So as we recently announced, we want to get early feedback from about 10-20 people in a closed Beta, and we are hoping for people who really love base-building. Or interior decorating. Send us a contact form to sign up! This will lead to a public Beta in the next few months.

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This is a feature-Beta, so you won’t see most of the other cool stuff we’re working on in the background – our mission team is working at top speed, so don’t worry – adding bases isn’t affecting that! The Beta will still be fun, because we have a lot of cool features in the SoH player housing/base-building system.

Some games have player housing but not bases, or the reverse. Some have both, but they’re separated. We think it’s more fun to have the full set of options for whatever building you’re making. Want to stock up your home with medical kits and weapons? You can. Want to set up your supergroup mega-base with beds and sofas, or even individual rooms for members? That’s fine, too.

We’ve created a short video showing some of the highlights of the player housing system as it is today. The basics will be familiar to those who have created bases in other games, but we have added several advanced features to help express your artistic vision.

• There are currently six interior layouts, and we plan to add more based on your feedback.
• There are a wide variety of furniture pieces. In addition, you can change the colors of each piece of furniture as well as its size and how it is orientated inside your base.
• Robotic pets and servants are available. The cat even has idle animations.
• There is a very significant variety of textures and colors for the floors, walls and ceilings, with more to come.
• You can add windows with a view, or viewscreens if you picture your lair in alternate dimension or deep underground.
• You can control the lights: place them where you want, dial them up and down, and even change the individual colors and hues.
• You can have a see-through ceiling looking out at the night sky if you want.
• You can have more than one story, with a staircase, or put in additional flooring to turn your base into a platformer’s delight.
• You can place radios which allow you to skip to the next track of in-game music by changing the radio station.
• You can even have magically themed items in your lair, if that is what you want.

Players can also place walls to divide the space into rooms as needed. You can see in the pic-ture below that one area has been walled off for use by just one player. The current bases are not big enough to serve as a 50-hero guild hall, but we intend to add bigger starting spaces lat-er, along with plaques that can carry custom messages.

Ship of Heroes has improved in a couple of other areas, too. First, we’ve decided that the best way to resolve the downloader/patcher issues from our last big public Beta is to join Steam so that when we eventually launch SoH, we will be using the Steam launcher and patcher system. As far as we can tell, this is the best launcher/patcher in the world, by far. In particular, using the Steam tool set will speed up game downloads and updates, and it will also mean that if a player is interrupted during download, almost no progress is lost, and a player can simply resume downloading the rest of the update when the interruption is over. This was generally the most important improvement players requested from the last Beta, and this way we won’t have to delay the game by a year to make our own patcher. Feel free to discuss this upgrade on the forums.

Another improvement that we’ve made recently is double-jumping engine versions from UE 4.25 to UE 4.27. This took us about a week. There were some small, lingering issues, as usual, but the new engine version gives us some nice capabilities. The sky, clouds, and water all look a little better now. There are also a host of under-the-hood improvements for the dev team. We’re happy with UE 4.27, and we are now evaluating which engine version we want to launch with at the end of the year – it doesn’t really make sense to keep upgrading past a certain point.

Now, we’d like to repeat that there is no option on the Ship of Heroes website that allows any-one to purchase Ship of Heroes at this moment in time… but one is coming soon. Apparently some of our fans are so incredibly skilled that they found the hidden page on our site for buying SoH later on. They activated the right page and paid us, all to try to pre-purchase the game early. Wow! It’s extremely impressive, and definitely not the kind of hacking we were worried about. We have offered a refund to all who contacted us post purchase and tried to hide the pages better to avoid any billing problems for you guys in the future.

The next couple of months will be quite exciting. We’re going to put out our upcoming feature Beta, as well as talk about some new missions, and more detailed launch plans. Stay tuned!