With Twitter abuzz with taunts and challenges and the Thrifty Nerd staff’s productivity brought to a halt by the release of Hero Academy, we decided to take a look behind the scenes at Robot Entertainment to see what went into the crafting of our latest handheld, tactical addiction.

“I have always loved tactics games like Vandal Hearts, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Disgaea,” Marcin Szymanski, lead programmer and designer of Hero Academy commented. “When we at Robot started talking about potentially making a smaller game, I jumped at the chance and put together a pitch with a few other tactics fans here.”

Their primary focus was providing an entertaining multiplayer experience, with a level of polish found in games such as Plants vs Zombies and the WarCraft series, according to Szymanski. The possibility of reaching a new audience, one that may not have a console or gaming PC, but do have a smartphone really interested the team and made iOS the platform of choice.

With the platform chosen, the team set out to with the goal of making “a multiplayer tactics game that anyone can play,” despite the fact that PvP tactics game are traditionally far from simplistic, according to Szymanski.

This was by no means an easy task, he continued. The team spent a large amount of its initial resources on designing and refining the base gameplay, throwing out what didn’t fit the goal the team had set out to achieve. The fruits of their labor included the undo and replay systems that allow players to easily stay actively engaged in a dozen games simultaneously, a key component in any game that players may go hours or days between moves.

The next challenge the team had to tackle was balancing their ambitions with the technical limitations of the hardware and the limited screen real estate available on iPhones. “We needed our units to be a certain size so that you could read their animations and upgrades correctly, but not so big that you could only have a 2×2 grid filling up the screen,” he said. “So we were actually very constrained in our board dimensions; for example, four rows was too few for good strategy, and six rows have resulted in units that were probably too small.”

The game wasn’t the only thing scaled down for the Robot Entertainment team with this release. The team choose to limit the initial launch to Canada to iron out any unforeseen problems that they didn’t discover during in-house testing as well as test their servers under the load of the Great White North.

The team isn’t content to sit idling with the game released, more content and improvements already in the pipeline. They are currently working on an iPad version, exploring the possibility of releasing on other platforms and looking at the feedback from the community for additional functionality to add to the game in the coming months.

“We are almost done with the third team and have begun tech work on the fourth, and so far the playtest results have been very positive,” Szymanski said. “We want to be a little careful with how quickly we change up the formula for future teams, but we also want to make them feel very different from one another while remaining balanced.”

With everything the team still has planned for Hero Academy, office productivity won’t be returning to normal anytime in the near future.

 

Tags: Hero Academy, Interview, iOS, Robot Entertainment