Hero's Hour - Heroes of Might and Magic-inspired real-time strategy RPG

[Peachcurl]

Are they still planning Steam release this year?

 

[Blutwurstritter]

Is every unit of stack spawned ? If so what happens if you have very very large armies ?

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Is every unit of stack spawned ? If so what happens if you have very very large armies ?

No, at least not in the last version I played. Each a hero can have a certain amount of units on the battlefield, depending on their skillset. The higher tier units also take up more space in that amount. Part of the game is deciding your initial unit layout, later units just spawn in whenever they feel like it.

 

[lukaszek]

Is every unit of stack spawned ? If so what happens if you have very very large armies ?

No, at least not in the last version I played. Each a hero can have a certain amount of units on the battlefield, depending on their skillset. The higher tier units also take up more space in that amount. Part of the game is deciding your initial unit layout, later units just spawn in whenever they feel like it.

is there a demo somewhere?

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Is every unit of stack spawned ? If so what happens if you have very very large armies ?

No, at least not in the last version I played. Each a hero can have a certain amount of units on the battlefield, depending on their skillset. The higher tier units also take up more space in that amount. Part of the game is deciding your initial unit layout, later units just spawn in whenever they feel like it.

is there a demo somewhere?

https://thingonitsown.itch.io/heros-hour

 

[lukaszek]

hah, this is funny. Combat is quite chaotic though, even at start when armies are supposed to be small

 

[pakoito]

Unit and Hero mods coming. We only need spells and I feel a Dominions 5/CoE port coming :D

 

[Infinitron]

From last month:



https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1656780/view/3122684555909541682

Hero's Hour has a release date!
See you on March 1st to conquer them all!

Hi everyone,

We're very happy to announce Hero's Hour will launch on March 1st!

Up-to-date features

• 11 factions with special mechanics, strengths and weaknesses
  
• 22 hero classes, with a special skill each
  
• 50 common hero skills
  
• 177 units (and 99 upgraded units)
  
• 80 unique unit abilities
  
• 166 artifacts
  
• 83 spells (+18 spells unlocked via skills)
  
• Dozens of impactful map buildings
  
• Local "hotseat" multiplayer
  
• Co-op with other players or even with the AI

 

[Infinitron]

https://af.gog.com/en/game/heros_hour?as=1649904300

 

[lukaszek]

gog sent in mail -20% codes. Not sure if I want to buy it now, if someone wants it let me know

 

[Dr1f7]

gotta say this looks pretty cool i love homm3

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Heroes of Might and Magic with procedurally generated levels? That's really just HoMM3, isn't it? Looks awful visually, but at the same time, it looks like it could be fun, since with real-time combat its definitely quite different than any Heroes game or Heroes-clone I've ever seen.

Kind of reminds me of Dragon Force on the Sega Saturn.



Like someone took Dragon Force and added the freedom of a Heroes game on top of it...only it doesn't visually look anywhere as good as either. It also seems similar to what head-to-head multiplayer battles in tower defense games looks like.

 

[DakaSha]

Got the premium version on steam and liked it, then hated it, then hated it some more, now back to liking it, and close to really liking it. It's a strange flawed game, but i think there may be some depth here (if balance is ok, or improved if not). Def play on 1/2 combat speed or you wont be able to tell whats going on.

It has more interesting mechanics than Homm, but the battles def wont be for everybody

 

[Ludwig von Eisenthal]

Why does a modern game that's inspired by HoMM2 feature graphics that are ten times worse than Homm2's graphics were a quarter of a century ago? I don't know, maybe gameplay is stellar, but I don't feel attracted to try this game myself.

 

[DakaSha]

back to just being neutral on the game. It kinda just devolves into a constant slog. Essentially you need to outplay the AI by being more efficient in your army loses and winning the attrition war which is fine I guess. Better than Homm being won/lost by one battle (in many cases).
Prob worth the money but nothing special

 

[Blutwurstritter]

I enjoy the visuals and audio of HoMM3 and they are essential to its charm for me. But the graphics of this game are not appealing. Is at least the soundtrack/sound design any good?

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I enjoy the visuals and audio of HoMM3 and they are essential to its charm for me. But the graphics of this game are not appealing. Is at least the soundtrack/sound design any good?

I don't remember the audio from when I played the demo, so chances are it was probably average or just not very good.

 

[DakaSha]

Its shit audio

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Has anyone tried hotseat-mode?
How does combat work in it? Does one player got some control or is AI vs AI show?

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Why does a modern game that's inspired by HoMM2 feature graphics that are ten times worse than Homm2's graphics were a quarter of a century ago? I don't know, maybe gameplay is stellar, but I don't feel attracted to try this game myself.

Hipsters.

The sprites during combat kind of make me think of that first Warsong Langrisser game. Specifically that first Warsong game when you see your little guys clash during combat. Theyre also somewhat like the mini version of characters you see on the world map, but those mini versions are bigger than the sprites used for this.

Visually it seems like a weird direction to go to me. Because even just making the sprites slightly bigger, which would still be tiny, you could make better looking sprites even while keeping details simple. Like there's this tower defense game Ancient made called Protect Me Knight, and it's got pretty simple sprites made up of three (two colors and the black outline) colors, (so less color than these sprites) and they look better than this game's sprites because they're like twice the size (which still means they're really small) which allows for more detail. Even if you had sprites that were like 26 to 28 pixels high (which is around what your hero is [along with the enemies] on the world map in HoM&M 1 & 2) as opposed to 13 to 16 like I think this game has for normal size enemies you could still flood the screen with them.

There also seems to be a bit of a slash of styles, and I'm not sure that's done on purpose. Things like the world map area, the battle fields, and the town screens all have very simple uses of color. Thing like grass and dirt are handled more like you'd expect in something like Link to the Past and Earthbound, being mostly just one (bright) color as opposed to how King's Bounty and the first two Heroes games do things. For me anyways it creates a kind of clash in my mind I'm not sure they were going for, you almost expect to see more stylized sprites against those background, but instead it's those tiny sprites with more color details than the anything in the environment or the buildings on the town screen. Even the cartoony style of the buildings in the town screen, with their simple colors schemes makes it seem weird the character spirit are (mostly) going for normal proportions with lots of colors as opposed to something cartoonish that fits the backgrounds.

 

[DakaSha]

Its a solo developer and a game made in game maker you dumb shits LOL. Can you not tell the difference between having the budget of an established 90's game company and working on a game by yourself. How are you even comparing these things.

A game can be shit or look bad regardless of it being a single developer but sitting here and trying to disect this shit is pretentious as fuck

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Its a solo developer and a game made in game maker you dumb shits LOL. Can you not tell the difference between having the budget of an established 90's game company and working on a game by yourself. How are you even comparing these things.

A game can be shit or look bad regardless of it being a single developer but sitting here and trying to disect this shit is pretentious as fuck

Did you do the sprites for this game? I wasn't even saying this game needs highly detailed sprites, my point was they could've just made slightly larger simple looking sprites and it would've looked better.

Like, this is the Protect Me Knight game I was talking about:

These are some sprites for this game:

They're both pretty simple. They'd both be easy to make. But I'd say those Protect Me Knight sprites make better use of their limited size, are easier to read, and overall just look better. This game's sprites are like what you, that's a general "you," shouldn't do when making sprites. When you've got characters that are slightly smaller than Mairo and Link on the NES and original Game Boy, you might want to rethink your approach to how you're handling sprites, and look back at how those old games did thing, and what did and didn't look good.

There's also a weird clash of styles within the character sprites. That mermaid character looks like they're going for normal proportions on a tiny character. The bird just looks like a normal bird. That little guy with the sword however looks like some big head chibi character made using less sprites than a original Game Boy game would use on the exact same thing.

Here's something... look at this sheet of a HoM&M2 Lich:

Now, forget about those larger spirits used during battle. See those little tiny ones that get used for the world map? That kind of seems to be what this game is going for when it comes to sprites being used for its combat. But those little tiny ones are also like twice the size of the spirits in this game, and height wise closer to the sprites in that Protect Me Knight image I posted above.

 

[DakaSha]

Christ okok have a brofist, God damn dude

 

[ArchAngel]

I tried this.. it is shit. It has little to do with HOMM, just a much worse version with weaker combat and battles and no story missions.