Hero-U - December Update

Next to wishing us all some nice days in December, the Hero-U team also have a new release window for the game and development status updates.

After some initial challenges, we opened Alpha testing to a few backers in August. Since then we’ve invited 100 top backers and have 30 testers exercising the game.

And boy have they been exercising! The testers have reported over 1000 bugs and suggestions for design improvements, most of which we’ve been able to address. We’ve also addressed several hundred automatically reported issues with the game.

This has, as expected, been quite a challenge for our small team. Every day we face the question, “Do we keep polishing the parts of the game we’ve been testing, or spend the time getting the next section ready for testing?” For the most part, we’re making sure there are no story-wrecking problems anywhere in the game.

What we didn’t expect was the passion this small group of playtesters has applied to playing Hero-U. Many of the suggestions have been incredibly insightful, causing Lori to rewrite and add entire sections of dialogue to improve the game flow and responsiveness to player actions.

Our next steps will be to open the testing process to all 340 backers who supported us at an alpha test level. Once all of the game content is ready to test, we’ll open the floodgates to over 4000 Beta testers. At each stage, we raise the stakes for the team as we continue to develop the final sections of the game while fixing and improving the parts that we thought were “done”.

We’ve made a great amount of progress thanks to the team and our testers, but there is still quite a bit to be done before release.

…

The adjusted schedule:

• Catacombs about Jan. 15
• The Dungeon early in February, with the endgame added in late February.
• Meanwhile, we’ll improve game settings, add additional sound effects, implement Steam achievements, and finalize the opening cinematic.
• Game release - between March 15 and April 15.

I would love to say a flat “March 15 is the release date”, but as we’ve seen, many things can happen during testing that can cause us to step back and spend extra time reworking an area of the game. Still, March 15 is our target release date.

More information.

Nice to see this one coming together.

Estimated Delivery Oct 2013.

Wow.

Yeah, that's why I never kickstarter anything now. Instead I early access once a game has been reviewed several times by the early adopters.

I'm going out on a huge limb and predicting this won't be out by March.

Originally Posted by Carnifex
I'm going out on a huge limb and predicting this won't be out by March.

Of course they'll ship in April.
But anyway, they're in the polishing phase and obviously at full speed. Every week in beta will make this game better.

If the kickstarter had of been pitched like it has ended up I would of backed it in a heartbeat. Instead they pitched something that looked like a rogue-like. I will definitely buy this at some point though as the QfG series holds a special place in my heart.

I gave up on this one…but maybe there is still hope?

Originally Posted by rune_74
I gave up on this one…but maybe there is still hope?

It's definitely coming next year.

That's part of the reason it has taken so long. Not sure how it will turn out given the number of disruptions they had during developement and cash crunch. I hope it works out for them but I think it will be tight.

Originally Posted by bjon045
If the kickstarter had of been pitched like it has ended up I would of backed it in a heartbeat. Instead they pitched something that looked like a rogue-like. I will definitely buy this at some point though as the QfG series holds a special place in my heart.