This award validates our philosophy for making games, which is focused on being transparent and responsive to our core community on our forums and in Betas as we move towards launch.  Once Ship of Heroes launches, we want to show that the MMO industry can be revitalized, giving players many new choices.  In our view, passionate indies that meet the desires of specific smaller audiences are the future of MMORPGs.

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We have also rebuilt the Ship of Heroes website with a new structure, new pictures, new information about the game, and new features. We’ve added a slew of new anti-spam and security measures, and so far they’re highly effective. If for any reason you were previously auto-banned from the website, please sign up again. You enroll by going to the forums page of our website and there is an enrollment pop-up. There’s no cost, and we plan to add an e-commerce capability to the site so that supporters can pre-purchase Ship of Heroes at a discount. As we have always said, funds received from pre-purchases are spent immediately on developing the game. More pre-sales means more missions, more costumes, and more maps at launch.

We’ve now created a new base-building capability in Ship of Heroes; bases will be available to both individual heroes and supergroups. In building this feature, we’ve looked at the base-building capabilities in other MMOs, including SWTOR, CoH, and a few others, for ideas, as well as the ideas we have received from the community.

Six floor plans of various sizes are already included in the base-builder. But the best part is the wealth of great customization options. A wide variety of textures is available for the floors, walls, ceilings, and doors, and the color of textures can be changed; you could have red marble walls, for example. Different types of doors are available – modern residential, utilitarian metal, nostalgic barn doors, etc. Their colors can be customized as well, and you can even change the shape of the doors.

Furniture can be bought from a furniture vendor and placed inside the base, resized and positioned exactly. Special items such as extra lights, robotic cats, door greeters, and teleportation portals are available in addition to standard furniture. Each piece of furniture can be shrunk, enlarged, and rotated along three axes to create unique visuals.

And the initial floor plans are just starting points. You can truly make the base your own by adding wall segments and flooring platforms to change the internal layout of your base, creating new rooms in the available space. Those walls and flooring platforms are also available from the furniture vendors. You can save multiple bases with the same character.

Currently, we are thinking of having players rent bases on a monthly basis using in-game currency. Tell us in the forums if you’d prefer to buy and own your base. If you have a forum account, we’re also hoping you’ll log in and tell us how important you think supergroup bases are in our latest poll. Log in or sign up here to participate, then check out the poll here.

One of the things we’d like to do before we launch an open feature Beta for the new base-builder is to do a quick closed Beta with a handful of really interested supporters, ideally people with a passion for building bases in other games. If you think you qualify and you would like to see and suggest improvements to our base-builder, fill out a contact form at the bottom of the “about us” page letting us know that you’d like to help. We will let volunteers test out the system as it is right now, and give us suggestions for improvements.

The date of the public Beta will depend on the feedback we get from the closed one. We’re hoping to do the public event in March or April, if all goes well. We still have a lot of work to do before launch – adding and improving missions is a continuous process – but we can see the path forward pretty clearly right now. It’s going to be fun to play the new game, with a new story that you’ve never experienced and deep lore that you’ll uncover as you play. We hope to see you all in-game in 2022!