level-up your Attributes. While definitely a necessary part of the game, I wanted to expand on their use as a currency and also increase the ways players can customize their characters. To this end I revamped all of the Boons (Followers, Items, and Spells) to include ranks. Players can now spend their Experience Shards to upgrade their Attributes, weapons, armor, spells, and party members. I still have a few updates to make before I can playtest again but I am very excited to see how everything falls into place. Or breaks. It's a toss-up every time you make a change in game design.