Massive Plasma Cannons!

Mar 22, 2022

“Do not stand in the big firing chamber while this is happening. Or do; it’ll be funny.” – Meltdown

The Plasma Cannon Defense is an exciting challenge mission, one of the missions currently under development. We are using it here to illustrate the massive size of the spaceship FHS Justice. A cramped shuttle craft it is not! We are also adding to our social media presence: Ship of Heroes is now present on eight social media platforms, in addition to the forums on the SoH website.

Motivational posters, the Justice Corps way

We often get questions about the scale of the FHS Justice. Many people hear that the game is set aboard a spaceship and think of ships from Star Trek, or perhaps Firefly. But Ship of Heroes takes inspiration more from massive vessels like the spaceships in Independence Day, or the Imperial Star Destroyers of Star Wars. The massive cannon room you see below helps to convey the sheer size that ships can reach in the 25th century. The FHS Justice is over 20 miles long, and it has dozens of these cannons, plus other weapons. So do Nagdellian motherships.

This picture is to scale. The woman flying in the air is roughly five to six feet tall.

Cheap teleportation makes it practical to maintain and defend such large areas, but hostile boarding parties are a constant threat. In this mission you’ll face waves of attackers with specialized AI goals, so some will behave differently than others. We think it will be a lot of fun to play through and try all kinds of strategies, both solo and with friends. Any badge-hunters can expect to find a few new ones in a mission like this, as well. Are you the type to fire the big cannon and disintegrate the first wave of attackers the moment they teleport in? Make sure not to hit any friendlies! Alternatively, will you rely on your own powers just to prove that you can?

Don’t be this hero! She dies from taking the Nagdellian invasion too lightly.

“I approved putting up a blastproof poster or two, but this is just excessive.” – Ambassador

In other news, we’re expanding to provide updates on more sites in response to audience requests. Our videos are available on YouTube, and Rumble is in the process of syncing up with the YouTube channel. This is very convenient because it means we only have to upload each video once. You can also check out our posts and ask us questions on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Parler, and even LinkedIn. Or log in to our forums and shape the game’s future by voting in our polls.

Yes, we’re here too! Come check us out!

Finally, we’d like to remind everyone what’s coming up over the next couple of months. We’re going to put out our upcoming feature Beta, as well as talk about future missions, and more de-tailed launch plans. As a sneak peak, we’d like to show off a clip from one of the missions we’re currently working on:

Did you think that there would be no rewards for saving the ship?

Stay tuned for our next newsletter!

Technical Notes

1. There’s a cool conversion process that YouTube allows to repost videos on Rumble. This process is underway now, and you can already see that last half-dozen videos we’ve produced on Rumble. More are coming over the next few weeks.

2. The first base-builder Beta is underway now, with about ten volunteers. This is exciting for us – new eyes and new ideas are emerging daily.

3. The combat video clip we’ve included with this newsletter was recorded live on our Steam version, so it looks exactly like what you would see in real gameplay – it is not a staged marketing piece. However, the mission is in-development and may change over the next few months.

4. This is the first time we have planned a two-step Beta. In the first stage, we hope to have power users help us get ready for the second stage, an open feature Beta where the general public will participate.

5. The second stage is tentatively scheduled for April.

6. Ship of Heroes is currently tentatively planning for a launch sometime around the new year.

Firing the cannon is very satisfying.

More on this Subject

Summer 2021 Schedule

Mar 23, 2021

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

Jan 19, 2020

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

Jan 31, 2019

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.