Tag Archives: Hero Academy
In our last poll we asked Whats your favourite Hero Academy Team? The votes are in and we can reveal that the Dark Elves managed to claim victory with 32% of the votes. Trailing last was (my personal favourite) the Council with just 13%. Here is the full round up:
- Dark Elves (32%, 23 Votes)
- Dwarves (22%, 16 Votes)
- Team Fortress 2 (19%, 14 Votes)
- Tribe (14%, 10 Votes)
- Council (13%, 9 Votes)
As one poll closes another begins. This time we’re looking to find out what your favourite Orcs Must Die! 2 DLC is. Could it be the frosty Yeti’s that get your vote? Or the fire and water mix? Or maybe traditional family ties gets your vote.
Whatever the case the polls are now open! Lets find out what your favourite OMD2 DLC is by casting your vote in the poll on the right hand side of this page!
After a brief period of downtime on the Hero Academy server for the last few hours, everything is back up and running but now with an added bonus – the launch of the Shaolin Team! Not only is there this brand new team to pick up there are also some tempting special offers with the other previously released teams in celebration of the Shaolin launch. There’s a whole 50% off The Dark Elves, The Dwarves, and The Tribe Plus there is also 50% off on the Steam Two-Packs and Gold Packs. Now is a great time to pick up any missing teams you might have!
Just in case you have forgotten what the Shaolin team is all about – here is a quick reminder of the units you can now play with! You can’t go wrong for less than $5 / £3!
Heroes
- Monk – A melee brawler whose attack reduce a single enemy’s maximum health by 25%.
- Windblade – Her attack chains to additional enemies.
- Poisoner – Her attack weakens the opponent’s Defense and Resist.
- Taoist – A Healer who can resurrect, clear debuffs from allies, and remove buffs from enemies.
- Shadow – Turns the tide of battle by reviving KO’d units into specters to fight on his side.
Spells and Equipment
- Dragon – Cast this spell to summon a dragon that breathes fire along a row, dealing damage to three squares directly in front of the target.
- Combo Potion – A consumable that heals an ally for 1000 health and makes their next attack worth two combo points.
- Bamboo – Place a destructible bamboo tile that blocks enemy line of sight.
Robot Entertainment have today revealed the next team to enter the fray in Hero Academy – The Shaolin! This is a brand new team focusing on combos and some interesting new bonus characteristics For every turn a unique unit does damage to an enemy the units attack get gradually more powerful each turn making it even more important than ever to take down the unique units quickly before being overwhelmed. Not only that but the Shaolin”s Heros can also reduce the strength of enemy units. A formidable team that’s for sure! Here is the stats breakdown:
Heroes
- Monk – A melee brawler whose attack reduce a single enemy’s maximum health by 25%.
- Windblade – Her attack chains to additional enemies.
- Poisoner – Her attack weakens the opponent’s Defense and Resist.
- Taoist – A Healer who can resurrect, clear debuffs from allies, and remove buffs from enemies.
- Shadow – Turns the tide of battle by reviving KO’d units into specters to fight on his side.
Spells and Equipment
- Dragon – Cast this spell to summon a dragon that breathes fire along a row, dealing damage to three squares directly in front of the target.
- Combo Potion – A consumable that heals an ally for 1000 health and makes their next attack worth two combo points.
- Bamboo – Place a destructible bamboo tile that blocks enemy line of sight.
When is it coming?
The Shaolin team will be available on iOS and Steam some time in November – so not long away. Oh and did we mention the team also brings with it a new map for everyone to play plus some more new challenges! Keep your eyes peeled for the November release!
There are only two days left for voting in the Golden Joystick awards, so if you haven’t already dont forget to vote for Hero Academy in the “Best Mobile / Tablet” category. The Golden Joystick awards are widely recognised in the industry so if you feel like making Robot’s day go ahead an nominate them on the link below!
http://www.goldenjoystick.com/best-mobile-tablet/hero-academy
Time is running out to vote! Voting closes on the 22nd!
Hero Academy fans may remember that back in late June this year Robot Entertainment announced that it was partnering with YoDo1, a Chinese video game studio, in order to bring Hero Academy to the mass Chinese market. Hero Academy has been available in China for a number of weeks now and the launch has been a great success. So much so that the YoDo1 localized version of Hero Academy made the Top 10 list in free games, and Top 25 iPhone apps overall in just 48 hours after going live on the App Store.
Localizing the game & servers
The results are very impressive and it is great news that Hero Academy is reaching a global audience. Robot Entertainment partnering with YoDo1 have really shown the industry the kind of results that can be achieved by localizing games for the Chinese market. Recently Henry Fong, CEO and founder of YoDo1 took part in an interview with Gamasutra to give us an insight to how we arrived at this point. There were a number of considerations and challenges that Robot Entertainment and YoDo 1 had to address to achieve this success. One of the key decisions was to provision the servers in China and have a separate Chinese version of the game rather than connecting players to the same USA based servers. This was an important consideration not only for technical reasons (connectivity from China to USA servers was slow) but also it was important to give Chinese players and experience they were familiar with. As Henry Fong tells Gamasutra:
As a multi-player turn-based game, Hero Academy needed a local server presence in Asia. Otherwise, it would take forever for Chinese players to find opponents, and cause long delays in between moves. On top of that, the Western version of Hero Academy has a lot of connectivity to Twitter and Facebook, so players can share content with their friends, and find fellow players on those social networks. Trouble is, neither Twitter nor Facebook are even accessible in China.
Robot and YoDo1 set about replacing the existing US based social network links (Facebook & Twitter) and replaced them with Chinese social network Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo. After all its no good having functionality to invite friends by Twitter if all the Chinese players are using Weibo. This move was certainly important to allow players to connect with friends in China.
A brand new exclusive team
In order to help entice the Chinese players a brand new team was created based on the Chinese equivalent of Middle Earth “Jiang Hu”. Think “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon“. As Henry describes:
Hero Academy is full of elves, orcs, and other character types that Western gamers are totally familiar with, from Lord of the Rings and other classics. So what if we introduced a China themed heroic team to the game? We thought that this would certainly be a bigger draw to the Chinese gamer audience.
New marketing materials
The concerns that Chinese players wouldn’t be familiar with the Western style characters also centred around the need to create new marketing materials such as a new video trailer to promote the Chinese launch of the game. YoDo1 went about creating a brand new trailer unique to the Chinese market and the results are pretty impressive – check out the trailer below!
Its fantastic to see that the Chinese version of Hero Academy has had such great success. YoDo1 are continuing to work with Robot to add new content to the game. The Chinese launch of Hero Academy is clearly a beacon of success that says Western games with the right level of localization can make it big in China. Hero Academy is now at the forefront of this kind of game localization. Congratulations Robot and Yodo1!
Further reading
Check out the full article with Henry Fong and Gamasutra here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/177767/How_Hero_Academy_went_big_in_China.php
Hero Academy players may have found they have had some difficulty playing some of their existing games over the past few days. Unfortunately Robot Entertainment have been having some technical issues on the server side which has resulted in the corruption of some of the games you may have had on-going.
In order to get things back to normal again, the Robots will be taking the Hero Academy servers offline shortly in order to do the nessecary remedial work to bring the game back to full health. Sadly any games which have been corrupted by the recent issues are likely to be lost during this essential maintenance.
A full update on the situation has been posted on the Robot Entertainment website and the blog post details what the issues are and the impact. Take a look at the blog post on the link below. It is unfortunate to have to lose some data, but we trust the Robot’s to get everything back and running as soon as possible. Just sit tight for the moment hero’s!
Robot’s blog post: http://www.robotentertainment.com/blog/detail/Hero-Academy-Instability-Updates
When I started getting more into Hero Academy and playing several games at once, I found it difficult to keep track of what was going on in each game (especially if some opponents were playing “Take All Week Academy”). I got bored watching the LA Kings destroy the Phoenix Coyotes in the 2012 NHL playoffs, and wrote “an app for that” in an afternoon. Sometimes being an iOS app developer comes in handy! I used it myself for a little while, then decided to give it the finishing touches and put it out there for others to enjoy.
Academy Professor landed on the App Store in June, the first iOS app of its kind. It’s still a side project for me, but I’ve managed to add a few nice features. The app is Universal and supports landscape, so it pairs well with Hero Academy on either iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Your data is synced over iCloud so that if you play HA on multiple devices, Academy Professor keeps up with you. Readouts on every item show you the chance that your opponent has one (or two, or three) of the item in hand, and you can keep extra notes on each game as well.
What’s next for Academy Professor? Aside from little bells and whistles, the next big piece I would like to add is a “chessboard mode” where you can set up a game grid with units and test out moves. It would be similar to a damage calculator function, but visual and tactile. Who knows – someday it could include a mini AI that suggests your next move.
Academy Professor is available now on the App Store worldwide and supports all 5 heroic teams. Play better – play smarter with Academy Professor!
Download now from iTunes
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/academy-professor-hero-tracker/id528143599?mt=8
Free code giveaways
Robot Fans will be giving away free Academy Professor codes all week long – so keep an eye on our Twitter feed @RobotEntFans to get yours!
