the Official Hero Interactive Blog

Believe it or not, we’re still working on Bubble Tanks Arenas here at the Hero Interactive office.  We still have a lot of work to do, but we’re making a lot of headway.  At this point I can safely promise you that BTA will be coming out in the first half of 2010 (that’s anytime between now and July) so those of you predicting a 2012 release can adjust your estimates accordingly.  :)  As we get closer to the release, I’ll narrow it down to a more precise date, giving you the exact month, later the week, and still later the actual day of release.

We’re working on actual gameplay now.  Moving around, shooting at stuff.

Q: Can you have multiple secondary weapons?  How do you control them?
A: Yes, weapons are separated into two categories: primary and secondary. Holding down the mouse will fire all primary weapons, pressing Spacebar will activate all secondary weapons at the same time.

Q: Can I make a tank as big as the BFT from Bubble Tanks 2?
A: Class 6 tanks can even be bigger.

Below is a screenshot of what the Arena Creator screen will look like.  You are able to create an Arena with up to 10 Bubblefields.  An Arena can have up to 10 different types of enemies in it.  Once you select an Enemy to go into a Bubblefield, the Quick Key at the bottom will allow you to see a thumbnail of enemies available and clicking on it will add 1 enemy of that type to your current Bubblefield.

When someone downloads your Arena, they not only get that Arena, but they also will automatically download all the enemies that are part of it.

More to come later!

Once again…WOW!  Our latest BT game, Bubble Tanks Tower Defense, now has over three million plays on ArmorGames alone!  Thank you all for rocking our socks yet again!

If you haven’t played BTTD yet, click here!  You won’t regret it…

We’ve gone quite a while without any updates on StormWinds: The Mary Reed Chronicles, so I thought I’d go ahead and give you some updated news on the game. For those of you who missed our initial announcement, SW:MRC will be a Point-and-Click game, NOT the strategy/shooter hybrid that the traditional StormWinds games are.  There’s been a lot of confusion about that.  Also, a lot of people have (falsely) assumed that all future games in the StormWinds series will be Point-and-Clicks and that we’ll never do another standard SW game- Wrong!  There is a lot of very cool and exciting stuff about the StormWinds world that you guys don’t know about, and we wanted to do something different to show you more of the world.  But you can be sure that there will be more classic StormWinds action at some point in the future, so rest easy.

As I said, StormWind:MRC is going to be a Point-and-Click game.  You solve puzzles on the screen by clicking on objects in the correct order.  Some puzzles will require a timing element to solve them.  The game features some amazing artwork by our in-house artist Kristin Chapman, and she tells me all the artwork is nearly completed.  We still have music, sound fx, programming, text boxes, and other story elements to integrate, so it’ll be a little longer yet before the game is completed.  I expect SW:MRC to come out after BTA.

As far as the story goes, the game will take place about 3-4 years after the events of StormWinds: The Lost Campaigns.  At the end of SW:TLC the nation of Agloria had been destroyed by the massive armada of Demo.  However, through your valiant leadership, you were able to buy time for Princess Anne to escape. Years later, the Demons still control the country and are frequently looting towns and capturing Aglorians as slaves.  But hope still lives, a young woman by the name of Mary Reed leads a rebel movement to continue the epic battle against Demo to free her countrymen.  In SW:MRC, you’ll follow Mary and her robotic sidekick Rusty as they set out on their first legendary adventure- the hijacking and theft of a massive Demon airship to be used as their pirate flagship.

Remember the airship from SW:TLC that shot the massive lasers?  You’ll be stealing that. 

And now for some art:

[Edit: The bottom concept piece is by Ecky Oesjady]

Eric, our lead developer!  Hope you have a super great day, Eric! Here he is enjoying a game of Spiderball.

Happy belated Valentine’s Day!  Hope you all had lots of candy!

We just found out that we’ve been voted into a finalist position for the 2009 Mochi Awards!

A couple of weeks ago we mentioned that you could nominate your favorite games for a Mochi Award and that Bubble Tanks Tower Defense was a contender for the best Strategy game of 2009.  We must have gotten lots of nominations!  Here’s yet another huge thanks to each and every one of you who played the game, commented on the game, nominated the game, and voted for the game.  We are truly fortunate to have such awesome fans.

The winners of the Mochi Awards will be announced at the Flash Gaming Summit next month!  We’ll keep you updated on the results.

I just realized the other day that we haven’t had a poll since the end of 2009!  I guess my brain fell out or something.  Sorry!

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Since Bubble Tanks Arenas Update #2 seemed to be successful, I thought I’d hold up my promise to do a follow-up post with more answers to your questions submitted via the comments section.  I’m not going to try to answer all questions here, but just a few.  Onward!

Q: Will you be able to face other people’s tanks?
A: Yes, sort of.  If I create enemies and arenas and upload them to the server, other players will be able to fight the enemies I created.  If I create an avatar tank (player controlled), you can’t fight that with your avatar tank.

Q: What is special about creating Arenas?
A: Arenas let you create Bubblefields with your own custom created tanks.  If my friend John plays an arena that I created, his game will automatically download all of the enemies I created as well so he can fight them in the arena I made.  You can determine how many of each enemy you want and combinations you’d like, but you can’t determine the starting positions of enemy tanks.

Q: Can I make a tank on one site such as ArmorGames.com and then load it up on another site such as Kongregate.com?
A: As long as both sites allow us to connect to our server (the above named sites will), and as long as you upload your tank to our server, then yes, you will be able to download your tank on other sites.

[Edit] You can also simply copy and paste the Tank Code (TC) from wherever and paste it into the game to load a tank.

Q: If I sell a weapon will I get all my Gun Points (GP) back?
A: Yes.  GP is more like a limit to how strong you can make your tank.  You can totally swap out weapons.  If you don’t like one 3 GP gun, you can trade it in to get a different one or even 3 separate 1 GP guns.

Q: If you save a custom tank will you have to write down the number to retrieve it or does it also save locally?
A: There are a lot of ways to get tanks.  First of all, when you save a custom tank, it will save locally.  It will also give you the Tank Code (TC), the actual data, that you can copy and paste into notepad to save or email to a friend, whatever.  You then also have the option to save the tank to our server on top of that, if you feel it’s a particularly awesome creation.  Tanks saved to the server are issued ID #’s.

When people load tanks, they can either enter in a tank ID number to load a specific tank, they can copy and paste the Tank Code into a box and load it that way, or they can just browse our server and see what other people have made.  If they see something that looks cool it’s just one click to save that tank to your local machine so you don’t have to browse for it again or remember the ID number.

Q: Will guns rotate with the tank or rotate independently?
A: Both, it depends on a few things.  Some guns NEVER rotate, i.e. the massive cannon from BT2.  Typically though when you’re talking about basic and heavy cannons, it depends on the size of your tank.  There are 6 size classes.  Tanks sized class 3 or lower will not have rotating cannons.  If you have a gun that points backwards, it’ll always shoot behind you.  If you are class 4 or larger, then your guns will rotate.  Really large tanks may also have the option of getting weapons that have auto targeting enabled- basic cannon auto turrets as they were in BT2.

Q: What do you mean by “the money we receive” in the question regarding Extra Content in the previous Q&A?
A: BTA will be free to play, but it will have Extra Content.  EC will be free to play, but you will have to play it on ArmorGames.com.  ArmorGames pays Hero Interactive to make the Extra Content because it drives more traffic to their site.  Although EC can be frustrating, we like it because it allows us to make a LOT more stuff for BTA (and make the game in the first place) while at the same time making everything free for the players.

Q: Will there be a way to get infinite GP and BP?
A: Probably not.

Q: Will Arenas keep track of scores and time’s of completion?
A: Of course!

Q: How is tank speed determined?
A: Both armor and speed are determined by the Class of your tank.  Class is determined by the size of your tank.  The bigger you make your tank, the more health it will have but the slower it will be.  Starting the game, you will be only able to make Class 1 tanks.  As you progress, you’ll be able to unlock larger classes.  Also, if you’re wondering why you’d want to make a small tank when you have class 6 unlocked, some weapons and parts will have class restrictions.  For example, a massive cannon might only be able to go on Class 5 and higher tanks.  A piercing sniper cannon might only be able to go on a class 2 or smaller tank.  So there are advantages to going either way.

Q: Will there be many new weapons?
A: Probably not unfortunately.  This round, we’re mainly focusing on the ability to simply create tanks and share them.  In future versions of the Bubble Tanks series (aka, BT3), we’ll be focusing mainly on making many new weapons and parts for your tanks.