Hi all! Some exciting new updates to Heroes in the past week.
This last week I talked about the process we take to productionize AI systems so that we’ll be able to deliver Heroes to as many players as possible.
This week we’re back on the core gameplay train with a big new update: Party Members and Local Multiplayer!
Players can now add new characters to their party and switch between them depending on whose turn it is (making it so you can play local multiplayer or just control multiple characters yourself).
When you add a new character to your party you’ll be able to go through the same character creation process, defining your name, race, stats, class, skills etc… the AI Dungeon master will then introduce your character and weave them into the story!
This also works with characters that you’ve already met on your journey. For example you might meet Grom the blacksmith in the Tavern and eventually convince them to join you on your adventures. Now you can also add them as a playable character to for you or your friend to control.
We’ve also done several changes to how story generation to make non party members around you take their own actions, not just respond to yours, making them feel more like real alive characters.
But we’re not stopping at local multiplayer, next we’re adding online multiplayer too! We’ve already built out the engine infrastructure to enable it and now we just have to finish wiring all the pieces together.
Right now multiplayer characters all have to stay in the same party (as basically all DnD games do), but down the road our plan is to make it so you can both play together, and go your separate ways exploring and shaping the same world together.
So you might show up as a town with your party of friends and decide to split up for a while, each having doing your own shopping, meeting new friends, or going on fun side adventures before meeting all together back at the tavern.
One of the key things we’ll need to enable this is a robust world persistent world that you explore with your friends. This will create real structure to the world and game you’re playing so that you aren’t just playing along with a constantly improv-ing AI, but are actually in a real persistent world that has it’s own plot lines and is alive and changing independent of you.
The longterm goal being something like Minecraft, a generated world that you can explore and shape with your friends, defined not just by blocks, but by characters, towns, kingdoms and epic stories that occur as you affect and shape the world.
– Nick
