I would like to take a moment to announce to those who have interest that our team (Ninjacore Studios) is in the midst making the next generation of Custom Hero Line Wars. We are trying to keep a pretty tight lid on the project, but we have agreed that is past due that we post some information about it. So here is what you guys can be ready to expect from our map, in addition from the standard HLW map features on SC2 release day.
Heroes
6 heroes with 3 different selectable specializations
a Talent Tree (Similar to WoW)
The ability to put points into individual attributes (possibly unique attributes for each hero)
Unit Summoning
3 different summoning races a player can choose from.
Each race has its own unique set of advantages and disadvantages
Gameplay
4 players per team
Teamwork and cooperation will be a huge part of HLW Universe
Selectable difficulties
Finally in some general notes I'd like to say that our version of HLWs is going to diverge from previous versions of HLW where good teamwork and cooperation were not always a necessity for winning. In many versions HLW was all about the massive income gain ( basically he with the largest income would win). While we are not getting rid of income by any means we are adjusting the mechanics where not only income is a factor but so is how you and your team work together. We feel this will bring and added element of fun and energy to the game which was lacking before.
Anyway there will be more updates to follow including some screens and videos (hopefully within the coming week). However, most of our time is spent working on the map making it hard to post updates. The reason we did make a thread is we enjoy hearing some feedback from everyone here and any suggestions you might have in what can make a more fun and complete HLW style map. We are also completely insane about bringing the highest level of quality to this project so if you post terrible ideas we reserve the right to refuse the idea and privately laugh about it. =)
PROGRESS REPORT:
HERO ABILITIES
Arcolisk: FINISHED!
Brood Mother: FINISHED!
Elemental Sorcerer = 6 of 7 finished
Experimental ACU: FINISHED!
Pharoah: FINISHED!
Tech Marine: FINISHED!
HERO TALENTS
Arcolisk: 0 of 18 finished
Brood Mother: 18 of 18 FINISHED!
Experimental ACU: 0 of 18 Finished
Elemental Sorcerer: 0 of 18 finished
Pharoah: 0 of 18 finished
Tech Marine: 18 of 18 FINISHED!
BASE SUMMONING UNITS
Zerg: 14 of 14 FINISHED!
Protoss: 5 of 14 finished
Terran: 14 of 14 FINISHED!
TIER 2 (First Evolution) SUMMONING UNITS
Zerg: 14 of 14 FINISHED!
Protoss: 0 of 14 finished
Terran: 14 of 14 of FINISHED!
TIER 3 (Second Evolution) SUMMONING UNITS
Zerg: 14 of 14 FINISHED!
Protoss: 0 of 14 finished
Terran: 14 of 14 of FINISHED!
SUMMONING UNITS "LEVEL UP" BEHAVIOR
Zerg: 42 of 42 FINISHED!
Protoss: 0 of 42 finished
Terran: 0 42 of finished
UNIT MODIFYING UPGRADES
Zerg: 5 of 5 FINISHED!
Protoss: 0 of 5 finished
Terran: 0 of 5 finished
APPLYING UPGRADES TO UNITS
Zerg: 42 of 42 FINISHED!
Protoss: 0 of 42 finished
Terran: 0 of 42 finished
SUMMON BUILDING UPGRADES
Universal: 3 of 4 finished - Halted until we can find a solution to the ability to upgrade charges. (they are bugged atm)
SUMMON UNITS' ABILITIES UPGRADES
Universal: 0 of 18
Zerg: 0 of 3 finished
Protoss: 0 of 3 finished
Terran: 0 of 3 finished
USER INTERFACE
Hero and summon race selection menu 100% finished
Scoreboards: 15% finished
Talent Tree: 100% FINISHED!
Attribute points menu 100% FINISHED!
Fast on screen linked Action Bars: 30% finished
Skill upgrade Menu: 100% finished
an old video update: here is a video from some time ago, gives an basic idea of what one hero is like.
Here is a brief description of what else we have changed in HLWs. Upgrading to different tier summoning buildings has been replaced with an evolution leveling system
IE a player will specialize into several different units of his choosing, the more he summons that particular unit the stronger it becomes until it evolves into the next tier of that unit and repeats this process. Units are no longer just for generalized damage, they do different things and well has have enough variation that it is important to communicate with your allies and work with which units they are summoning. Ive posted to pictures which show how a unit evolves but all the other units in the building remain the same.
I liked one of those WC3 hero line wars map, where you can use a undead archer to kill and summon units, and add rapid fire capability to do so with greater ease...
Maybe with SC2's units, have a queen that can infest enemies and create broodlings/zerglings/hydralisks out of them or something.
Wow that looks awesome! I would also recommend looking at The Warrior RPG http://www.sc2mapster.com/maps/warrior/ because the UI seems like it would fit in with your ideas. Also I need to ask for more screenshots... great work!
i have a simple question, how do you made the hydralisks that black?
i mean, is there any feature like it was on the wc3 editor, to change color and some kind of brightness on a units pmodel, or is this just a texture modifying?
2 ways you can do it. The guy in charge of the Brood Mother unit decided to do it through triggers so Ill tell you how he did it. In the actions section of triggers there is one called "Send Actor Message To Unit". Specify what you want in case the message you specify is "Set Tint Color". The rest you should be able figure out just be aware that setting the Tint color has some limitations. Because this does not replace the texture color just pastes another color on top you have to play around with it to get the color you would like and sometimes you can't get the color you want. Hope that helps PatchOne.
Our new test release date has been pushed back to the end of august (hopefully). We plan to make a US release and perhaps we can find some volunteers to upload it to the EU and AUS servers then we will try to upload there as well.
I'll take this moment to post some updates though. We have most of the heroes and their abilities finished. only two heroes are left to polish. and of those two we have them about 75-80% done. Creature summons are sadly only about 15% done but most of our priority has been to finish and polish the heroes. Once our focus shifts to the creature summons we can assume fast and rapid completion. we also have settled for only 6 heroes on version 1 releases (I was honestly hoping for more but hero skills and abilities especially when creating them from scratch can be very time consuming.
Our reason for not really keeping everyone up to date on our progress the beta patch blizzard released right before official screwed up close to half the stuff we had completed. I'm sure many other mappers know this as well, but for those just trying to keep an eye on the project I figured it was time to post an update.
Over the next couple of weeks one thing we will need is about 8 or 9 individuals who would be willing to help us beta test the map and help us with balancing issues. With that in mind we will be looking for anyone with outside the box thinking IE (if your first impulse when playing a game/map is to find any exploitable bugs and exploit them we want you). If you are interested just send me a PM and give me your bnet name and I will be more than willing to add you and when the time comes contact you for some help.
also anyone who would like to help with the testing need only have one requirement: Ventrilo and a Mic.
I don't know if you want some more heros but I was working on my own version of a line wars game. I am almost finished with 8 unique heros and I don't know whether or not you would want them. Unfortunately, they are skill point based with 4 levels for 4 skills and 1, 1 level skill. I was going to release a hero pack soon but if you want to take a look at what I've done then I can send you the data.
I understand if you decline. My work is probably of a much lower quality then yours but if nothing else, perhaps you can get some new ideas for skills and heros. If you want, I can also just list all of the heros and their skills and take some screen shots.
I love hero line wars though and your map sounds fantastic. Good luck with it and I can't wait to see it.
With the title being *Custom Hero Line Wars*, is the final version going to contain custom heroes ala WC3 custom hero line wars, Where you picked out your hero, picked the different skills and finally an ultimate, or is it more like ENFOS and other hero line wars?
honestly, either way ill be... satisfied ;P (as long as its released on sea of course :3)
Sorry to take such a long time to reply, we have been busy working on this project. Infact I'm happy to announce that we just completed our first alpha version several days ago and it was very successful with only minor bugs popping up. To answer your question we decided to go with a mixture so to speak. Our heroes have set decided skills but each one is not just one hero because we will be introducing talent trees each hero will have more abilities and options to pick up depending on the tree ge picks.
Now for more news hopefully by the end of the day I'll be able to post up an official progress report in which all here will be able to view our current progress and we will make a good effort to update it once a week.
There are some other exciting things I'd like to start telling everyone interested in this project about. We have been working on this hlws since beta a lot of time was spent just learning the editor, the other part is we just keep coming up with better ideas for this project and so we end up creating more work for the team. I'm going to start reveling some of those ideas today and hopefully later I'll include some pictures. (video we are saving till we move to beta).
First HLWs has always suffered from a replayabilty issues. It has a winning fun initial pull but quickly wears off because of it's overly simple core which was the team that summons the most wins. Our team has been working for months to solve this issue. We believe now we have enough of a new tactical gameplay revision that it now feels far more repayable.
There are several ways we are accomplishing this, some we have already told you about (such as talent trees) and heroes unique playstyle.) after we finished heroes it was time to focus on the summoned units and so without more typing here are the new features you can expect from Custom Hero Line Wars Universe.
1. The traditional unit tiers have been replaced with a leveling and evolution function.
2. Units are not just the same anymore there are real differences in summoned units making it important for each player to work together and individually choose which units he will focus on summoning.
3. An upgrade building is now available to increase certain stats for summoned units.
4. An ability research center now exists for the purpose of attaching abilities onto summoned units. The players will research an ability and then choose which unit it will be attached to.
5. Upgrades which affect the actual the player map are now available (such as randomized spawn locations which create units closer to the enemies portal/castle.
This is only the start of a new level of depth you all can expect from this release, but as always projects of this magnitude take time to complete and polish for max enjoyment. As I said before I'll try and get some pictures up later today or tomorrow. Any questions and comments are welcomed and appreciated.
Posted our official progress report and tacked it onto the first post up top, anyway I hope to update it once or twice a week from now on so everyone can see how things are coming along.
A personal update is that our progress data side with making tiers and tiers of units is starting to speed up, largely to the fact that we finally got a standardized naming convention in place.
Also in the next day or two here I should be posting more pictures possibly even reveling some more of our heroes.
Starting to add some screenshots of the Talent Trees. Starting with the Tech Marine. Put them in the top post. also made sure the progress report is up to date
Sounds great :) So you are working on this since May? o_0 Did not even know you could already create maps back then.
So you implement a ton of new features? Well, then I probably cannot help you with your problems ;). Actually, I played it more safe, my approach is more casual, more like the warcraft hlw maps. However, I am planning on keeping it updated for a long time, I might add some features later on as well ;)
Your concept sounds nice on paper, but I would like to see some more information. You say, you want to encourage teamplay, but how do you do that? Also the announced videos and screenshots would be very nice :D
I see you emphasise dialogs quite much. Is your sending system also based on dialogs?
I didn't want a sending system based on dialogs because as of now there's no way to make that kind of thing lagless, (I like the ability to tap a key if I want to summon units instead of mouse clicking a bunch of times)
Most of the Dialog stuff is for heroes in general
We are lazy about the videos and pictures cause we are always working and I hate to stop working for something that's not productive (even though videos do build some extra interest in the project). We have begun a basic overview video where we will slowly release one video per hero showing off all their talent specialization options and abilities. The current one in the works is the Tech Marine. Can't give anyone a specific date but we are working hard to get it out by the middle of next month.
Okay I also dug up an old old video, I must make mention that pretty much all the stuff in this video has been changed, or modified to where it looks even better but the core of it is still there. It was a crappy rushed video we put out months ago but Ive brought it back and posted it up at the top.
I just realized I wrote this in the wrong threat ;)
Oh and for a more team oriented map, I would actually recommend to re-think the spawning system. If your map wants to be more competitive than casual and really emphasize organized teams, I would DRASTICALLY reduce the amount of sent troups in some way (for example, by adding a food limit for each player or team). This way, killing the creeps becomes way more tactical, instead of constantly killing massive incoming waves, its more like little bossfights, where everything is about tactics and positioning. Also the variety of spells increases (in the usual HLW, high damage single target spells or powerful single target debuffs are kind of pointless, in your game, they could play a huge role that way.) This would require a huge amount of rebalancing however.
Additionaly you might want to "accumulate" creep waves somehow, like not every creep is sent instantly but is stored and all creeps sent in the last 2 minutes get spawned in a group. This way you do not lose the "mass" factor of the game, and the accumulation is another great way to emphasize more on teamplay. Imo, the "competitive" player likes to have some control. When creep numbers get too high, usually things get out of control (same thing when income gets too high), so keep the income and income growth quite low, same with the monster count. Distinct intervals for monster spawns helps with control as well. Make the monster's strength increase much faster than the income (not that it gets frustrating, try to find the right balance), but do not make too strong monsters available too early (maybe expensive upgrades for food to unlock monsters which require higher food count?)
Just some random thoughts; I was maintaining a hero line wars map for a very long time and accumulated quite a big deal of information on how I could make the game a little more competitive and less casual. Make use of it, if you want to, I most likely will not; I like the casuality ;)
I didn't want a sending system based on dialogs because as of now there's no way to make that kind of thing lagless, (I like the ability to tap a key if I want to summon units instead of mouse clicking a bunch of times) Most of the Dialog stuff is for heroes in general
We are lazy about the videos and pictures cause we are always working and I hate to stop working for something that's not productive (even though videos do build some extra interest in the project). We have begun a basic overview video where we will slowly release one video per hero showing off all their talent specialization options and abilities. The current one in the works is the Tech Marine. Can't give anyone a specific date but we are working hard to get it out by the middle of next month.
Well, I am not that dead serious about my map xD. I work on it when I am in the mood to do it (which happens to be quite often)
Also do not underestimate the power of some good advertising. Preview videos are more productive than you think, especially in times of the blizzard popularity system.
Okay I also dug up an old old video, I must make mention that pretty much all the stuff in this video has been changed, or modified to where it looks even better but the core of it is still there. It was a crappy rushed video we put out months ago but Ive brought it back and posted it up at the top.
How fast do the monster you spawn go up in strength? Because if its too fast you could get overrun pretty fast when heroes are low level.
About every 10 spawns or so the units are given a spawn buff that increases most stats 1-3% and its possible the heroes could be overrun at a low level. Because we haven't yet reached beta we have only estimations of how powerful things will get how quickly. Most of the issues along these lines will be worked on more heavily when we reach beta.
as for how we are doing. Sorry for the lack of updates for a while. The whole team has been busy working on the project and there were some unforeseen problems which arose with the unit summoning. However I'm glad to say that we have almost completely re-done the unit summoning and it works much better now without the problems we were experiencing before.
We have two fully functional and linked heroes (meaning their icons and menus have been linked and are working properly. As well as the Zerg and Terran summons being almost completely done complete with tooltips (I hate tooltips because there are so many of them). Lastly we were experiencing some heavy lag for unknown reasons, but as of the last patch they seem to have cleared up quite a bit so might be that blizzard fixed something.
The Terrain is currently being reworked and the map has been re-sized for latency reasons.
Hopefully we will start moving into a very early closed beta phase and we can begin showing some video. Regardless glad to see people still interested in the project I assume there will be more buzz as we get some video up and move closer to an open beta.
I would like to take a moment to announce to those who have interest that our team (Ninjacore Studios) is in the midst making the next generation of Custom Hero Line Wars. We are trying to keep a pretty tight lid on the project, but we have agreed that is past due that we post some information about it. So here is what you guys can be ready to expect from our map, in addition from the standard HLW map features on SC2 release day.
Finally in some general notes I'd like to say that our version of HLWs is going to diverge from previous versions of HLW where good teamwork and cooperation were not always a necessity for winning. In many versions HLW was all about the massive income gain ( basically he with the largest income would win). While we are not getting rid of income by any means we are adjusting the mechanics where not only income is a factor but so is how you and your team work together. We feel this will bring and added element of fun and energy to the game which was lacking before.
Anyway there will be more updates to follow including some screens and videos (hopefully within the coming week). However, most of our time is spent working on the map making it hard to post updates. The reason we did make a thread is we enjoy hearing some feedback from everyone here and any suggestions you might have in what can make a more fun and complete HLW style map. We are also completely insane about bringing the highest level of quality to this project so if you post terrible ideas we reserve the right to refuse the idea and privately laugh about it. =)
PROGRESS REPORT:
HERO ABILITIES
HERO TALENTS
BASE SUMMONING UNITS
TIER 2 (First Evolution) SUMMONING UNITS
TIER 3 (Second Evolution) SUMMONING UNITS
SUMMONING UNITS "LEVEL UP" BEHAVIOR
UNIT MODIFYING UPGRADES
APPLYING UPGRADES TO UNITS
SUMMON BUILDING UPGRADES
SUMMON UNITS' ABILITIES UPGRADES
USER INTERFACE
an old video update: here is a video from some time ago, gives an basic idea of what one hero is like.
Here is a brief description of what else we have changed in HLWs. Upgrading to different tier summoning buildings has been replaced with an evolution leveling system
IE a player will specialize into several different units of his choosing, the more he summons that particular unit the stronger it becomes until it evolves into the next tier of that unit and repeats this process. Units are no longer just for generalized damage, they do different things and well has have enough variation that it is important to communicate with your allies and work with which units they are summoning. Ive posted to pictures which show how a unit evolves but all the other units in the building remain the same.
I liked one of those WC3 hero line wars map, where you can use a undead archer to kill and summon units, and add rapid fire capability to do so with greater ease...
Maybe with SC2's units, have a queen that can infest enemies and create broodlings/zerglings/hydralisks out of them or something.
The second Hero we designed sounds like it will be right up your ally
Brood Mother Screens 01
Brood Mother Screens 02
Brood Mother Screens 03
Complete with summons and the ability to also devour said summons for buffs with many other skills at her disposal.
Wow that looks awesome! I would also recommend looking at The Warrior RPG http://www.sc2mapster.com/maps/warrior/ because the UI seems like it would fit in with your ideas. Also I need to ask for more screenshots... great work!
EDITED: because this is where we are posting updates
hey.
i have a simple question, how do you made the hydralisks that black?
i mean, is there any feature like it was on the wc3 editor, to change color and some kind of brightness on a units pmodel, or is this just a texture modifying?
2 ways you can do it. The guy in charge of the Brood Mother unit decided to do it through triggers so Ill tell you how he did it. In the actions section of triggers there is one called "Send Actor Message To Unit". Specify what you want in case the message you specify is "Set Tint Color". The rest you should be able figure out just be aware that setting the Tint color has some limitations. Because this does not replace the texture color just pastes another color on top you have to play around with it to get the color you would like and sometimes you can't get the color you want. Hope that helps PatchOne.
How long untill you think its completed...and will you upload it to Australian battle.net?
@solidtuber: Go
Our new test release date has been pushed back to the end of august (hopefully). We plan to make a US release and perhaps we can find some volunteers to upload it to the EU and AUS servers then we will try to upload there as well.
I'll take this moment to post some updates though. We have most of the heroes and their abilities finished. only two heroes are left to polish. and of those two we have them about 75-80% done. Creature summons are sadly only about 15% done but most of our priority has been to finish and polish the heroes. Once our focus shifts to the creature summons we can assume fast and rapid completion. we also have settled for only 6 heroes on version 1 releases (I was honestly hoping for more but hero skills and abilities especially when creating them from scratch can be very time consuming.
Our reason for not really keeping everyone up to date on our progress the beta patch blizzard released right before official screwed up close to half the stuff we had completed. I'm sure many other mappers know this as well, but for those just trying to keep an eye on the project I figured it was time to post an update.
Over the next couple of weeks one thing we will need is about 8 or 9 individuals who would be willing to help us beta test the map and help us with balancing issues. With that in mind we will be looking for anyone with outside the box thinking IE (if your first impulse when playing a game/map is to find any exploitable bugs and exploit them we want you). If you are interested just send me a PM and give me your bnet name and I will be more than willing to add you and when the time comes contact you for some help.
also anyone who would like to help with the testing need only have one requirement: Ventrilo and a Mic.
I don't know if you want some more heros but I was working on my own version of a line wars game. I am almost finished with 8 unique heros and I don't know whether or not you would want them. Unfortunately, they are skill point based with 4 levels for 4 skills and 1, 1 level skill. I was going to release a hero pack soon but if you want to take a look at what I've done then I can send you the data.
I understand if you decline. My work is probably of a much lower quality then yours but if nothing else, perhaps you can get some new ideas for skills and heros. If you want, I can also just list all of the heros and their skills and take some screen shots.
I love hero line wars though and your map sounds fantastic. Good luck with it and I can't wait to see it.
Hate to be annoying, but i just have to know,
With the title being *Custom Hero Line Wars*, is the final version going to contain custom heroes ala WC3 custom hero line wars, Where you picked out your hero, picked the different skills and finally an ultimate, or is it more like ENFOS and other hero line wars?
honestly, either way ill be... satisfied ;P (as long as its released on sea of course :3)
@DumpTruckJester: Go
Sorry to take such a long time to reply, we have been busy working on this project. Infact I'm happy to announce that we just completed our first alpha version several days ago and it was very successful with only minor bugs popping up. To answer your question we decided to go with a mixture so to speak. Our heroes have set decided skills but each one is not just one hero because we will be introducing talent trees each hero will have more abilities and options to pick up depending on the tree ge picks.
Now for more news hopefully by the end of the day I'll be able to post up an official progress report in which all here will be able to view our current progress and we will make a good effort to update it once a week.
There are some other exciting things I'd like to start telling everyone interested in this project about. We have been working on this hlws since beta a lot of time was spent just learning the editor, the other part is we just keep coming up with better ideas for this project and so we end up creating more work for the team. I'm going to start reveling some of those ideas today and hopefully later I'll include some pictures. (video we are saving till we move to beta).
First HLWs has always suffered from a replayabilty issues. It has a winning fun initial pull but quickly wears off because of it's overly simple core which was the team that summons the most wins. Our team has been working for months to solve this issue. We believe now we have enough of a new tactical gameplay revision that it now feels far more repayable.
There are several ways we are accomplishing this, some we have already told you about (such as talent trees) and heroes unique playstyle.) after we finished heroes it was time to focus on the summoned units and so without more typing here are the new features you can expect from Custom Hero Line Wars Universe.
1. The traditional unit tiers have been replaced with a leveling and evolution function.
2. Units are not just the same anymore there are real differences in summoned units making it important for each player to work together and individually choose which units he will focus on summoning.
3. An upgrade building is now available to increase certain stats for summoned units.
4. An ability research center now exists for the purpose of attaching abilities onto summoned units. The players will research an ability and then choose which unit it will be attached to.
5. Upgrades which affect the actual the player map are now available (such as randomized spawn locations which create units closer to the enemies portal/castle.
This is only the start of a new level of depth you all can expect from this release, but as always projects of this magnitude take time to complete and polish for max enjoyment. As I said before I'll try and get some pictures up later today or tomorrow. Any questions and comments are welcomed and appreciated.
Posted our official progress report and tacked it onto the first post up top, anyway I hope to update it once or twice a week from now on so everyone can see how things are coming along.
A personal update is that our progress data side with making tiers and tiers of units is starting to speed up, largely to the fact that we finally got a standardized naming convention in place.
Also in the next day or two here I should be posting more pictures possibly even reveling some more of our heroes.
Starting to add some screenshots of the Talent Trees. Starting with the Tech Marine. Put them in the top post. also made sure the progress report is up to date
Sounds great :) So you are working on this since May? o_0 Did not even know you could already create maps back then.
So you implement a ton of new features? Well, then I probably cannot help you with your problems ;). Actually, I played it more safe, my approach is more casual, more like the warcraft hlw maps. However, I am planning on keeping it updated for a long time, I might add some features later on as well ;)
Your concept sounds nice on paper, but I would like to see some more information. You say, you want to encourage teamplay, but how do you do that? Also the announced videos and screenshots would be very nice :D
I see you emphasise dialogs quite much. Is your sending system also based on dialogs?
Keep up your work :)
@Kueken531: Go
I didn't want a sending system based on dialogs because as of now there's no way to make that kind of thing lagless, (I like the ability to tap a key if I want to summon units instead of mouse clicking a bunch of times) Most of the Dialog stuff is for heroes in general
We are lazy about the videos and pictures cause we are always working and I hate to stop working for something that's not productive (even though videos do build some extra interest in the project). We have begun a basic overview video where we will slowly release one video per hero showing off all their talent specialization options and abilities. The current one in the works is the Tech Marine. Can't give anyone a specific date but we are working hard to get it out by the middle of next month.
Okay I also dug up an old old video, I must make mention that pretty much all the stuff in this video has been changed, or modified to where it looks even better but the core of it is still there. It was a crappy rushed video we put out months ago but Ive brought it back and posted it up at the top.
i like everything so far, except that "talent tree" its ugly lool...
I just realized I wrote this in the wrong threat ;)
Oh and for a more team oriented map, I would actually recommend to re-think the spawning system. If your map wants to be more competitive than casual and really emphasize organized teams, I would DRASTICALLY reduce the amount of sent troups in some way (for example, by adding a food limit for each player or team). This way, killing the creeps becomes way more tactical, instead of constantly killing massive incoming waves, its more like little bossfights, where everything is about tactics and positioning. Also the variety of spells increases (in the usual HLW, high damage single target spells or powerful single target debuffs are kind of pointless, in your game, they could play a huge role that way.) This would require a huge amount of rebalancing however.
Additionaly you might want to "accumulate" creep waves somehow, like not every creep is sent instantly but is stored and all creeps sent in the last 2 minutes get spawned in a group. This way you do not lose the "mass" factor of the game, and the accumulation is another great way to emphasize more on teamplay. Imo, the "competitive" player likes to have some control. When creep numbers get too high, usually things get out of control (same thing when income gets too high), so keep the income and income growth quite low, same with the monster count. Distinct intervals for monster spawns helps with control as well. Make the monster's strength increase much faster than the income (not that it gets frustrating, try to find the right balance), but do not make too strong monsters available too early (maybe expensive upgrades for food to unlock monsters which require higher food count?)
Just some random thoughts; I was maintaining a hero line wars map for a very long time and accumulated quite a big deal of information on how I could make the game a little more competitive and less casual. Make use of it, if you want to, I most likely will not; I like the casuality ;)
Thought so.
Well, I am not that dead serious about my map xD. I work on it when I am in the mood to do it (which happens to be quite often) Also do not underestimate the power of some good advertising. Preview videos are more productive than you think, especially in times of the blizzard popularity system.
Looks nice ;)
How fast do the monster you spawn go up in strength? Because if its too fast you could get overrun pretty fast when heroes are low level.
<<reply 213374>
About every 10 spawns or so the units are given a spawn buff that increases most stats 1-3% and its possible the heroes could be overrun at a low level. Because we haven't yet reached beta we have only estimations of how powerful things will get how quickly. Most of the issues along these lines will be worked on more heavily when we reach beta.
as for how we are doing. Sorry for the lack of updates for a while. The whole team has been busy working on the project and there were some unforeseen problems which arose with the unit summoning. However I'm glad to say that we have almost completely re-done the unit summoning and it works much better now without the problems we were experiencing before.
We have two fully functional and linked heroes (meaning their icons and menus have been linked and are working properly. As well as the Zerg and Terran summons being almost completely done complete with tooltips (I hate tooltips because there are so many of them). Lastly we were experiencing some heavy lag for unknown reasons, but as of the last patch they seem to have cleared up quite a bit so might be that blizzard fixed something. The Terrain is currently being reworked and the map has been re-sized for latency reasons.
Hopefully we will start moving into a very early closed beta phase and we can begin showing some video. Regardless glad to see people still interested in the project I assume there will be more buzz as we get some video up and move closer to an open beta.