2019 Holiday Greetings

2019 has been a great year for Ship of Heroes. In the end, our success comes back to all of you, our community, and the support that you have consistently offered to us. So, we want to thank you all, and wish that all of you have a great holiday season..

We started 2019 in the glow of a very successful login test at the end of 2018. Over 200 supporters came in, ran around, and chatted with our dev team, allowing us to demonstrate that our FPS is good even with 80 unique heroes in the most graphically intensive spot in the whole city: under the Arch. From there we’ve been rapidly expanding and improving various aspects of the game, resulting in our recent and highly successful CCT Beta (Character Creator Tool).

Among the key progress milestones for 2019, we identified the following: 1. UI features were added, making the elements of the UI resizable and customizable for location on the screen.

2. Our system for leveling characters was completed, tested, and added to the game. This is a big deal; many other systems require leveling. 3. We’ve upgraded engine versions to keep up with advancements from the Unreal Engine team at Epic Games. 4. We added superspeed as a travel power during 2019. After the CCT Beta, we’ll be dialing it back a bit, per the request of the community.

5. Augments, infusions, and buffs all work exactly as planned, and all stack as well, which adds a lot of strategic depth to the combat in Ship of Heroes. 6. We’ve added more than five new costume sets to the game to prepare for the CCT Beta, and two more since the Beta. Between our costumes, our powerful morphs, and our randomizers, the Ship of Heroes Character Creation Tool is ready to launch. 7. We’ve created, tested, and polished over 60 new custom animations for powers this year, as well as the FX and props to go with them. That’s more than five entire powersets! 8. We’ve completed the testing for our FPS control system. Ship of Heroes provides the essential core MMO experience with many players in the city at once, all with high FPS. 9. We’ve polished Apotheosis City, placed NPCs, cars, and trains into it, including some of our mission-giving NPCs, and let the community come inside and run around for a week during the CCT Beta. 10. We’ve created and opened the auction house, the warehouse area, the Beta Club, and the hospital to the public. In addition, we’ve created dozens of map segments for the area under the city and building interiors, which can be recombined into unique mission maps.

11. We’ve revealed more pieces of the backstory of the game, and installed the code to support multiple types of missions and events, including missions with branching dialogue and invasions. It all works. We are continuing to refine these systems, but the first versions are looking good. 12. We capped the year off with a popular Character Creation Tool (CCT) Beta test in which over 500 people jumped into the game and created unique heroes. Players were able to run around the city, test a few powers, and look for bugs; most important of all, we then fixed the bugs; in most cases, players got to see the updates before the Beta even ended. Every professional game studio wants to move faster, to deliver more, to work on the most exciting elements, and most of all, to ship their game. But along the way, every team needs to integrate the pieces they have built and get community feedback on what they have so far. We’re committed to listening to our community, so keep giving us your thoughts in the forums! The next big community event will be a test of our invasion system, which we are planning for Q2. You’ll experience big fights, with waves of enemies, and the very real chance that we’ll all be wiped out! But no matter what happens, the testing will be fun.

2019 has been a great year for Ship of Heroes. Not only have we expanded the core of the game, we’ve had powerful and consistent support from all of you to keep building, to launch Ship of Heroes as soon as possible, but also to not launch before the game is ready. We hear you, and we’re looking forward to showing even more progress in 2020! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all from the Ship of Heroes developers!