Ship of Heroes has released its second annual Christmas video highlighting a future holiday event in-game: fighting winter-themed seasonal monsters. Those looking carefully will notice that the flashing presents from the 2017 Christmas video are still in use in this year’s build. This video was released a week late because the devs conducted a series of login tests on December 15 th with several hundred supporters, and that pushed back production of the holiday video.
This time, a team of seven heroes defends the city. There is one tank and six ranged damage-dealers, two of whom can also heal. Civilians run away from the invading
monsters as the heroes run in to fight them. Nice touch!
This video shows several new game mechanics. First are waves of extradimensional monsters invading the FHS Justice. Each wave spawns once enough of the previous wave has been defeated by the heroes. The video also shows brand-new temporary power-ups called infusions being used in-game. Finally, players can now buy infusions; this is the first time we have seen vendors working in Ship of Heroes.
This Christmas video is the conclusion of a big year for the SoH development team. They’ve conducted a major combat Alpha in Q1 and a hugely successful set of login tests in Q4, allowing 200 real players and supporters from the community to run around inside Apotheosis City for the first time.
Ship of Heroes has now published 26 videos over the last two years, showing the steady construction and expansion of the MMORPG. One of the hidden benefits of this process is that we can go back and look at any of their prior videos, even the very first one, and see how their game prototype is evolving in an extremely focused manner. These devs understand project management, and are illustrating their development philosophy of “build excellence, then expand it.”
The devs at Ship of Heroes are also asking their community to make donations directly on the SoH website, as a beta is now in the offing for the end of 2019, plus several additional events that the donating community can participate in. The video was sent to more than 10,000 newsletter and YouTube subscribers, and contains a soft appeal to help the self-funded indie developers at Ship of Heroes to achieve their goals.
Ship of Heroes has planned multiple events open to their community for the coming year, and is currently scheduling a Beta launch at the end of 2019.