It's a process we see often. A high-profile developer gets shut down, and several smaller developers start up. Robot Entertainment is one such example, forming after the closure of Ensemble Studios (of Age of Empires fame) by several of its founders. After releasing Age of Empires Online and Orcs Must Die!, their first attempt on iOS has hit the ground running, with Hero Academy gaining popularity via word-of-mouth, backed-up by excellent review scores.
Despite Hero Academy's foundation in Robot Entertainment's strong strategy pedigree, it was still a departure for the studio, marking its first attempt at turn-based and asynchronous play. As with all strategy titles, walking the balancing tightrope is key, which is where Marcin Szymanski, lead programmer and designer of Hero Academy said his RTS experience came into play.
"Balance, as a design goal, is certainly not trivialized ... anytime you have an asymmetric match-up, there's extra risk of having missed some crucial situation that severely tips the scales towards one side or the other," he said. "We thought we would be able to bring over our instincts and various techniques from our RTS games. As we add more teams, we'll continue evaluating and adjusting so that we can still reach that goal."
Hero Academy's asynchronous gameplay is a mechanic that largely plays to the strength of iOS devices, and it's one that Robot Entertainment wanted to "fully embrace from the very beginning." Perfecting this took a lot of pre-planning in the design phase, to help ensure that players "never really had to remember the last half dozen turns, or had to plan that many turns ahead," said Szymanski.
The developer also added several features to boost accessibility, such as the reset button, which allows the player to try out multiple series of turns each round before committing their turn. This contrasts many turn based games where you commit to a unit's actions as soon as you make your move. "This can be pretty unforgiving and intimidating, especially for new players," he noted.
Having had plenty of PC and console development experience, with Age of Empires Online and Orcs Must Die!, Szymanski feels that asynchronous play is something that faces a whole different array of design challenges on that side, praising it as one of the best reasons Hero Academy works on iOS.
"[Asynchronous play] allows you to check in various times throughout the day and play in small chunks," he said. "I don't think it maps as well to PC and consoles without changes. In both of those cases, people sit down explicitly to play for longer periods of time. Spending a few seconds on a turn, submitting it, and then waiting for your opponent to get back to the game wouldn't work as well there."
Hero Academy has little in the way of explicit tutorials, but gives the player enough of a basic gameplay premise, then lets them explore the game's systems on their own. There is a detailed game guide and video tips from one of the studio's best players, plus help options in-game, but Szymanski says he's always looking into new ways to make the game easier to understand and play.
Hero Academy is a multiplayer-only game, and while a single player tutorial was thought about, they decided to leave it to the player to explore the game's systems after a basic rundown of the gameplay premise.
Facebook integration was chosen to aid in multiplayer matchmaking, opting to forego the iOS' inbuilt Game Center functionality. This was the case as Robot Entertainment is actively working on an Android version of the game, for release "in the not-too-distant future," according to Szymanski.
"When that comes out, we are going to support cross-platform games ... We looked at several options for supporting this, and ultimately determined that the way to give our players on multiple platforms the best experience was to build our own servers and matchmaking system, then allowing them to use the social networks they already use every day - Twitter and Facebook - to connect with their friends."
Robot Entertainment had some experience with the free-to-play model after developing Age of Empires Online for PC, and Hero Academy is following suit. But Robot Entertainment has gone to great lengths to ensure that its micro-transactions don't mess with the game's balance.
"One of the fundamental goals of Hero Academy was that we wanted it to be a game that anybody could play," said Szymanski. "We didn't want to create a microtransaction 'arms race' where players could essentially pay to win. The focus with the teams is around providing alternative strategies and mechanics. This will become more evident over time as we release more teams. Not every team will play exactly the same, but we do a lot of in-studio play-testing every single day to make sure that they're all well-balanced against one another. We're very committed to making the teams different but equal."
Hero Academy offers a wide-range of DLC, from team customization to avatars, to new teams entirely -- of which the Dwarves update has just been released. The dev's fans are giving it a lot of inspiration for new ideas, in addition to the multitude that are already in the developer's collective minds. According to Szymanski, Robot Entertainment is currently working "to nail down a process that will allow us to release a new team every several weeks, while at the same time adding major features to the game."
The latest update also added a new game board, Game Center achievements and leaderboards, balance tweaks and bug fixes. Robot will also be making further "quality of life features", which will endeavor to make the app nicer to use, such as a "next game" button in the recent update, allowing players to go from one game to the next without having to back out to the game list.
"Naturally, we came up with a mountain of ideas when making the game, and we've crystallized the most promising ones into a rough roadmap for future development," he said. "However, it has been extremely valuable to see player's reactions to our gameplay and our team mechanics, and it has resulted in shifting around our various priorities to address things sooner rather than later. For example, we moved up the Game Center integration to be included in our first major update."
Suffice to say, Szymanski and the team at Robot Entertainment are very satisfied with the reception Hero Academy has received since launch, and have been enjoying seeing players dissect the game's mechanics to offer "constructive feedback".
"In the end, we made a game that we wanted to play and that we thought others would enjoy as well, so we want to incorporate all of the feedback we possibly can as we shape the game's future."
What on earth gave you the idea that this is "pay to win"? What a lame, ignorant, and inflammatory accusation.
You can't buy a single thing in the game that gives you even the slightest bit of advantage. The two armies you can buy are well-balanced and have tons of weaknesses, and everything else is cosmetic.
Please fix the first person advantage, when you have symmetric maps that are this small the first person gets an incredible advantage by grabbing land on his first move.
We're watching the balance pretty closely, including first-to-move advantages. While there may be a small advantage there, particularly among the very top players, we aren't seeing a really significant advantage in the first move so far. That said, the Dwarves release shakes things up a lot. It'll take a few days at least for people to learn how to fight against their aggressive tactics.
That said, we'll continue to watch the balance numbers in our own games and in the stats, and will make more adjustments as needed.
The dwarves are great! From a design standpoint I prefer the preventative nature of shielding to the strong reactionary healing the other teams have. I think it makes the pacing of matches much quicker and lets you capitalize on mistakes more. I don't want to play 50 round matches across 7 days. I know you're keen on this because the dwarves are specially built to be healing formation bunker busters. Thanks for the dwarves.
Do you have any suggested house rules for eliminating FPA? I understand the reluctance to update the game when the majority of players are not experiencing FPA so maybe a forum post with restrictions for the first player would be enough for the hardcore people suffering the most.
I really love Hero Academy and I'm excitedly playing the Dwarves since their release. I wonder if the solution to FPA is a reduction of potential actions on the first turn of the game. Other turn-based games like Magic use the skipping of resources (not drawing a card) to somewhat account for the first turn advantage.
FPA really seems the most oppressive when someone draws Archer (or Grenadier) in their opening hand and runs them to a central Attack bonus tile (then equip items or deploy a healer). The opposing player can't move into position, kill, AND stomp in the same turn, putting them pinned on their side for the first few turns. Perhaps if player 1 only had 3-4 actions on the very first turn, this would edge the balance.
Overall that's mostly just addressing a minor concern, I think the game is incredibly balanced given how deep it is, and the recent balance changes were great. Void Monks were my favorite unit before, and now they're just awesome. Thanks and keep it up!
I've been playing the game quite a bit and from my experience I don't think the FPA is that big of a deal. The first person to move shows some of their cards so the 2nd player can react accordingly. Just comes with experience.
My only issue is the inventory. I've tried exchanging items and received the same thing back. Not sure if this has been fixed in the latest update. It would be nice (when exchanging an item) if you could have a choice between 2 items, or even destroy 2 items to create anything you want. That would be crazy!
Overall, very fun game and worth playing.
I'd pay way more money for a single player version.
You can't buy a single thing in the game that gives you even the slightest bit of advantage. The two armies you can buy are well-balanced and have tons of weaknesses, and everything else is cosmetic.
Please fix the first person advantage, when you have symmetric maps that are this small the first person gets an incredible advantage by grabbing land on his first move.
We're watching the balance pretty closely, including first-to-move advantages. While there may be a small advantage there, particularly among the very top players, we aren't seeing a really significant advantage in the first move so far. That said, the Dwarves release shakes things up a lot. It'll take a few days at least for people to learn how to fight against their aggressive tactics.
That said, we'll continue to watch the balance numbers in our own games and in the stats, and will make more adjustments as needed.
Do you have any suggested house rules for eliminating FPA? I understand the reluctance to update the game when the majority of players are not experiencing FPA so maybe a forum post with restrictions for the first player would be enough for the hardcore people suffering the most.
FPA really seems the most oppressive when someone draws Archer (or Grenadier) in their opening hand and runs them to a central Attack bonus tile (then equip items or deploy a healer). The opposing player can't move into position, kill, AND stomp in the same turn, putting them pinned on their side for the first few turns. Perhaps if player 1 only had 3-4 actions on the very first turn, this would edge the balance.
Overall that's mostly just addressing a minor concern, I think the game is incredibly balanced given how deep it is, and the recent balance changes were great. Void Monks were my favorite unit before, and now they're just awesome. Thanks and keep it up!
My only issue is the inventory. I've tried exchanging items and received the same thing back. Not sure if this has been fixed in the latest update. It would be nice (when exchanging an item) if you could have a choice between 2 items, or even destroy 2 items to create anything you want. That would be crazy!
Overall, very fun game and worth playing.
I'd pay way more money for a single player version.