Hero-U - Funded! & Update On Combat

The Hero's Quest spiritual successor Hero-U reached its funding goal of 100k$. At the moment the Kickstarter is at 110k$. A couple of stretch goals have been met, the next one is at 120k$ with 14 hours to go.

The Coles also added an update to explain Hero-U's combat system.

Action Game Combat - Too Fast

Computers are great at the dice-rolling and rules memorization parts, but we also expect much more of them. Combat has to feel involving and take a reasonable amount of time; animation and special effects need to show what's going on. No more spending 10 minutes on one round of the fight. Taken to extremes, combat becomes purely arcade - mash the buttons faster to do more damage. A one second cooldown or 300 millisecond latency can feel like an eternity in an MMO game.

Even our Quest for Glory games used real-time combat. We tried to make it interesting and have a good reason to parry and dodge, but most players just kept hitting the Attack button. We constantly tweaked with the combat rules and ended up with a different combat system in each game. We were trying to find the Holy Grail of combat that was fun, fair, fast, and rewarded players more for gaining character skill than for having twitchy trigger fingers.

Balancing a real-time game is really (pun intended) hard. Some of those games that seemed pretty fun at the time are now completely unplayable on faster computers - the enemies react too quickly. We want to make games that will be just as fun in 20 years as they are now.

 Visit the Hero-U Kickstarter page to find out why the Coles claim the Hero-U combat is "just right".