It has been dead for a long time but in effect a dumped corpse. At least now it has a proper burial.

You are welcome to pick up the src and do some work if you wish.

There is also discussion here:
http://www.bigbluecup.com/yabb/index.php?topic=44704.0

Hi all,

I have had a chance to reflect on the past several years of Hero6 for which I was involved. I dare say we all had a lot of fun, laughs and so forth. But through all the good old days of jollity, we never made a fantastic amount of progress in the past 12 years that would really lead us to the alpha stages. I think we can all agree that any game development requires management, coordination and above all, leadership. While it is true Hero6 was a conglomeration of artistic, musical and technical talent, leadership and coordination was a much needed quality that was never established.

I recently took a stroll onto the old private forums that once breathed a seemingly ever-lasting life of commitment and passion and all I see now is just memories decaying away at the mercy of a poor maintained forum that seems to be gradually losing its data - there has been not a single forum post since January 24 2011. Earlier this year, I did however oversee a small final attempt by a small resurrected group of old members with a goal to at least complete Chapter 1 of the game and sadly even they seem to have lost all interest. Projects like these require a seemingly impossible amount of commitment so it is simply astonishing that AGDI (a team that actually spawned from Hero6) has managed to complete 4 different games for us to play (excluding the commercial ones) with no personal gain for them.

So anyway, this just leaves me (so as far as I can tell) who seems to be the last remaining 'sort of' Hero6 member with an interest in seeing the project through but alas I have no time to commit what with working and personal life taking priority. I guess I have been less a Hero6 member but more a steward as it were in recent times but now I think it is time to concede.

I would like to officially announce that I myself will now be stepping down from Hero6 and will not be making more contributions. And as this leaves no more Hero6 members, I will now be declaring that the Hero6 project is DEAD!

But do not despair entirely as I will not be leaving you faithful Hero6 fans empty handed. I has decided to publish the source code for you to play with - who knows maybe someone else will decide to take over and see the project through where us old timers did not succeed.

Please be aware that the game is nowhere near complete and requires lots of work. The source code is quite a mess due to lots of changes, cuts, TODO's and revisions made and does need quite some refactoring (IT term making clean up the mess).

So if you are interested, please find the latest AGS src here:
http://s153599580.onlinehome.us/files/Hero6_src_0302.rar

You will need the latest AGS build (go to www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk).

There is some other material hidden away in the archives (such as unused art and music) and they might be available for request although I'd have to dig around.

Anyway, thanks for reading my long-winded farewell speech. Its been fun and I wish you all the best of luck.

Thanks

Delta.

Hi,

I know its been a while. Don't really know what to say. I do hope to see something come out of this one day that we can all share - even if its not what we were expecting. It appears this site is now attracting evil spammers. I have cleared the annoying posts from this section.

Delta

Before it dies, I believe the whole source will be published in the public domain.

Hi JackofAllTrades. I replyed to your PM.

I personally feel that the rarest skill in this genre is sprite animators. Anyone good at sprite animations? (I know you are Gron)

As much as possible would be recycled to create the game. Something needs to be released.

Nice to still see you around Lazygamer.

Hero6 has failed largely due to poor plot management.

I believe that if there is some future for Hero6, but it will be in the form of an entirely different game. We should forget about Hero6 and move straight on to Hero7....sorta. If Hero6 is not released then graphical elements of Hero6 can be partially recycled for the new game.

ummm. i thought you needed special privileges to open threads here that appear on the front page!

Anyway, Hero6 is not being developed right now and seems to be on an indefinite hiatus. I am the lead programmer and currently in charge of uploading new internal alpha demos and I haven't been able to do any work on the damn game for a long time due to other life commitments. I am personally doubtful Hero6 will ever be complete as the passion and the interest within is gone.

Unfortunately the coles were the only ones to get the QFG formula right. But since QFG2VGA came out, i've noticed my interest in QFG suddenly fade. However I do believe that if Hero6 was ever released as it was meant to be, it'll be one fantastic game. But a true QFG styled game with a suitable plot is far more difficult that you realise.

LOL. A game will come out of this.

LOL. I may well incorporate that.

Hello to all Hero6 fans,

After a loooong time, the designer journals have finally been updated.

See it here:
http://visitors.hero6.com/forums/index.php?topic=665.0

Hello to all our Hero6 fans who still visit this site. As you've probably guessed, we had some downtime due to yet another major shift in management. It cannot be denied that the Hero6 team has suffered greatly from management problems and creative direction has not been easy.
This can particularly be said for our one time creative director, Servant, who sadly found that managing such a complex team was more than he expected and eventually chose to resign. For a long while, Hero6 has since continued to develop after reorganizng to a simpler management model allowing swifter production.

Since reorganization, the main plot has been partially re-written to make it more interesting for the player and some work is being focus to improve the immersion factor for the player. This is a important step in the design of the game for allowing the player to easily pick up the plot and give a sense of direction (something some previous test builds lacked).

But this also involves some sacrifice as we have also decided to reduce the complexity of the backstory and focus more on the present. Too much background can be confusing for some players and takes a lot of work to write and implement in the game design.

So, in a nutshell, Hero6 is not dead, (in fact its probably been more alive than ever recently) and we continue to aim for the best possible quality in the final piece.

Those were the days 

How do we solve this problem? Trouble is, QFG and other Sierra games aren't likely to attract many new fans so once people move on, the communities will probably die. Just about all hero6 developers now got job commitments including myself although I still commit some time to workin on Hero6 which is still going.

We will hopefully start updating the news feed soon.

Mystery is a very good point and I believe that to have been one of the flaws of the older Hero6 design. A complex backstory was boring to read, hard to write and left little room for mystery. I remember trying to read old plot designs a couple years and found myself bored wonder how much of it is truly relevant. I wanted to get on making the main game and thats wot we can doing now. Hero6 will have some backstory but how much of how little will not be finalized for a while yet. We do have currently hav one minor puzzle which requires the reading of a short book to solve so some backstory involved there.

Monkey Island probably could work as a novel albeit with a lot of changes. Maybe that would reveal the SECRET.

But Hero6 is not going down the novel route. I think we tried to get a complex plot backend but it slowed us down for a long time, hampered progress and caused much confusion within the team. All adventure games require a little backstory but you have to find a good way of getting the player interested if its relevant. And I have little doubt that some of our playtesters will find themselves interested in the available backstory in Hero6 while others may choose to ignore it and skip thru most conversations. Making the game suitable of both types of player will require a careful balance of necessary talk vs necessary action in the game. As a playtester who would prefer to ignore much of the backstory, I think we are on the right track now and development has gone pretty good recently.