Reflections

[CentaurOfSifnos]

I was involved in this project for several months back in 2000.  On the one hand it is sad to see that it has not yet been finished, particularly for the fans not involved in the project who wanted an opportunity to play the game.  On the other, the story of Hero6 IMO is less about the making of a game than the ability of the internet to bring together a community of talented individuals from all over the world to work together on something that was, for a period in time, important to them.  For all those that have been involved over the years, I believe it has been a mostly positive experience in their life, however small.

In retrospect, I believe the project was initially too ambitious given what we had to work with, both in technology and personnel.  A polished, professional-quality game created from scratch in the QG4 mold was, IMO, a much larger undertaking at the time than people wanted to admit.  Progress reports were IMO generally overly optimistic and underestimated what still needed to be done.  At the time of my involvement, the development was largely democratic.  We had "leaders" or "directors" over certain aspects of the game that were responsible for organizing what we had, but nearly every decision was put to a poll/vote.

On the one hand, this fostered good will among the project members and gave incentive to stay involved.  On the other, with 50 different people come 50 different opinions.  We had no one to enforce decisions, no stylistic standards to which members were forced to adhere.  Nor is there incentive to continue to participate when you eventually get displeased with the direction things are going.  People in a professional gaming company will comply with the wishes of their project managers because it is in their financial interest to do so.  In a volunteer situation, people who are unhappy with the decisions regarding the direction of a project will eventually end their involvement; some will decide to start their own project with which they believe they can have a bigger influence on the project's direction. 

The end result for Hero6 back in 2000 was that we ended up depending on individuals to do too much.  We voted for the features of our game engine, but we depended on a single programmer to put it together.  We voted for art styles, room layouts, and even individuals screens, but we didn't have the people interested in emulating or adhering to those decisions resulting in one or two people being forced to work on hundreds of pieces of artwork, in what could only be hoped was a timely fashion.  It was, IMO, too much to ask.

At the time I ended my involvement, I remember thinking the game was maybe 2 or 3 years away.  We had the characters, the story, a number of the puzzles and quests worked out.  We had people who began working on the dialogue trees.  I believed the art and music, and the completion of a polished engine would end up being the primary time factor from then on out.

Inevitably, as the "staff" turns over new people bring new ideas which require revisions in story, style, programming, etc.  I imagine the game today has very little in common with the one I worked on ten years ago.  We are now further away from the start of the Hero6 project than the founding of it was from the release of QG4.  For many people, even those who were involved in the project, I imagine it's been years since they played anything like the old Sierra adventure games.  What we actually had planned in 2000 was a slightly progressive take on those games IMO, but now even that is quaint by today's gaming standards.  With the number of game development suites and mod-able games out there, people who would have gotten involved in Hero6 because they saw it as a way to apply their skills and interests to a game now have hundreds of other avenues to do so.

Hero6 really would have benefited IMO from thinking much smaller scale, even if it doing so would not have met up to the expectations of awaiting fans.  It would have been better I think to have released a tiny game with only one or two monster types, a handful of rooms, and a half-dozen or so NPCs with only a portion of the story.  Future releases could have added to what was already released, like releasing chapters in a fanfic a month or two at a time.  Sometimes getting something done is much more important than trying to do everything all at once, and to perfection.

At any rate, I suggest that, unless there is a true expectation of the project being completed "soon," most of the general Hero6 material be released to the public domain so people can get a more complete idea what the game might have been like -- perhaps it will provide creative inspiration for other projects.

Good health to all,
The Centaur of Sifnos

[Paladin0707077]

At any rate, I suggest that, unless there is a true expectation of the project being completed "soon," most of the general Hero6 material be released to the public domain so people can get a more complete idea what the game might have been like -- perhaps it will provide creative inspiration for other projects.

Open source all the material, in other words? Hmmm...idea has merit, though I would say that perhaps open sourcing as much of the redundant/obsolete material would be better. It would give people the benefit of seeing how an open-source game can change over time, while also allowing the developers to continue working on this if they wish.

[Blackthorne519]

This project is dead.  I think people just need to let it go - release all the work, source, demos, and let someone else make a version of it.  Such a shame.


Bt

[AnonT]

Centaur, I kind of remember you, but it's been almost 10 years and it's kind of fuzzy.

I spent probably 2-3 years active (on and off) on the project. I was active on the original forums when Te'ja first brought up the idea and we were still calling it Quest for Glory 6. My brother, TheBlueNinja, was I think the first, at least one of the first, heads of the plot department, before he passed it on to Angus who passed it on to me before I passed it back to Angus or Ianfe or Erasmus or somebody. I met my first girlfriend in a Hero6 developer chat that we had with Lori and Corey Cole back in 2000 or 2001; we had a long distance relationship for like 8-9 months or so that eventually fell apart. Needless to say, this project was a big part of my life for quite a while, and the number of people who had a bigger impact on the project, or for whom the project had a bigger impact on them, is maybe a dozen at most.

A lot of the problem was that we had a lot more people contributing ideas than actually fleshing them out and working on them. This was true just in the plot department, let alone trying to find people to actually contribute art and code and music. I can remember accepting at least half a dozen applications for the plot department after making the applicants submit writing samples, only to have them post multiple ideas for new characters or quests, write maybe one dialogue or contribute to one screen worth of descriptions, and then disappear. It got to the point where we stopped letting people submit new characters and quests, which just took away their incentive to contribute.

I can remember having to sort through dozens of posts of possible side quests and having to try to rework each of them to require as little work for as much actual game time reward as possible, and cut those that couldn't be saved. I can remember having at least a couple of heated discussions with SirElethil, one of the art mods, because I was trying to rescue too much of the content and include too many characters (and in the end SirE was right), and as time went by I think we did start to realize just how much work we had cut out for ourselves, and I can remember on multiple occasions going back to look at old threads about quests that I had fought to keep and realizing that they needed to be cut because we just had too much content to actually produce it.

I think the final straw that made me stop coming back was one quest that I wanted to save because most of the necessary artwork had already been done for it. It required a ghost girl character, and I remember offering to not only revamp the quest write up, but also write the dialogues for the quest and even finish the sprites for the eye and mouth movements for the dialogue picture, despite not being on the art team. I can't remember how much of that I finished. I remember doing the sprites for the eyes, and I'm pretty sure I finished the dialogues but I might be wrong. I don't think I ever finished the mouth sprites and I don't know for sure if I even posted the last of it on the forums. I know for a while I had a bunch of pages in HTML of a database of something for plot, I think for the text descriptions from looking and interacting with various objects on screen since that was probably the area I contributed to the most (and if I could access that part of the forums, I remember thinking that I even wrote some pretty funny lines). I don't think I still have them, the free hosting site I was using at the time probably doesn't even exist anymore and the only hard drive I might have backed them up on got thrown away over a year ago, if it even still had anything hero6 related.

That wasn't the whole story, of course. There's a lot I don't remember. I do remember that for the last 9 months or so that I was active, it seemed like I was the only active person in the plot department, trying desperately to get whatever work I could out of whoever was still posting and trying to do the rest of it myself. I was getting burnt out. For all the hopes we had for the game in 1999-2000, and for all the progress we made in 2000-2002, by the time I stopped posting in late 2002 or early 2003 or so the writing was already on the wall, and I think a lot of the people who were still posting and contributing were doing so as much out of habit and because of the friendships they had made on the team as because they were actually focused on finishing the game. From what I can see when I log in, it looks like the last breath of real productivity on this site was in 2006-7; other than the general forum, most of the forums haven't been posted in since. If a few people are still working on it underground, if the recent posts about the project being revived are true, great! I would still love to play the game - hell, I'd probably even contribute again, but for me, a small part of me died some 7-8 years ago along with my hopes that this game would ever be done, and despite my occasional nostalgia trip every few years since I'm not really expecting much, and I don't think we could ever make the game we all thought we would have finished years ago.