Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption Interview with Corey Cole

The Gamer HUD has a new interview with one of the developers behind Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, Corey Cole.

The game is a spiritual successor of sorts to the RPG/adventure hybrid series, Quest for Glory, and the interview serves as a recap of the game’s journey through Kickstarter, among other things. Here’s an excerpt:

First off, can you tell me what the original catalyst behind Hero-U was? Have you guys been wanting to return to the Quest for Glory universe (i.e., Gloriana) for a while, or did you originally conceive of it as an entirely independent story and setting?

Corey:

A fan who is now a successful fantasy author – Mishell Baker – co-wrote the first of a planned series of young adult novels loosely based on themes in Quest for Glory, “How to Be a Hero”. Mishell came up with the idea of a web site to promote the books, and Lori and I later took it over. We expanded it into the School for Heroes website and thought we should make a game based on that.

So the roots reach back to Quest for Glory, but are quite distinct from it. In particular, I’ve been very careful to avoid anything remotely resembling infringement of Activision’s copyrights on the Quest for Glory games. Gloriana is “our world”, going back to D&D games we ran at least a decade before we started work on Hero’s Quest / Quest for Glory. One of two worlds actually – we had another “pocket universe” in the parallel world of Coriann, whose amazingly creative name comes from “Corey” and “Lori Ann”.

GH:

As a project, Hero-U outgrew the original Kickstarter pitch almost immediately. I remember some reluctance to even call the original version an adventure game, and you were demo-ing (if memory serves) a sort-of turn-based combat system. Now it’s a full-blown adventure game and RPG hybrid like the QFG series was, which was always something that was unique to those games. How does Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption combine elements of both genres in new and interesting ways?

Corey:

As for “outgrowing”, I think we were overly ambitious from the start. The Kickstarter campaign barely met its goal – a fraction of the budget of a normal adventure game – and we pretty much promised a game as rich as a Quest for Glory to get there. We modeled our campaign after Broken Age (the “Double Fine Adventure”). That campaign got 8 times as much as we did, and still ended up going over budget. Our proposed one-year schedule was based more on the budget than on reality, but we always wanted and intended to deliver much more game than could realistically be done under that budget.

Combining adventure and RPG was probably a silly idea. Then again, combining RPG and adventure in Quest for Glory was crazy too. This time, we have turn-based combat that is more tactical than in Quest for Glory. We also have a broad selection of weapons, armor, and other combat tools that QfG did not provide. Hero-U is different from most adventure games in that we’ve mostly avoided having arbitrary puzzles. There are a few “find this and use it to solve that” puzzles, but mostly the game is about exploration, discovery, and relationships. Oh, and fighting bad creatures for riches and glory. Most of the combat is optional; players who want a pure adventure game can stealth past the monsters and focus on discovery.

[…]

GH:

Final questions. First, do you have any plans for immediately after Rogue to Redemption launches? You’ve said before that you envisioned Hero-U as a series of games, for example, but do you think you’ll head right back into development on the next game?

Corey:

We have a ton of work ahead of us after launching Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. We’ll need to work with distributors, try to get publicity, fulfill physical orders such as game boxes, posters, and art prints, fulfill new direct orders, and so on. We owe a visit to a fan in Germany as a Kickstarter reward, and hopefully we can meet with European gaming press while we’re over there.

What we do after that depends on initial success of the game. We might add foreign language localization, speech, ports to consoles or tablets. Then we’ll get started on the design of Hero-U 2: Wizard’s Way. But if the first game sales are dismal, we’ll instead refund pre-orders of the second game and try to figure out how we can dig our way out of massive debt. Every game production is a gamble, and this is a distinctly personal one.

We are very thankful for our backers who have enabled us to take on this ambitious game project, and we are doing our best to give them a beautiful and fun game experience.