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KickStarter Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption - adventure-RPG from the creators of Quest for Glory

NotAGolfer

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So I threw a bag with sleeping powder at that Gog King. But I still want to kill the fucker. Why don't you let me kill him without interrupting combat and playing that stupid victory fanfare again and again, game? Whyyyyyy'*$/"§$)/("

Also multiple choice interactions are a poor replacement for item and icon based puzzles. Still no deal breaker because let's not pretend that the QfG games were that big on puzzle solving to begin with. But this is all still way too brainless with time management and combat being the only minor challenges. Sometimes this feels more like an adventure game book than a real game.

Still not too bad for a nostalgia cash grab.
IGN 8/10

edit:
those pop culture references though
baANF0j.jpg
IkpFpwQ.jpg
:lol:
 
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V_K

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So I threw a bag with sleeping powder at that Gog King. But I still want to kill the fucker. Why don't you let me kill him without interrupting combat and playing that stupid victory fanfare again and again, game? Whyyyyyy'*$/"§$)/("
Yeah, I ran into the same issue. Maybe a bug?
Also multiple choice interactions are a poor replacement for item based puzzles. Still no deal breaker because let's not pretend that the QfG games were that big on puzzle solving to begin with. But this is all still way too brainless with time management and combat being the only minor challenges. Sometimes this feels like more an adventure game book than a real game.
Hear-hear.
 

Flint

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Question about Sea Caves:
It is the spring break and I agreed to help Katie find the treasure. I'm supposed to bring tattooed skull and she is going to find the key. Now she shuns me away from the pirate cave after the barricade, and I cannot proceed otherwise (I don't have sufficient throwing to cross the water, and blowing the hole in the ceiling up does nothing except killing the poor beast). Am I fucked? Is there a way to proceed?
 

fantadomat

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Question about Sea Caves:
It is the spring break and I agreed to help Katie find the treasure. I'm supposed to bring tattooed skull and she is going to find the key. Now she shuns me away from the pirate cave after the barricade, and I cannot proceed otherwise (I don't have sufficient throwing to cross the water, and blowing the hole in the ceiling up does nothing except killing the poor beast). Am I fucked? Is there a way to proceed?
To get past the barricade next to the fish king you have to blow it up with a big bomb. If you are talking about the climbing in the serpent cave,then i don't believe so,maybe you could drop down from the hole that fall on its head. For the serpent:
Also the serpent drops pretty good weapon if you kill him,don't know what it drops if you help him tho.
,if you have problem finding the skull:
It is in the next screen after the serpent cave,there is a hole in ground on the right,you have to tie a rope to the ship next to it.
Hope it helps mate.
 

DeepOcean

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Question about Sea Caves:
It is the spring break and I agreed to help Katie find the treasure. I'm supposed to bring tattooed skull and she is going to find the key. Now she shuns me away from the pirate cave after the barricade, and I cannot proceed otherwise (I don't have sufficient throwing to cross the water, and blowing the hole in the ceiling up does nothing except killing the poor beast). Am I fucked? Is there a way to proceed?
You need to get a red gem inside a skeleton that is tied to an anchor AND the tattooed skull, the tattooed skull in on the room right after the room with the sea serpent. You need to have enough throwing and climbing to walk on the rope over the water. If you don't have enough skill points, you can train some more on the practice room.
 

Flint

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Thanks, bros.
It seems that practicing throwing is the only way to go for me. I blew up the barricade but bitch doesn't let me enter cool ass pirate cave and tells me to go look for skull. Blowing the hole does nothing, you can't use it to go down in the cave. Pretty bizarre, I didn't expect such blatant gating without alternative routes.
 

DeepOcean

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Thanks, bros.
It seems that practicing throwing is the only way to go for me. I blew up the barricade but bitch doesn't let me enter cool ass pirate cave and tells me to go look for skull. Blowing the hole does nothing, you can't use it to go down in the cave. Pretty bizarre, I didn't expect such blatant gating without alternative routes.
If it isn't too annoying, load a previous save before the midterm break and go searching for the tattooed skull and the captain key before triggering Katie's side quest, actually, you can get pretty much get all that is necessary to open the gate before Katie shows up, you will need her blue gem to actually open the gate so you can't open the gate alone and you will need her but you can do all the other steps at your leisure.

Actually, this is pretty profitable if you have high gaming and luck, you can challenge the pirate captain to a game of Poobah and earn a fortune and the items you will need for Katie's quest. I got 1300 Lyra from him, be aware that his bets are really expensive, so if you have very little money, don't bother.
 

MRY

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Continuing my off-the-beaten-path research for my possible Hero-U article. I found this Corey Cole Quora post interesting:
Pre-rendered videos - speed-efficient, memory-inefficient.

On-the-fly-rendered videos: Slow, but memory-efficient.

Today’s home computers and video game consoles are so fast, and optimized for 3D graphics rendering, that the rendering speed is usually not an issue.

Memory is always an issue. If a large number of pre-rendered videos cause the game to need an extra DVD, that’s a real production cost. Loading those assets from a slow device (e.g. hard drive) takes time, so extra memory use costs speed.

In the 1990’s, when computers were much slower and had far less memory, I worked on an ambitious project for Accolade that involved a lot of characters moving around. The in-house-developed graphics engine had trouble rendering all those characters in real time, so I recommended pre-rendering the animation… until I did the math.

Back then we used 256-color graphics, so 8 bits per pixel - one byte. A 2D render of a character might be 80 pixels high and 50 wide, so that’s 4000 bytes. Not too bad. Now make that character walk - 16 frames in each of 8 directions (hopefully enough to fool the eye into thinking the character can walk freely in any direction). That’s 128 x 4000, so now we’re up to half a megabyte. Define 4 other poses per character (running, kneeling, reaching out, etc.) so multiply by 5 to get 2.5MB. Now multiply by 50 possible characters, and it’s 125 MB. That’s without any code, background graphics, etc. The load times for all that would have negatively impacted game play.

The conclusion was that we could not fit all of the characters on the DVD or in memory with all the other stuff needed for the game. Either we needed to speed up the graphics engine by 20X or more, or make major cuts to the number or quality of the characters. I was arguing with the director on the best way to go (I recommended fewer characters) when Accolade cancelled the project along with several others and downsized.

More recently, I used a pre-rendered cinematic for my new game, Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, and it looked pretty good. World of Warcraft uses pre-rendered cinematics for important moments in the game. So that is a technique that is still in frequent use. It’s strong for cinematic cut scenes, but lacks flexibility and takes up a lot of storage space for game play where the game isn’t in complete control.
Looks like most of his Quora stuff is political, but this interested me because it seems a little historically iffy...
 

Boleskine

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I'm a teenage lesbian and I'm very scared about what's going to happen when I die. I've tried forcing myself to be straight and "praying the gay away" but it doesn't work. What should I do?

Corey Cole, Former Libertarian turned Liberal
Answered Jun 29, 2018 · Author has 334 answers and 406.7k answer views

I went through a similar experience as a teenager, when I was a “born-again Christian.” No, I wasn’t gay, but there was something I liked to do by myself in bed that I had been told was strictly forbidden by the Bible.

This became a turning point in my life, as it was plainly stupid that completely natural and normal behavior should somehow be a “sin”. It caused me to completely re-evaluate everything I had been told about life and the Bible.
 

NotAGolfer

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Christians are retarded, news at eleven. What does that have to do with the game though?

I finished the pirate treasure quest after about 5 attempts to squeeze in all the things I forgot to do before day 3 of the midterm break.
This game is incredibly restrictive. Are there even any alternative solutions to complete the same task?
Just to mention one example, why can't I avoid that fight against the Gog King? I wanted to play a more sneaky character but I'm constantly forced to fight. Same for the 2 pirates right after the barrier. And the only alternative way to defeat the wraith king is to flee and tell Moira like the little bitch I am. :argh:
And while we're talking about bitches, why is there even a discussion that I earned half the fucking pirate treasure, Katie, you entitled brat? What's going on here ffs?!
:x
 

Boleskine

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Christians are retarded, news at eleven. What does that have to do with the game though?

If the Bible had never made Corey Cole feel shame or guilt after wasting his seed, he may have never turned away from Christianity, become a game developer, met Lori, or made the QfG series with her.
 
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MRY

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I just like that Corey uses "memory" to mean "disk space," the same way my parents did when I was growing up. I find it endearing. The political stuff is irrelevant to my research -- it was noise that I had to get through to get to the signal. I didn't think anyone was left to be surprised that a game developer is staunchly liberal.

Here's another interesting thing: In May 2018, Corey said that they had "spent about $1M so far." But in July 2018, he says "my budget was $800k." I wonder whether that means they went hundreds of thousands over budget, whether $800k = "about $1M," which is a pretty glib kind of accounting but I guess some people can afford round numbers, or whether he's actually not sure how much was spent on development.

[EDIT: His two Quora questions do might a funny pairing. Also, many of his other posts an extraordinary.]
[EDIT2: "It isn’t enough to just redistribute all the wealth in the world. There isn’t that much to go around. You would have to do that on top of redefining attitudes towards wealth so that people will be happy with clean water, enough food, and a roof over their head." I can't tell if this is a Modest Proposal, a lament, or a policy position.]
[EDIT3: Another substantively interesting one:
The adventure game market never went away. It was the publishers who decided that the games weren't profitable enough to develop. As Noah Falstein pointed out, adventure games became increasingly expensive to develop in the late 1990's as art standards improved. Three artists did most of the backgrounds and animation on Hero's Quest (1989, 16-color EGA), while we had over 50 artists for 3 years on Quest for Glory V (1998, 24-bit color with 3D). The budget increased 10-fold in that time.

Meanwhile, players were satisfied with the very primitive art of the first-person shooter games. It was all about the action, and players had no problem with low-budget, blocky stone walls. So if you're a publisher, do you make games that cost $500K and sell 200K copies, or ones that cost $2M+ and sell the same number of copies? It was a no-brainer.

Again as Noah pointed out, art standards in the FPS games have improved, and now the average AAA FPS game budget is $25M. This has created a big opportunity for crowd-funded adventure games with much smaller budgets. The picture has reversed in the last 15 years, and now adventures are less expensive to develop than shooters.

But the audience never went away, and Myst didn't kill the genre (except by raising expected standards and development costs).
 
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MRY

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[EDIT2: "It isn’t enough to just redistribute all the wealth in the world. There isn’t that much to go around. You would have to do that on top of redefining attitudes towards wealth so that people will be happy with clean water, enough food, and a roof over their head." I can't tell if this is a Modest Proposal, a lament, or a policy position.]

Perhaps it is a self-description? As said roof is now collateral :negative:
I doubt it. When you can round up by $200k, you're doing all right. Also, other posts involve him explaining how his father was a millionaire and he grew up with a trust fund (which his father ultimately took away), explaining that "most millionaires are seniors who worked for decades," assuring a poster that $5 million is "plenty to feel rich," explaining why a multimillionaire would still play online poker (there are lots of online poker posts), etc. Actually a lot are about being a millionaire. It's one of five or six recurring topics (probability, poker, politics, religion, and to a lesser extent game development).

Overall, it's a pretty interesting corpus of posts. I'm not sure how much I want to delve into biographical details -- with "A Fanatic and His RPG," they were really only relevant to me as a jumping off point for design discussion. Much of what I'm reading here doesn't seem to have the same kind of connection. Honestly, the Quora stuff is intriguing but if anything is somewhat inconsistent with the hero-worship that I intended for the article. Also, I had always viewed Corey as the Garfunkel to Lori's Simon, and if I let social media self-exposure shape me too much, it will tilt the article toward him and away from her.
 

DeepOcean

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Okay, I'm close at the ending but I will put finishing the game for later.

Mini review, no spoilers.
My conclusion is that Hero U is an interesting game, I was entertained and I don't regret paying, I really liked the writing and the whole fairy tale vibe the game has, I think the main objective, to make a Quest for Glory inspired game was achieved but the game has some issues that got piling up and piling up, you end the game sort of tired, I never stop feeling the lack of something meaty in terms of gameplay to place my teeth on though, a gameplay loop that was satisfying. My two main complaints being the pacing and the combat.

The gameplay flow is: go talk with characters to see if they have something new to say, go training your skills and then go fighting (or sneaking), the problem the grinding and the combat weren't enough for me.

You go all over the place mining characters for new dialog and training your skills, the process involves zero gameplay and lots of repetitive clicking AND backtracking through multiple rooms, this is really time consuming and after some time, it gets tiresome.

The game is based on a timed schedule and this makes backtracking a even bigger of a problem, between the recreation room and the picklocking room, there are four rooms (depending of the time of the day, you will need to stealth your way through Terk what will make this process even slower), you will probably make this same circuit ALOT of times during the game and what mostly you do is to click on dialog lines and grind for skillpoints, guess what is the effect of this on the pacing of the game?

I didn't replay yet and tried to ruin my reputation with the characters to see if there is some consequence to it of not being a good two shoes, so I can't say if the reputation system has an impact, I hope it does because this process is quite mindless and without the lure of a fresh story, it will be annoying to replay.

Maybe I will play again with a snarky character and take the science elective to see if there is something new.

Besides the slow pacing, another big problem is the combat, it has the basic RPG loop of you getting better and better that is fun but it is too shallow, there is a big variety on the surface, with bombs, traps, magic runes and throwing daggers but bombs work like more damaging daggers and the magic runes work like traps, their use don't completely change the gameplay and in the end, the combat is a repetitive and really slow slug fest. There aren't well crafted combat encounters that go beyond, see enemy with big health bar, how many traps/hits will take to kill him? Not mentioning that enemies respawn (especially on the catacombs) AND there is little to no reward killing them, making combat even more pointless.

Shallow combat systems always was a problem on the Quest for Glory games but, on Hero U, they focus alot more on the RPG side of things, there are really very few puzzles this time around, and combat was never the strong point of the Coles. I always had fun on seeing on how many different ways I could solve a puzzle or a setpiece on the Quest for Glory games, not much of this here.

I will mention too the obscurity of the skills too, while the usefulness of some skills like fitness and lockpicking are kinda obvious. I didn't notice a big difference between having 40 of defense and 80 of defense or having 30 throwing daggers and 70 throwing, I had the impression of being a pretty good at dagger throwing during combat that only got slightly better at the end. I expect the game demanded alot more of skill checks too but this rarely happens beyond a very few skills (pro tip: Max out lockpicking). It is disappointing.

I felt the second half of the game really doesn't introduce much in terms of content, after maxing out pretty much most useful skills (something really easy to do), there are practically no new items on the store and after the grind is over, there isn't much more to do than just wait for the timer to advance the story . I have to say that after doing Katie sidequest, that was the best point of the game, the other sidequests of the other characters were kinda disappointing and short, don't having nowhere near the same amount of detail.

How would I rate Hero U? Imagine a Quest for Glory 5, with slightly better combat and ALOT better writing. The game is, at best, good for what it is but I enjoyed it and I'm really curious if the Coles get enough money to make the next one and maybe fix those problems.
 
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DeepOcean

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Mini review, no spoilers.
mind comparing to heroine and infamy?
Both games have some of the problems of Hero U but I think the timer, school routine stuff on Hero U goes a little overkill, I think, there are too few puzzles on Hero U and practically zero good inventory puzzles (beyond some really basic stuff) when the combat isn't good enough to carry the gameplay alone.

You know, you go exploring, grind a little your skills, do some puzzles, talk with some characters, at you leisure, some quick combat, this is far more enjoyable to me than grind and talk, grind and talk while being prodded by the timer all the time of Hero U. You are on the middle of the dungeon? Sorry dude, it is getting too late, you will be teleported to your room and have to backtrack ALL the way back where you were next day while the enemies respawned, this sort of stuff really grinds your enjoyment. You will need to watch the class lectures when the game wants it and the events happen when the game wants it. The game is too worried with controlling you instead of letting you enjoy yourself and it tries to create this school routine that only adds more backtracking to the game.

Are you on a dungeon? Great, how about this, the catacombs are big and filled with undead for you to kill everywhere, lots of trash combat and empty spaces, but there is little of interest in there beyond a few side stories and chest filled with items you won't need. Do you need to do some interesting puzzles to solve those sidequest? Nope. Do you need to do some interesting setpiece? Mostly no. (exception of Katie's quest, that was interesting).

I enjoyed it on the end but I prefer Quest for Infamy and Heroine Quest.
 

almondblight

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Here's another interesting thing: In May 2018, Corey said that they had "spent about $1M so far." But in July 2018, he says "my budget was $800k." I wonder whether that means they went hundreds of thousands over budget, whether $800k = "about $1M," which is a pretty glib kind of accounting but I guess some people can afford round numbers, or whether he's actually not sure how much was spent on development.

My budget was $800K, of which two Kickstarters supplied only $500K with the rest as expected out of pocket. And we went over that budget, but by a fraction compared to all the games I listed above.

So, budget of $800k, and they went over that to about $1 million. Or that's how I read it at least.
 

MRY

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You must be right. Thanks for that insight. I does make me wonder what a "budget" means in this case, though. For instance, here's this from the original Kickstarter pitch:

We know that you are taking a leap of faith by supporting our new game, and we want to assure you that we will use the money wisely. Our goal is the minimum budget with which we can make a high-quality game. ...

Fortunately, our team is up to the task. We have created multiple best-selling, award-winning games with budgets ranging from $250,000 to over $4,000,000. In particular, our team members led the development of six acclaimed projects - all comparable in budget to this Kickstarter project - that shipped on time and under budget. We know exactly what we can and can't accomplish at various budget levels and schedules.

I have budgeted out the entire game development with contingencies depending on the amount we raise. As long as we reach our Kickstarter goal, we have a specific plan for making the game - a budget for art, for programming, etc. Most of use are working at "cost-of-living" rates so that we will be sure to finish the game.
So presumably at this point, when the ask was $400,000, the budget cannot have been $800,000 -- right?!

Oh. I guess, it was, based on this update:
We worked out a series of budgets for Hero-U based on possible fundraising amounts. The “sweet spot” was at $800K, which would give us $650K towards game development. The catch was that we knew we could not ask $800K ... Should we have asked more than $400,000 in October 2012? The funding campaign would have failed, and we'd have gotten zero.

Step one was to realize that we did not have to live within the Kickstarter budget – It is a "starter", not an upper bound
Sigh.
 

Strange Fellow

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
So presumably at this point, when the ask was $400,000, the budget cannot have been $800,000 -- right?!
Why not? They asked for 400,000, but were operating with a budget of 800,000. It follows that they were prepared to supply the remaining 400,000 themselves. What's the problem with that?
 

MRY

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So presumably at this point, when the ask was $400,000, the budget cannot have been $800,000 -- right?!
Why not? They asked for 400,000, but were operating with a budget of 800,000. It follows that they were prepared to supply the remaining 400,000 themselves. What's the problem with that?
I guess nothing, if it is upfront. Otherwise, it's a considerable undisclosed risk. "If you pay us $400k and if the next Kickstarter for $100k succeeds and if the bank loans us $200k, then the game will ship as we promised it" is different than "If you pay us $400k, then the game will ship as we promised it," no?
 

Strange Fellow

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I think it goes without saying that there's a considerable undisclosed risk involved in giving developers money to make a game. :P

I didn't follow the Kickstarter, so I couldn't say whether they were upfront about 400k not being enough to fund the game, but I gather they weren't. It it possible of course that this whole "we'll pay half, you'll pay half" thing was something they came up with post hoc, once they realized that 400k wouldn't be enough. But even then, I'm not seeing a problem. By that time it was far too late for backers to get their money back anyway.
"If you pay us $400k and if the next Kickstarter for $100k succeeds and if the bank loans us $200k, then the game will ship as we promised it"
That's certainly one way to put it. Another is: "We are so committed to the development of this game that we are planning on funding it partly out of our own pocket." If anything, I'd say it would have been good PR. They seem to think so too, considering how forthcoming they've been with the admission that they went over budget. I'm assuming they were good for the money when they launched the KS. I don't believe they would be stupid enough to hinge development on a loan that they hadn't yet secured, not when there was half a million dollars of non-refundable backer money involved.
 

Mustawd

Guest
I didn't follow the Kickstarter, so I couldn't say whether they were upfront about 400k not being enough to fund the game, but I gather they weren't.

They weren’t upfront about it. The kickstarter campaign mentions that $400k is the minimum budget needed for a high quality game. If they were planning all along to double that then it’s safe to say they just BS’ed their backers.

To be fair that’s also what most campaigns did during that time. It’s a lot more common now to mention investor involvement if it exists during the campaign (Black Geyser did this, for example).
 

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