Name: Erasmus
Position: Creative Leader
Department: Plot
MY HISTORY WITH HERO6
I first learned about Hero6 via an email sent to me by Te'ja when I was in a Quest for Glory newsgroup many years ago. Te'ja stated that he wanted to form a group of fans interested in creating a fan-made sequel to the newly discontinued Quest for Glory series. I was in 8th grade at the time, and was a huge fan of the Quest for Glory games and all the other Sierra adventure games. I immediately jumped at the opportunity to be part of a sequel, and applied to be a member for the game. The temporary name of Hero6 had been created as a placeholder, indicating our intent to create the sixth game which started with Hero's Quest. I was lucky enough to be one of the first members on the team, joining within a few weeks of it's birth.
I've been with hero6 ever since. Since joining, I've been active in the forums except for about a year period of time several years ago when between real life stress and what I felt was bad leadership by an admin TUOIC, I took a break and only checked into the forums occassionally. After several years on the Plot team, I was made Plot Administrator two years ago in appreciation my commitment to stabalize a rather hectic plot section and work effort. After a year of trying to also help with other departments and chiefly trying to ensure that the game worked cohesively, I was given the title Creative Leader, to indicate my position as not only a Plot Admin, but also an advisory figure to the other departments to ensure that everyone was working "on the same page."
MY PERSONAL INFO
I'm a Senior now at the University of Central Florida, in the USA. I'm a high school International Baccelaureate graduate. I'm a legal studies major dual majoring in Political Science, and plan on going to law school around August of 2007- Hopefully to Northwestern University in Chicago, where I grew up. Other hobbies of mine include computer games, reading, D&D, watching good movies, photography, and a bit of acting. Besides school I work at a law office as a paralegal and am involved in two groups on campus- The Comedy division of the Campus Activities Board, and a club called iClub which is a kind of interactive performance group.
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Name: Swift
Position: PR, Chat and Visitor Admin
Department: PR
I first learnt of Hero6 in 2001 from a fansite about QFG. Though I visited Hero6 for many years, it was only last year that I was recruited by Pwincess to join the PR team.
At the beginning, I focused on moderating the forums and running RPS chat sessions every week. I watched the team work hard at making the game, observing how it's done. It was only after being involved in making
Hero of Infamous Kingdoms that I got a feel of what it was like making a game, and loved it. I was promoted to PR Admin shortly after the Hero6 anniversary celebrations, and after that I concentrated more on helping the team with the game development by helping out in sprite-making, dialogue picture editing, proof-reading and play-testing. I also help new members get adjusted to working on the project.
It's been fun working on the project and working with very talented people from all over the world.
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Name: Yuri
Position: Member
Department: Plot
Lifted off a page from the Hero6 Archives and Glossaries, here's a recorded conversation between Yuri and Swift!
Yuri scratches its' head...
Yuri: "Now, now, why did I join H6 instead of another project? "
Yuri: "Well, it's because ... ...."
Yuri: "I WANTED TO UNLEASH THE CARNIVOROUS MONKEYS!!!"
Swift: "..."
Swift: "That must be why we have Coco"
Yuri: "Reared and groomed to be the ultimate psychopathic killers, I did an Eenie Meenie Minee Mo and chose H6!!!"
Yuri: "And Coco was my spy!"
Yuri: *pets the dear monkey*
Yuri: "Good job, dear."
Yuri: "And in case you're wondering, that's where all the missing members went to..."
Swift: "You evil doer!"
Yuri:"Well, now, what have I done for Hero6?"
Yuri:"Apart from working with dialogues, quests, descriptions, the overall plot, conducting play-testing, I also spend my time bothering the other departments with my flying bananas."
Swift: "What difficulties, then, have you encountered?"
Yuri:"Ensuring how the details shape the outcome like how a quest affects a character and even the whole plot and so many other details is not easy. My command of English, which was lacking, produced less than satisfactory results."
Swift: "And what have you learnt?"
Yuri: "In addition to shaping up my English, I learnt a lot of things about creating games, writing dialogues, etc."
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Name: JohnWWells
Position: Member
Department: Plot
"My name is John Wellington Wells,
I'm a dealer in magic and spells..."
- W. S. Gilbert, _The Sorcerer_
Though I signed on to Hero6 as a proofreader, I'm really more of a Jack-of-all-trades. I revise (or, in some cases, write) dialogues, polish quests, and design puzzles here and there. Also, I helped pare down the plot by posting a massive, unauthorized rescript that was miraculously accepted by most of the team - for reasons that befuddle me to this day.
I've released one freeware adventure game before, "ESP: The Evil Sorcerer's Party." It's available at zzt.the-underdogs.org, and it's been pretty well-received for a game where you play a little ASCII happyface. At the very least, it's taught me that puzzle design requires a downright obsessive attention to detail. It's no Hero6, though.
In real life, I'm a biology major with a taste for fruit fly research, and am currently looking into good developmental genetics programs for graduate school. It's not an exciting life, but it's exciting work, and so sometimes my commitment to Hero6 suffers. But how many game development teams can claim to have a genuine Mad Geneticist in their ranks?
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Name: ReishVedaur
Position: Member
Department: Plot
My name is Adam Wright. I'm 20 (turning 21 on Feb. 20th). I live in Illinois, not terribly far from across-the-river St. Louis, Missouri. For the most part, I don't care what people know about me, so I tend to give a lot more information than is necessary. I'm a Christian, I'm unemployed, and I've been graduated from high school since I was 16 -- although the actual story of my schooling is highly bizarre, so I'll give that a pass.
When I was 2, I, along with my other two older siblings, met our collective best friend, Joel Harrington. He was my sister's age (seven at the time), but because he was so freaking tall we all thought he was 13 or 14 years old. It took a visit to his mom's house to clear that up. At any rate, the reason that's important is because he is the one that introduced me to roleplaying games. And when I was maybe 6, he is the one that introduced me to Quest for Glory.
Eventually, our computers and the operating systems running on them stopped supporting DOS games, and with that my interest shifted to other games such as Quake. For years I never played nor thought about Quest for Glory. Then, finally, we got digital cable with ZDTV (renamed to TechTV, and now called G4TV), and I learned just how far the gaming industry had gone without me from Gamespot TV (renamed to Extended Play, and now to X-Play). I was for the first time being shown Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Then later on came Call of Duty.
See, ever since I learned that I was allowed to create things on my own, I began to do so. I'd open Paintshop Deluxe (or whatever it was called) on the Amiga and do a big doodle, and then pretend I was playing Lemmings and try to find a route for my imaginary lemmings to get through it. When I first played Dungeons and Dragons with Joel as the DM, I started making P&P games (with no actual rules) for everything I could think of, from random silly ideas of my own to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
When I ran across Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Unlimited Adventures (the one that lets you create your own AD&D quests), I would sit there for weeks trying to get it to do what I wanted and never be pleased with the results. When I learned that there was actually a way to create new maps for Quake, I started trying to learn to use QuArK, which went over like a lead balloon. Same with trying to use DoomEd, once I learned that existed. So for the time being I subsisted on downloadable content, but continued to make my own P&P games, now with the knowledge of how to use MS Excel, and now with rules.
It was when I found out there was a map editor for Medal of Honor: Allied Assault that I said, "I really want to know how to do this." And that's also when I figured out that there were online community forums that could help me with things like this; until then I surfed the internet daily but it had never crossed my mind that something like that would exist. That's how I learned to map for Medal of Honor. Then came Call of Duty.
When Call of Duty came out, I joined a number of forums, and I became very well-known in both the mapping and modding communities. When I felt that I had enough experience and concepts for enough content, I decided to set out and create my own mod: The Silver Creek Campaign. Along the way, I met a guy named Coleman and he was working on Breaking 50, a Call of Duty paintball mod. I helped him get it finished, and it got released. The release taught me a valuable lesson about the Call of Duty community, which is essentially that they are morons. Silver Creek Campaign was shut down a few months later, but mostly just because of lack of support. You can still see what's left of it here: Honor Guard
I am not sure when I came across Hero6. I know that it happened twice. The first time I was probably a year younger. I thought about sending in an application (in fact I very well may have, but I don't remember). At any rate, I didn't become a member of the community. I don't even know if I left any forum posts, but I seem to recall a couple as a visitor. Then I forgot about it for a little while.
After my bad experience with Call of Duty, I started feeling very nostalgic for video games. I was grabbing all the old games I could find around the house, and once again came across the QfG series. And then I found DOSBox. I finally beat Quest for Glory 1 not long before I signed up on the Hero6 forums. I started posting regularly, decided to send in an application, and got into the Plot department. Which I feel quite suits me.
Diving head-long into a project that has been going for so long was actually not as intimidating as I thought it would be -- thus, when I started I thought nothing was prepared properly and made a bad and almost-entirely-unjustified stink about it. Gathering the appropriate information took awhile, but I've got pretty much everything down by now. Working with smart people after all my suffering in Call of Duty is a huge relief, and I couldn't be happier.
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Name: Silverbolt
Position: Member
Department: Plot
My name is Paul, my last name isn't important. I go by the handle Silverbolt on the Internet. I'm 18 years old, in my senior year of High-School (read "hell") and I'm Romanian. I enjoy long walks in the...oh wait...this was the other thing.
Short History:
I think that my first contact with adventure gaming was somewhere back in 1998 when I saw Broken Sword 2 on a friend's computer and I was immediately hooked. Then, in the year of 2000 AD, a friend of my dad's lent me a CD full of Adventure games, most of them being produced by the Sierra of old. I started playing them all and I reached the letter Q. Quest for Glory. I can still remember how impressed I was by the game and how it was a perfect hybrid between adventure and RPG. I played and finished QFG 1, 2 and 3 with all character classes, working my way around the bugs. Then I couldn't finish QFG 4 because of the copy protection. Long boring story, involving country economics. Then I had to format my hard drive and get rid of my old computer on the 1st of November 2002. On the 6th of December of the same year I had my first loose contact with the Internet. Autumn 2003, I start writing. 2nd of January 2004, I join a writers' forum and start meeting people online. I discover messenger programs. May 2005, I get rid of Dial-up and get a cable connection. June 2005, I use my +10 skill to Google granted by my Race to...procure the QFG series. The result is...unimportant and irrelevant. Of course, I also found two interesting projects: AGDI and Hero6. And I joined the Hero6 forums.
Me, the Hero 6 Visitor:
I started to look into this project and I found it interesting. I was completely unaware that indie gaming existed and still...there it was. I started posting, posted a few ideas, a few suggestions at the time, met some people, including Swift and Ianfe. This project seemed interesting and I had always wanted to be part of something. If it's an adventure game development team, even better. I fancied myself a writer and thus I decided to apply for a position in the Plot team, namely Dialogue Writer. I applied once and didn't recieve an answer, started writing an original story and re-applied submitting that, keeping my fingers crossed. Of course, the path for success is long and hard and the Apply form was apparently bugged, so I did not recieve a response. However...I had friends on the inside
. Through Ianfe and Swift I, again submitted an application and thus I was admitted into the project about a month ago.
Me, the Hero 6 Member:
Well, there I was: Head-first into a six year-old project. Confusing, to say the least, but I started to read the forums and tried to understand what had "gone down". Slowly I started to get it relatively straight and I was ready for my first assignment. And an asignment I got quite expeditiously. Well, what can I say? I really had fun writing the dialogue. I mean, I was literally HAVING FUN while WORKING: An unthinkable concept. It wasn't easy, finding the most up-to-date version of the NPC, finding quest info and general research. Not easy, but I felt great doing it. I was actually being useful to something...Who'd have thought?!? And now I'm between assignments, eagerly awating another one while reading the forums still. One section down, more to go...*sigh*. This reminds me of a really interesting thing I read in one thread. I can't remember why or who said it, but here it is: "Remember when Hero 6 started and everyone was, like...14?". It's Hero 6 in a nutshell. A group of people ever evolving, ever getting better at what they do. It's what I intend to do as well.
Peace and love and don't talk to strange watermelons.
Author