Christmas 2017: Ship of Heroes Recap
In this video, we’re showing our first in-game holiday event: Meltdown is collecting Christmas gifts by racing around Apotheosis City. As he finds each one, he opens it and receives both in-game money (Dust), and a gift that goes into his inventory. We’re also showing picture-in-picture clips of the most important milestones SoH has achieved in each of the last twelve months. Through the PiP, we are sharing an overall tale of success, of moving from a website with a bit of concept art and story, to our current working game prototype.
In addition to celebrating the holiday season with you, our community, we are also asking for your support. We’re a small team, mostly self-funded and staffed by volunteers, and we’ve accomplished a lot this year. By the end of next year we plan to be launching an open Beta. But we need your support to reach that goal. So we are appealing for the first time to our base of supporters – that’s you, and the other individuals who receive this newsletter – to make whatever contribution you can manage. All of your contributions go straight into the funds we use to develop Ship of Heroes, speeding up development. We hope you can donate something to the cause.
https://shipofheroes.com/donations/
All donors are eligible for benefits, depending upon the amount of the donation, including a free download of the game, early access during Beta, a free month of play, and even the ability to participate with the dev team in an Alpha test while giving their feedback and requests directly to the devs.
Thank you, and have a wonderful holiday season.
From: the Dev Team at Ship of Heroes
Technical Notes
This is the first in-game reveal of a holiday event for Ship of Heroes, although we celebrated Halloween with a holiday-themed video and powerset. As each present is opened, signature hero Meltdown receives money and/or a gift reward. The devs intend for this to become one mechanic for larger future holiday events. Note that Meltdown’s total Dust is increased each time he opens a present.
The locations of the glowing gifts in the video should not necessarily be taken to be those in which gifts will be found when the game launches – though a couple of these spots are now favorites of the dev team, so you might want to remember them for the future.
It is our intention to allow players who gather presents during in-game events to also receive gifts such as one-use pets and powers that can be saved for later use, including after the holiday event has passed. We have not yet decided whether we will allow these gifts to be sold or not.
We’re using picture in picture (PiP) to illustrate the year of progress that the game has experienced. As each present is opened, a PiP clip opens showing one of the key events of the past twelve months of game development. Ship of Heroes was nothing more than a website with concept art in December of 2016. One year later, the game is well on the way to being launched.
We recorded the video in a packaged version of the game, as we usually do. The snow in the final scene is a post-processing effect, and does not indicate any plan to launch the game with weather effects like snow or rain.
For clarity, Ship Launch Day is anticipated to be July 4th. This is not the anticipated launch date of the game, but rather the in-game historical date of the launch of the Justice from Earth.
For those wondering why we did not decorate the Christmas tree in the final scene… we simply ran out of time. We have a big December planned, and we want to build the game as quickly as possible.
The next major event on our milestone schedule for 2017 is a small-scale alpha test of the combat system of SoH, planned for late December.
Summer 2021 Schedule
Our last newsletter talked a bit about the kinds of events we did in 2020, as well as our winter holiday content. In this newsletter we want to talk about the next upcoming event, our overall plans for 2021, and some new areas of Apotheosis City that we’ve created.
Engine Update Newsletter
First of all, we want to let everyone know that we’ve upgraded to the latest version of the Unreal 4 Epic Engine, 4.24! We spent most of 2019 in 4.21, which helped us with stability and consistency throughout the year while we developed and tested major new systems.
Upgrading to Engine Version 4.21
In the middle of 2016 we originally began the development of Ship of Heroes with the then-current version of the Unreal Engine, version 4.11.3. As development proceeded, we upgraded our engine version several times, and each upgrade brought new features, but also required a considerable effort by our coders and artists to adapt and upgrade our game code and art to the new version.