HeroEngine

HeroScript for Programmers – Video Tutorials Are Up!

heroengine — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:16:33 +0000

Our weekly installment of video tutorials continues. We have just uploaded three videos introducing the HeroEngine scripting language, HeroScript to our YouTube Page!

The three part video series covers the following:

Part 1 – Introduction to HSL
Part 2 – Language fundamentals including statements, output, messaging, declaration, how assignment functions, code blocks & flow control statements
Part 3 – Nodes and node persistence

We hope these tutorials help our newer developers get up to speed with our scripting language. For our more experienced HeroCloud devs, check out our wiki on HeroScript. Join the discussion over on the forums for any specific help. Our community is really good about responding quickly.

It’s Never Too Early To Think of Marketing

heroengine — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:23:12 +0000

Last week Ryan and I were talking about general social media stuff. Ryan by the way, is my awesome side-kick and behind the scenes mastermind running all of our social media. The convo quickly segued into general marketing stuff. Not too hard to do since these days social media is invariably intertwined with any and all marketing. We’re always looking for ways to be a helpful resource for our HeroCloud devs and in talking about our HeroCloud devs and the games they are developing One area where Ryan and I felt devs might want some tips, is marketing. I mentioned in passing, “it’s never too early to think of marketing.” I’m definitely not the first marketing person to say this, and I won’t be the last, but I think it’s a statement worth harping on for a bit. It’s one of the pieces of the puzzle devs tend to think about last, often when it’s too late, preferring instead to focus (and rightly so) on making their games awesome.

“The ‘M’ Word”

That being said, marketing doesn’t have to be a dirty word. Dan E Grey wrote a thoughtful post titled Indie Games and the ‘M’ Word last year that I think deserves mentioning. First off, there really is something to be said about the ‘M’ word. Not just indie game devs, but many entrepreneurs and small business owners are scared off, or simply don’t want to deal with, the word “marketing.” Unlike (or maybe very much like) coding, marketing can be a pretty elusive concept. Marketing involves putting not just our product out their, but yourself. These days, the two are very closely interlinked. As Dan Grey and others have mentioned, putting yourself out there means also putting a personality that represents you, your game and your studio out in the public eye. Andrew Smith of Spilt Milk Studios says it best in his recent article on Gamasutra:

“As an indie, one of the major factors you’ve got going for you — one that bigger companies struggle to harness effectively — is that you have a personality. It doesn’t have to be yours, although with Spilt Milk I make certain it is mine. What this boils down to is that you must have a very strong, consistent voice with which to communicate your message.”

This is what branding is all about, and when you are so closely tied to your product, as indie devs are, it can be a scary thing. Not to mention, it’s quite easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if you believe your game is the best thing since Mindcraft, others must as well. However, with all the noise out there, and shortening consumer attention spans (see below), you and your lovely game are competing against hundreds and hundreds of great games. Marketing doesn’t have to be a dirty word. And once you get into it, it can actually be quite fun. Engaging and interacting with your fans on facebook and twitter for example, can actually be really useful, and even help make your game better. By enlisting your fans feedback and advice during various stages of your game development, you can incorporate, or even get better ideas for the direction your game should take. The power of your fans should not be understated. Your feedback loop is effectively shortened thanks to real-time feedback from the Internet.

“It doesnt require a budget of millions to tell the world about your game”

The key, and simplest thing to do, is to just start somewhere. Many of you probably came across this vimeo video put up by IGDA Scotland last year. Brian Baglow’s entertaining speech pinpoints how lucky indie devs are today compared to the “old days” when one had to work at a big studio. (If anything, just watch the video to listen to Brian Baglow’s fantastic Scottish accent.) There are myriads of opportunties available to indie devs these days to put your game out there. Social media is one of the greatest inventions for small-time studios with limited budgets. It’s free afterall.

The basic ingredients to your marketing strategy at this stage should involve alot of time, consistency and dedication. And as Paul Taylor of Mode 7 Games bluntly states in his 2009 Gamasutra article Building Buzz for Indie Games:

“Obscurity is literally the worst thing that can possibly happen to you and your game. Notoriety is better. Public hatred is arguably better. Seriously. At least people remember Limbo of the Lost.”

He goes on to say,

“Marketing anything takes a lot of time and effort. Most small indies skew their efforts far too far towards production and away from marketing: this is one of the reasons why so few are a genuine commercial success, and why many high-quality games generate minimal revenue.”

Although Taylor’s article is a few years old (it was published in 2009), the article is full of valuable advice and takes you through key steps to getting your indie game known and out in the public eye. Everything from initial announcements to talking with bloggers is covered. The reading list he includes at the end is also very worth diving into.

“How to Tell the World About Your Game”

In the spirit of “starting somewhere, ” let’s get practical. After all, just thinking about marketing, as the title of my post might suggest, won’t get you very far. Where should you start, especially if you’re starting from scratch? Ben Ward, founder of a relatively new indie studio called Hogrocket, has some specific advice. Ward summarizes his indie marketing presentation made at Develop Brighton last year over on GamesBrief. In his three-part series, Ward goes through important phases of marketing as an indie developer. Ben lays out practical questions and steps on how to analyze the marketplace, build your message and put it out there. His advice is pretty succint, and all stuff you’ve probably heard before: blog regularly, video blog, build an email list, use social media and attend events and conferences. Ward takes it a step further and goes through practical tips and strategies that he himself uses. If you’re already doing most of the things Ben mentions, then you’re probably on the right track. If you’re not getting the results you were hoping for, don’t get discouraged. Building your fan base on Facebook for example, can take time. Just stay consistent. As with coding, you might not get it right the first time. Your messaging might need tweaking or the content you are delivering might need some polishing. The great thing about starting small, is that there is room for testing and playing around with different messages.

Take your first step – start a Facebook page and a Twitter account. The best way to learn how to use these mediums is to see how other successful brands and indie studios are using them. If you’ve gotten this far already, take the advice of many of those quoted in this post: dedicate the time and effort to your social media presence daily. It doesn’t have to take long, just be consistent.

“Believe that everything you are doing is interesting to someone, somewhere.”

To summarize, Andrew Smith of Spilt Milk Studios points gives some marketing & pr advice in his recent post on Gamasutra:

“Your aim, broadly speaking, should be to create a group of customers who are devoted to you. Your products and brand must appeal to them, and you must make it possible for them to open up a dialogue with you. You must create the games you believe in, find the customers who also believe in them, and then encourage them to join together in a group that starts to do some of your marketing for you, and supports your endeavours with relevant feedback and opinion.”

And finally, ”Believe that everything you’re doing is interesting to someone, somewhere.” The key is figuring out why and to whom.

This is by no means an exhaustive guide to marketing. My attempt here is to start the conversation around marketing, and gather some thoughts and tips that I’ve come across from around the web, and ones that I personally believe in as marketing director for HeroEngine.

Marketing can be a complicated beast if you don’t break it down and start simple. There’s all sorts of other marketing areas we can get into from the importance of split testing, to effective social media (see the “Five Tips” below), to more practical matters such as where on the internet to promote your game.

Finally, this pitch deck template from Bubble Games Interactive, although intended for indie devs looking for funding, is a great place to start thinking through and put some structure around your public-facing “elevator pitch” or messaging, which as discussed above, is a crucial to any marketing you decide to undertake.

Written by Melina Papadopoulos, Director of Marketing for HeroEngine

Fixing Digital Gaming

heroengine — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:50:50 +0000

Are we going about making online games the wrong way? Neil Harris considers the medium’s future

They are doing it wrong again. Every time that a new medium emerges the old guard’s first move is to retrofit. They look at the new medium as a new distribution channel for the same old stuff.

I’m talking about cloud gaming.

When moving pictures were invented the first wave of product were stage plays filmed with a camera that did not move.

Producers viewed movies as a solution to an existing problem – rather than paying to transport the actors and sets from playhouse to playhouse, they could film the play and make copies.

We know now that this was the wrong problem. Movies are something different than plays – cameras can move and film can be edited, and a powerful new medium was created.

Now, video games are going through similar growing pains. Using the internet for distribution reduces the costs of creating and shipping packaged goods, eliminates the ability to resell used goods, and more. The old guard sees digital as the answer to their issues.

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS

And, yes, I’m talking about you too, OnLive and Gaikai. These are great technologies. Very smart people run these companies. They created clever solutions to the problems. The wrong problems.

Online is a different medium. Online games are different from console games. The massively multiplayer genre is different from small squad. Persistent world titles are different from arena-based ones.

People have been building online games for many years on a smaller scale. The business was not small because it was inferior to console, but because the technology had not yet advanced to the point where the online medium’s strengths were available to everyone.

It’s not about moving digital bits from the publishers to the players; it’s about connecting the players to each other. It’s about an ongoing stream of new content.
It’s TV versus movies.

Publishers create games the way movie studios create major motion pictures – a years-long expensive process that requires huge up-front marketing.

The best online games are more episodic – because the publisher maintains an ongoing connection to the player. The best games create a continuous stream of content. There is always something new.

A movie lasts 90-to-120 minutes; a TV series has 1,000 minutes of programming per season and a console game has 50-to-100 hours of play, whilst people play online games for that many hours in a single month, and then for years.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Some social games studios are getting there. We can’t just retrofit old games and shove them through new pipes. That doesn’t take advantage of the strengths of the medium.

What about World of Warcraft? What about Zynga? I think they are not there yet.

The issue I see with WoW is that they release content more like movie studios release sequels, with updates every year or so.

Zynga does a beautiful job testing and polishing its game systems for launch, but the flow of new content doesn’t keep up with the most active players – each title peaks in a month and then go into a long decline.

Social gaming, just like social media, is about engagement, and studios like Zynga fall short.

The Answer? Online games need frequent updates and constant interaction with players.

It is not my purpose to harp on about the direction the industry is heading; I am just offering a perspective from my years of experience in the space.

I spend my days working with the HeroEngine team making sure our technology fits the needs of online. We built our technology platform to support easy updating of content, rapid prototyping and development, and the kind of massively multiplayer interaction that is only possible in this medium.

THE NEW REPUBLIC

I am not placing a risky bet. I’ve seen too many waves of new technologies arrive. The pattern repeats. There are always very well financed companies that are well connected to the previous technology wave who develop major solutions that get it all wrong.

Let’s see how things develop. Let’s see if Star Wars: the Old Republic gets it right. Its developers started the project by licensing HeroEngine, so as to be able to take advantage of the rapid prototyping and easy updating our technology offers.

If SWTOR can do things like stream constant new updates and find ways of consistantly engaging players, they’ll be at the forefront of helping to push the industry in a new and exciting direction.

There are more than 1,000 teams building major and indie games on HeroEngine, using the new free HeroCloud service.

I see a huge wave of new games coming out over the next year and beyond that will change the nature of games, by making them better, more fun and leveraging the strengths that only connected online games can have.

It’s a new way to play.

by Neil Harris, President & COO of HeroEngine

Reprinted from Develop-online.net

HeroEngine Technology, Critical to SWTOR’s Successful Launch

heroengine — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:29:05 +0000

HeroEngine Technology, Critical to Star Wars: The Old Republic’s Successful Launch Now Used by Thousands of Game Developers

LONDON–(January 16, 2011)– On December 20, 2011 the highly anticipated game from Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA – News)/BioWareTM, Star WarsTM: The Old RepublicTM, was released to the wider public. Importantly, this also marks the first release of a major game built using the HeroEngineTM, an integrated development platform for building online games.

The HeroEngine originally was designed with huge multiplayer scalable games such as the Star Wars MMO in mind. BioWare made its decision to build this complex, large scale game on the HeroEngine foundation because of its superior, integrated offering of development tools that provide live collaborative development and real-time updates, dramatically streamlining the process of building online games.

When Idea Fabrik Plc. (Boerse Berlin symbol GB00B61CVK31, TI4.BE) acquired the technology from Simutronics in 2010, Alex Shalash, Idea Fabrik’s Chairman and co-founder saw a great opportunity to bring innovation in both technology and services to the broader online game development space. Shalash said, “We saw HeroEngine as a very powerful toolset where through some changes in technology and additions of complementary services we could provide a new business model for smaller game studios in both the MMO and Social Game markets.”

In a matter of months, Idea Fabrik launched the “HeroCloudTM” service developed to provide continuously updated HeroEngine technology in combination with a new service layer designed for the needs of medium and smaller game studios. HeroCloud also supports developers post-launch with hosting and bandwidth as well as global billing and marketing solutions. HeroCloud is free to use for developers, and applies a revenue sharing model upon game launch.

There are already thousands of developers using HeroCloud and according to President and COO Neil Harris, “Developers are seeing a significantly reduced time to market. The Star Wars MMO was a major, multi-year undertaking, but other MMO games have shipped on our platform in as little as 15 months.”

The HeroCloud has been available to the wider public for only a few weeks as a free download from the website. For more information about HeroCloud, visit the official site at heroengine.com.

About Idea Fabrik:

Idea Fabrik is an industry leading online games company. The company licenses its HeroEngine game development technology platform to dozens of studios worldwide for online games which include Electronic Arts / Bioware’s MMO title, Star Wars: The Old Republic. Idea Fabrik also provides the HeroCloud managed service, offering to thousands of independent developers low-cost access to the HeroEngine technology. For more information about Idea Fabrik, including details about the company’s online game development studios across the globe, visit the official website at ideafabrik.com.

Safe Harbor: Statements contained in this news release, other than those identifying historical facts, constitute ‘forward- looking statements’. Such forward-looking statements relating to the Company’s future expectations, including but not limited to revenues and earnings, technology efficacy, strategies and plans, are subject to safe harbors protection. Actual Company results and performance may be materially different from any future results, performance, strategies, plans, or achievements that may be expressed or implied by any such forward-looking statements. The Company disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

STAR WARS and related properties are trademarks in the United States and/or in other countries of Lucasfilm Ltd. and/or its affiliates.

BioWareTM is a Label of Electronic Arts Inc.

5 MINUTES OF FUN CHALLENGE!

heroengine — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:04:48 +0000

The guidelines are simple. Design and develop an original, 5-minute playable online game using the HeroEngine.

Create a video of your game and submit it to us by February 12, 2012 at 11:59 PM EST to 5minfun@heroengine.com and be entered for a chance to showcase your game at GDC this year, along with up to 5 passes to GDC and either a hotel room for the duration of the expo or $500 if you can’t make it to the show.

Your game can be as simple or complicated as you’d like. Ultimately, we’re looking for fun, innovative and original games– so don’t hold back! Throw together anything you want, just make it fun! White boxes, stick figures and everything in between counts.

Check out the details below to learn how to compete.

To talk about the challenge, visit the official HeroEngine forum post thread.

How to Submit

1. Game Video. Create a video of your game and upload it to the video service website of your choice. Then cut and paste the website link and send it to 5minfun@heroengine.com.

2. Game Synopsis: Create a game synopsis that includes:

Game title. Make it original and memorable (30 characters max)
Game description. Tell us about your game in 10,000 characters or less. English only, please.
Up to 3 screenshots. Capture the action and unique style of your game as accurately as possible, showing only finished artwork and graphics. JPEGs only, 2MB max each.

Rules

Your game can have no more than 5 minutes of playtime. Don’t send us your entire MMO and tell us to only play for 5 minutes, this contest is for games designed around the concept of a 5 minute game.

Your game must be created and built using the HeroEngine.

You may draw on concepts that you have thought about or worked on before. Make sure you have the legal right to use anything in your game — don’t recreate Pacman!

Entrants can be individuals or part of a larger team. There are no restrictions on team size. Entrants must be 13 years of age or older.

Click here for official contest rules.

Prize for Winning Entry

Winning Game will be showcased at GDC at our HeroEngine booth
Up to 5 passes will be given to the winning team to come join us at GDC and mingle with press
A hotel room for 3 nights for the duration of the GDC expo OR $500 if you can’t make it to the show
Winning game will be promoted on our site

Picking Winners

Games will be judged according to originality, creativity and playability. Winners will be contacted via e-mail and announced on or around February 13, 2011.

How This Came About

As part of our mission to break all the barriers to online creative game development, we are strong supporters of the independent games movement and aspire to create opportunities for game developers to showcase their skills, and launch their games and careers to the next level.

Looking to build a Social Game? Our Social Ref Game is up and running!

heroengine — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:42:57 +0000

We’re excited to debut our first reference world for HeroCloud developers!

Why Are We Building These Reference Worlds?

We are building these reference worlds to provide developers using HeroEngine with example implementations of systems that would be necessary to operate various types of games. Our first reference world is designed to help social game developers build massive online asynchronous social games. The social ref world can be accessed by anyone with a HeroBlade client installed on their computers. Take a look at some additional screenshots below to get a closer look.

These reference worlds, are by no means a complete game beyond the small amount of gameplay we’re providing. However, the core systems are all there in this social reference game: persistent player farms, friends system, task system, object placement and interaction. The Demo Social Game is a proof of concept illustrating the use of HeroEngine to create the kind of social game one might find on social networking sites like Facebook or hosted independently across the web. Styled as a common farm game clone, its primary goal is to provide examples of art, programming and game logic that could be used to facilitate the creation of real social games of your own design.

Social Ref Wiki is also up

We’ve also just completed the HE-Wiki for the social ref game to help you digest and learn about how the engine works for social games.

The contents of the wiki include:

Overview of the Art
Overview of the World Building
Overview of Scripting Work Done
Session-based Gameplay
Character System/Character Creation
Sample Game Systems
Same Isometric Camera
Sample Input System

What’s Next?

Over the next several months we’ll be rolling out other reference worlds for our developers. Next up, an FPS game followed by a Space Sim, then a turn based strategy game. We’ll then probably go back and refine some of these reference worlds, work on some higher level systems and add additional genres.

This same team creating these reference worlds is also preparing to become available to strike team projects that are far along in their production and could benefit from work and insight of a seasoned group of HeroEngine developers. If you are interested in our strike team services, please do not hesitate to contact Cooper at heroengine dot com.

SWTOR is Live!

heroengine — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 03:49:29 +0000

SWTOR: EA’s biggest game to date

After more than five years in production and as much as $200 million dollars thrown into the game, StarWars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) was released at midnight today. That makes SWTOR EA’s biggest game to date. According to VentureBeat, as many as 1.5 million players may already be playing the game since it became available to beta players on December 13th. If the media blitz today around SWTOR will be any been any indication, the highly anticipated MMO is set to be a pretty big deal in the MMO space for years to come.

The build-Up…

Over the last few days there has been a lot of build-up across international media sources about the SWTOR release. This morning, BioWare founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk dressed up in Jedi robes, along with a contingent of Stormtroopers to ring the opening bell of the NY stock exchange this morning. The New York times ran an article on Monday vetting SWTOR against World of Warcraft, as “the first legitimate competition that World of Warcraft” came out six years ago. The Wall Street Journal touted in an article that EA is giving Activision a run for it’s money if all goes well. EA executive Frank Gibeau estimated that with 1 million subscribers, SWTOR would break even.

TV networks ran interviews with EA executive Gibeau today inquring about the game. According to Gibeau, SWTOR has over 9 million hours of gameplay, enough to entertain players for years. And according to Gibeau, EA plans to run the SWTOR game with new gameplay for at least ten years. When asked why they choose December 20th as the release date, Gibeau answered that this time of year all the high school and college kids are home and spending hours online – which means they’ll have plenty of time to get addicted to the game.

…And The Reviews Are In

Our executives remember vividly the initial introduction of our engine to BioWare, and we’re very excited to see the game finally launch today. Initial reviews have given the game very high reviews snd a bunch of us here in the office are definitely excited to really get into the game over the holidays. We’d love to hear from you: does SWTOR have the makings of a blockbuster hit? For those of you that have played the game, what do you think? Does it deserve the consistent 9 out of 10 ratings being given by across the internet?

Highlights from Game Connection

heroengine — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:20:21 +0000

Last week HeroEngine attended Game Connection, a networking style conference that brings developers, publishers and tech providers together. The event took place in Paris’ business district, right by the Grande Arche, a very cool building with unique architecture. More than 400 companies attended from about 40 countries.

This was our first year attending and we met with some current HeroEngine developers, demoed our tools to some interested studios from Poland, Canada, Spain and other countries. We also met with some tech and middleware providers to see how we could further improve to HeroEngine toolset and developer experience.

Game Connection uses a meeting application to allow participating companies to schedule their meetings in advance. The idea is that before the conference begins, you schedule your meetings beforehand to allow you to get the most out of the conference. Because our booth was located right in front of the coffee bar, we also had plenty of other people also stopping by our booth. Other highlights from the conference: the grilled rabbit served for lunch one day (only one of us was bold enough to try the local delicacy) and getting to see the Eiffel Tower’s sparkling nights by night one day.

Next up on the conference circuit? We are already busy preparing for GDC San Fransisco in early March! We hope to see many of you there and will pass along more details of our booth location closer to the show date.

HeroEngine Meets StarWars

heroengine — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:20:16 +0000

Hero’s Journey

Long ago in a company far far away, we were building a game called Hero’s Journey. It was an ambitious game with many wonderful features. We had our own special way of building games based on a unique process that we had developed while building pioneering online games like GemStone and DragonRealms. Our goal was to build a modern graphical MMO RPG that allowed our team of designers to continually add new content into the game – new areas, new spells, whatever they could think of.

We took an early version of our game to the legendary 2005 E3 show. We rented a small room in the back of a small hall, very far away from the giant multimedia extravaganza exhibits of EA, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and the rest of the empires. We set up meetings with people we knew, members of the press, friends in the industry, and publishers. We hoped to build enough interest to get a publisher to provide enough funding to expand the team and finish the game.

A few people got very excited, but not the way we planned.

“I need this.”

We showed the game to our friend Gordon Walton. We had known Gordon for many years, back in the days when he worked for Kesmai, our late great competitor. Gordon had since been with Sony for its Star Wars Galaxies game among other places. He knows games, especially online games.

Not only did we show him the game, but because Gordon knew us so well we showed him the development tools we had built around our special process – building the game online, in realtime, with tools for the entire team all in one package.

“I need this,” said Gordon. “I am about to start a special project and these tools will let us build and prototype fast and get something running in a hurry.” Gordon is not an excitable guy by nature but this had his adrenaline flowing. “This is just what I need! I want to license your engine.”

We had thought about offering our engine and tools to developers but we had expected that we would have to actually ship a game first, like Epic did with Unreal Tournament before they licensed the original Unreal Engine.

“It’s not productized yet,” we told Gordon. “There are whole sections of code that is only roughed in and not optimized for performance or security. And there are very few comments and very little documentation.”

He didn’t care. “We are going to have tons of engineers. We can finish it ourselves. We’re going to want to modify your source code for our special project anyway.”

BioWare Licenses HeroEngine For…

A few months after the show we heard from Gordon again. He was now the co-head of a new online game studio in Austin as part of BioWare. This was very impressive. Not only was Gordon a solid guy but BioWare was (and still is!) at the very top tier of game developers, the kind of company that made games that were always great. Soon the deal was done – soon meaning after months of painful negotiations and many weeks of meetings with teams of engineers who examined every line of our source code and interrogated our engineers. We were concerned over their making major changes to our engine, but we loved the size of the check that came with the deal.

A year or so later, it became clear to us that BioWare was building a Star Wars MMO. We had to keep the secret for another couple of years but it was incredibly exciting. If you watch some of the videos of BioWare developing SW:TOR, you can see HeroEngine and its unique tools and process being used by the massive team on this incredible project.

Our role began and ended long ago, in a company far far away, but we’re still excited over the part we have played in helping BioWare (now part of EA, of course) bring its vision to life.

by Neil Harris, President and COO of HeroEngine