That's right, Heroes For Hire has dropped into Early Access! The game has been expanded past the current demo content, along with the progression!
I've provided a small guide for newer players that may be a bit lost starting off! Remember to also complete the "Get The Ball Rolling!" list, I promise it'll really help out! Really!
And here's the trailer in higher detai!
Remember, the game is NOT finished! I imagine there are A LOT of bugs I missed while polishing. Along with that, localization is NOT finished either. There are plans for localization support near the end of the game's development, but not yet!
Thanks for following along during the run up to release, and thank you for providing feedback and support! Here's the patch notes for 0.12.0.0 and 0.12.1.0. There's a lot.
0.12.1.2
Additions:
- Double clicking on items on the Item Storage popup will now add them to the last active Crafting popup. This'll be expanded to include weapons and equipment, and the start raid popup in the future.
- Pressing space will now pause the game, and pressing space again will unpause it. This will be be keybindable in the future.
0.12.1.0
Additions:
- Added an option to allow you to generate team codes to skirmish your friends without being connected to steam or the internet! This can be found on the tournament signup popup.
- Hovering over blueprints now shows the base stats of the furniture it would add to your guild hall. This is taken from the Guide's stats, and doesn't factor floor level and furniture modifiers.
- The graph when hovering over dungeons on the sidebar now include the enemies you've encountered and the items you've gathered so far that raid.
Balance:
- Retooled how reputation is calculated.
- Projects are now unlocked at 100 reputation to compensate for previous changes.
- The guild now starts with $1750 instead of $1500, so that the guild hall is unlocked faster.
Other Changes:
- Oops, the crafting recipe for the Sweat Band wasn't working and now is. Refined fabric and metal.
- Right clicking now stops dragging items.
- Swapping project type will no longer wipe slots 2 to 4 when starting a project. (Still can only have one member in a gathering/training project, though.)
- Tweaked some of the tutorials slightly to ease the player better.
- Hovering over items now also shows how many you have in the inventory.
- Automatically crafting recipes will now fill the recipe out on the crafting popup.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed steam skirmishes not having skills unlocked.
- Steam skirmishes no longer have random variations on clothing.
- Picking up sandcastles no longer gives the tomato barrel blueprint.
- Fixed some odd issues with click box priority.
- Bee larvae can no longer grow up to be honeycombs and have more health.
- Fixed a crash caused by double clicking to reset the raid stats popup size.
- When heroes used the Pickpocket skill in tournament battles, the heroes would take the stolen item back. They no longer do. (Don't want any weird things with this in the future.)
- Fixed a potential glitch with furnaces and kilns.
- Blue slime puddles were not saving properly before and now do.
- Fixed a potential crash caused by the Reagent item interacting with the guide.
Demo Specific:
- DEMO ONLY. Holy parchment can now be crafted in the demo. Sorry, accidentally made it full only last patch.
0.12.0.0 - EARLY ACCESS IS HERE!
Additions:
- Demo Mode has been replaced by Sandbox mode, which is effectively the same thing but with no mission goal.
- New Relic! Sweatband, crafted with a refined fabric and a refined metal. Increases the chance that heroes will use skills or items.
- New Relic! Honey Stick, crafted with refined wood and 3 honey, increases potion effectiveness by 20%.
- New potion! Honey Jar, crafted with 2 honey. Heals a large amount of health over time.
- You can now craft weapons and equipment up to tier four (cobalt and cinnabar)!
- Hovering over raids on the sidebar now shows the graph for the raid that's going on.
- The desktop background now displays the current time of day as well.
New Raid Type:
- The Hive. A hive of different types of wasps, hornets and bees.
- Main resource is honey which can be crafted into a potion that heals over time.
- Boss is a Queen Bee. (Shocking, I know!)
- Spawns at level 2 star difficulty and above.
- Four pieces of furniture have been added along with this raid, too.
New Boss Encounter:
- Bull Shark raids will appear the same way as Gladius encounters do if the guild's heroes have high enough levels and equipment.
- A bull shark has been terrorizing the coast, dropping a bucket of sand and a shark fin that can be crafted into furniture!
New Clothing sets:
- Paladin Set: Dexterity focused tank set. Full set bonus restores some of the damage taken to the rest of the team's skill energy.
- Leopard Fur Set: Agility focused damage set with reduced defence. Full set bonus increases the chance that heroes will dodge attacks.
- Strongman's Set: Strength focusted set. Full set bonus increases the amount of damage heroes do per full item slot in their inventory.
- Marksman's Set: Dexterity focused light set. Full set bonus makes critical damage always do the maximum amount.
- Reaper's Set: Dexterity focused low defence set. Full set bonus reduces the cooldown on hero skills when an enemy is killed.
- Medic's Set: Agility focused light set. Full set bonus shares some potion healing when a potion is used.
New Shopkeepers:
- Black Market: Sells relics, and only arrives if you've beaten Gladius's Challenge and have 200 reputation.
- Demolitionist: Sells bombs, and only arrives if you've beaten The Coast and have 125 reputation.
- Scavenger: Whenever items are scrapped because the item storage is too full, the items will show up in the scavenger's store for a discount the next day. Finder's keepers, unless you pay!
New Services:
- Financier: When the financier is in your guild, all shops stock up to double the cash they normally would. Intermediate.
- Professor: When the professor is in your guild, the chance of relics breaking on return is drastically reduced. Advanced.
- Celebrity: When the celebrity is in your guild, the guild gets a free reputation boost. Basic.
New Furniture:
- Guest Book: A smaller notice board that can be placed in rooms, and on a table. Fabric, Fabric, Plank
- Kiln: A smaller furnace that can be placed on a table. Being on a table doesn't improve stats, this is more for organization. Ingot, Gunpowder, Ingot
- Sparring Ring: A huge gymnasium training ring with great stats. Fabric, Slime, Fabric, Ingot
New Room Type:
- Refinery, coming with another four furniture items! You need the required workshop to craft resultant items. Reagents are sold by the guide for a steep price and will be used later as well.
- Lathe: When placed away from a wall, this piece of furniture turns two materials into crafting resources that are the material level or lower.
- Equipment: When placed away from a wall, this piece of furniture scraps equipment for into crafting material that are the material level or lower.
- Distillery: When placed away from a wall, this piece of furniture turns crafting resources into refined resources that are the material level or lower.
- Vat: When placed away from a wall, this piece of furniture turns three slimes into potions that are the material level or lower.
Cursed Relics:
Cursed relics have been added to the game! When equipped, heroes will take some damage per cursed relic they have in their raid inventory. These relics are strong, and have a lower chance to break when returning from a raid.
- Twisted Contract: Hero takes 15% less damage, but some of the damage taken is reduced from the raid pool at the end of the raid.
- Blood Diamond: When carried by a hero, the gem activation chance when in battle is increased 75%.
- Rally Flag: When carried by a hero, every attack has a 15% chance to reduce every other hero's attack cooldown.
- Dueling Glove: When carried by a hero, every time the hero attacks, the attacked enemy will always target them next, and be more likely to miss.
- Weapon Poison: When carried by a hero, critical attack damage is increased from 1.5x to 2.0x.
- Orb of Infinity: When carried by a hero, other cursed relics cannot break when returning from a raid.
- Crafting a Cursed Effigy using Broken Bones and three Magic Dusts, then crafting THAT item will give you one cursed relic and two random relics.
Other Changes:
- If a raid team has been raiding for long enough and is lost, the team will try and flee.
- The current highest priority popup now has a more obvious outline.
- Redid the Scarab Display furniture item.
- Enemy status effect is now wiped on death. (If enemies were respawned, they'd still keep the effect.)
- Dropping an item on the inventory selection on the start raid popup now adds it to ALL inventories instead of a random inventory.
- Changed how dungeons are picked daily, to ensure a good variety of raid types every day.
- The guild rating ranking on the audit now caps at 9999, up from 1250. (Wasn't even hard to get 1250 at the current point.)
- Clicking on requests on the tips popup now brings up that specific request for the hero rather than the highest priority request.
- Tweaked priroity for hero requests.
- Heroes will now eventually give up on asking for a raise.
- Tweaked some tutorials. The Guild Hall tutorial now flashes on first unlock, too.
- You can no longer drag flares to raids where you can't flee.
- A maximum of 144 unique rooms is now possible, one per tile if you want to play objectively incorrectly.
- Tweaked the rate at which autosave goes off. Finishing a dungeon will no longer automatically make the autosave go off, but it will go off shortly after.
- When sending heroes out to gather, all heroes will not have the same gathered items anymore.
- The heroes and inventory popups now display how they are being filtered in the title.
- Changed how rotation in the guild hall viewer works, now rotating around the X/Y coordinate instead of rotating first. (I'm not a fan of the way moving around works, but it's unfortunately the best I could do.)
- You can now directly equip items from the request popup, and double click the portrait to open the hero info popup up.
- The "Supply Chest" icon on the item storage popup has been removed. This hasn't done anything for a couple months now and if it did, it wouldn't even be much.
- End tables look slightly different now.
- The Guild Information popup now shows a bit more detail.
Balance:
- Potions now cost 3 slime, and upgrading potions now costs 1 slime instead of 2. While at the start of the game, I found slime was overly plentiful, but as the game expands, it was getting very hard to keep up with. This should be better.
- The rate in which relics break has been tweaked.
- Heroes can no longer slack and leave behind relics.
- Slightly retooled rare order loot.
- Skeletons now drop bones more commonly.
- Rebalanced Gladius' stats slightly.
- The Tomato Barrel's rating stat now improves as the room improves like the Mimic Chest.
- Most of the unique furniture have had their stats modified to be more balanced. While most furniture were buffed, the bear fur items had dramatically high stats and have been nerfed.
- Heroes will now only use immunity elixirs when under a status effect.
- The maxmium stat bonus from bonus furniture is now clamped at 10% + 10% per floor level.
- New recruited heroes now start with weapons suitable for their level.
- Every day, at least one slime and cave raid will now spawn.
- Normal slime is now more common from slime pools in raids. You can now also get the slime from supply drops, too.
- Apothecary now sells potions for cheaper, and interior designer sells furniture for cheaper.
- Increased the scaling for how many raid options the guild will get daily. The floor and ceiling both have been raised, and the number is now more heavily based on reputation.
- Tweaked the scaling for order difficulty.
- Advanced gymnasiums and workshops now unlock at 2.5 rating, down from 4.0.
- Added some extra rubber banding to rival audit guild rating growth.
- Heroes who have only been sleeping for 2 or less hours will now not be as upset when woken up.
- Order requests have been rebalanced.
- The Guide now sells stuff for cheaper. (Now sells at 110% of the base value instead of 200%.)
- Order money rewards are now based on commodity value for the item, not the base value.
- Heroes will now gather considerably less sand from resource nodes in the Sandy Tomb map. I was always finding myself full of glass and sand as it is used far less common.
- On the Big Top mission, furniture and equipment drops are turned into a random item far less often.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a crash caused by raids running too long.
- Fixed a couple crashes related to enemies getting hit and dying on the same frame. (Only ever happened with attacks that hit more than one enemy at once.)
- The Major Mimic and Gladius now drops their proper drops again.
- The game's logic was running at a really low precision number which was very likely messing some stuff up, especially with raid navigation. This should now be fixed.
- Fixed a mismatch in the guide.
- You can no longer put furnaces on tables, and put stuff on furnaces.
- Raid map pins now play all sound channels, instead of only 2/3.
- Fixed a potential issue with the services popup.
- Fixed the furniture stats on the guide.
- Previously, loaded files would always have a slot replaced by a hat item. This was added for the tutorial and wasn't supposed to activate outside of that, this has been fixed. Sorry.
- Fixed a save issue that was deleting inventory slots, sorry again.
- The Builder's prices are now impacted by Clearance Friday.
- Heroes can no longer forget to bring items that aren't even in the item storage to raids.
- Heroes would commonly "oversleep" without actually oversleeping and no longer do.
- Gladius's showboating was actually dramatically reducing his defense instead of increasing it. Oopsies.
- Fixed a potential mismatch with furniture names.
- Fixed a potential crash with large room internal ids.
- Fixed a crash caused by gladius.
- Fixed the clickboxes on furniture and rooms in the guild hall popup bleeding through.
- Beds and chests are no longer negatively impacted by furniture in other rooms.
- You can no longer drag pins around and click on buttons at the same time accidentally.
- The slimy painting no longer saves as a normal painting.
- Fixed some extra incorrect wording with enemy attacks.
- Fixed a couple instances of click zones on popups being active even when they aren't on top.
- Fixed the music volume not returning to normal when the game is minimized
- Enemies can no longer use skills when frozen.
- Minor mimics are no longer buffed when doing a boss order raid.