Reflecting on a Past Project: Hero Academy 2

Preface

Okay, so I really liked Hero Academy 2. Like, 67 hours on my personal steam account liked Hero Academy 2. It totally turned me around about Collectable Card Games (CCG) and showed me they could actually be fun to play.

Unfortunately, the game servers were eventually closed. As much as I would like to get my greedy little fingers on a functional, offline copy or figure out how to direct its server to somewhere else so I could play, it probably won't happen.

So, I’m directing my HA2 related feelings into this sort of look back at the project. I have a lot more experience in the game industry having worked QA for close to 5 years now and am much more confident in my design abilities. So, I want to look back and think about if I was given the design reigns, what kind of things I would do.

HA2 the Big Points

Brief Explanation

Hero Academy 2 (HA2) is a tactical strategy game inspired by the original Hero Academy. Matches are real-time now. You can also customize your teams by collecting cards and building your own decks. Also with hours of single player campaigns and mind bending challenges against the AI.

- Excerpt from Robot Entertainment Website

HA2 has a pretty standard core game loop: Build a deck of cards > Play Match > Earn Rewards and or Progress to Rewards > Use Rewards to acquire more Cards to build more decks.

HA2 already has three major gameplay modes: Multiplayer, Campaigns, and Challenges.

Multiplayer - Players are matched together based on a MMR (MatchMakingRanking) so that players of similar skills will match with each other. There's also practice matches against AI and friendly matches in Guilds.
Campaigns - A series of single player matches with an overarching plot. Matches are unique in that enemies sometimes start on the board or objectives vary. They often reward card packs, resources, and special cosmetic items on first completion milestones.
Challenges - Puzzles and challenges that have one or a few solutions and reward usually small amounts of rewards on first completion.

Why like HA2?

It’s taken me a while to kind of grasp why I enjoyed HA2 so much. Like I said, no other CCG attracted my attention and neither did these types of character collection strategy games: Magic the gathering, Hearthstone, League of Legends, Minion Masters, and Clash of Clans.

So why? At first, I wanted to address some biases that I thought would affect this:

Affinity from it being my first project. This was the first commercial game project that I had ever worked on so it’s obvious that it would hold a special place for me. However, I don’t think that’s it. I like Orcs Must Die as well, in fact I played OMD 1 and OMD 2 before even knowing about RobotEntertainment and another game I worked on, though briefly. But I never quite got the same itch for it, not like I did with HA2. Years of writing critique and workshopping, I think has prevented me from being too blinded by rose tinted glasses. I can take some due potshots at games dear to me like War of the Monsters, EDF, or CRACKDOWN 3.
I was just good at it so I liked it. Haha, oh no. No. I mean, I could play a mean deck, my Zom-Baes Dark Elf deck was to be feared, but I was far from the best player of it. I liked when I could win in HA2 sure, but those instances of winning weren’t my driving point of playing, more so a pleasant result. I liked the board-based card combat.
Sunk Cost Fallacy. Like I said, I put a lot of hours into that game and was trying to get coworkers into the game as well before the servers shut down. And here it is, ending. However, in all honesty, I didn’t make many purchases in the game nor was I super tied to my deck or guild or cards.

A Breakdown of the Good

With these out of the way, I wanted to mechanically dive into why I liked the game so much so I could focus choices into those areas. What I came up with were: Casual Card Game Experience, Active Strategy, and Tons of Personality.

Casual Card Game Experience

One thing I always felt was that many CCG couldn’t be played casually. I mean, technically speaking you could, but for advancement beyond the “basic tier” of play you had to take more serious steps: researching player metas, building specific decks, playing in a specific way because only winning is fun. HA2, I feel, didn’t force these on the player.

HA2 is a CCG so it does want you to chase collecting cards and care about winning, for example the Tournament feature and the MMR numbers. However, I feel like it largely avoided pitfalls of restricting fun behind a level of player engagement:

Single Player Content

This is by far the strongest point of HA2. You could advance in the game when playing not multiplayer. Most CCGs want or at least heavily funnel you into an exclusively multiplayer environment and either ignore or tack on a single-player aspect. HA2 gave you variety in the form of: Challenges and Campaigns. Each one uses the game’s various multiplayer mechanics and elements to good use: making you strategically play cards to solve puzzles, facing off in a normal match against an unusual or unfair opponent, or building situational decks for a level.

Handling Duplicates

Duplicates are a bane of CCG players because they don’t offer use. Digital ones at least breakdown into coins, however these are just another gacha currency either for a specific faction or just for more random card packs. HA2 uses ink. Ink could be saved and used to purchase specific cards or skins. It wasn’t just another resource for a random draw; from a duplicate you are offered a guarantee instead of a chance.

Simplicity of Interaction

HA2 uses a lot of simplistic but common elements in games like this: armor, mana to cast cards, damage-over-time poison, and simple weapon assortment (sword, staff, bow, hammer). What it does that I still like, is the basic combat and action points. There’s no specific hero turn order, heroes have largely static stats to make them predictable, and hero movement and attacks work the same for every hero. It uses these common elements in conjunction to create unique, interesting situations and this makes the game much more digestible over other CCGs.

Attractive Strategy

The strategy offered in HA2 is a great mix of board game tactics and traditional CCG strategy. I love the way the incorporation of the board creates far more interesting situations.

The following are examples that have always stuck out to me:

My health points are physical things on the board, so the enemy has to directly find ways to attack them. There’s no “you can only attack this hero not my health points” or “if I have no monsters, you hit my health points directly”.
Heroes have to move around the board to get within range of Targets. This adds a chess-esque strategy of hero placement and movement instead of characters just being placed on a predetermined grid or battle line.
Card synergies require board synergy. I feel this helps prevent explicit deck meta as now heroes on the board force more variability into the strategy of the cards.

I mentioned mana before, but I love how HA2 used mana. I thought it paired very well with the active, player-driven strategy of the game because you could reserve mana for a specific play or upcoming gambit. In addition, you had sufficient mana coming in each turn (5) and a natural maximum of mana you could hold (I think 9?) which meant you had to spend that mana each turn to be efficient.

I’ve disliked the “mana over literal seconds” and the “real time auto fights” mechanic of games of this genre. I feel it restrains the strategic ability, forces you to play to the clock, and is a very passive way to play a card game. Hero Academy avoids all of these pitfalls.

Tons of Personality

Hero Academy 2 had one of the most colorful casts of interesting heroes I’ve had the joy of playing. From the card artwork, to the voice lines, to the animations of the 3D models, all of it just oozed this fun personality. What’s more, this provided great indirect storytelling: preventing the need of a lengthy paragraph to describe a character.

Monetization

In a blog post a few months before the final shut down, it was discussed that operating all their living games was not financially sustainable as a company and had been costing money to keep up. Things like servers, mobile platform hosting, along with just running the company add up to significant costs when the game isn’t paying for itself.

Hero Academy 2 used an IAP centric (In-App Purchase) centric format where the player would buy packs (I know there was a starter pack) and Gem purchases, the premium Currency of the game as well as many others. These Gems would then be spent on various other items within the game like speeding up chest completion, purchasing coins, or buying campaigns or challenges.

Monetization: My Take

Here’s the start of my own ideation section to address this question, “If the game were still running but having problems with monetization what would you do, Designer Joseph?”

With this in mind I wanted to establish some baselines that I wouldn’t be able to change, at least not in this scenario:

Platforms:
- Mobile: iOS and Android. Free games.
- PC/Mac (Steam): I think it was $15 or $20 and offered some extra goodies.
No Offerwalls or Ad Network incorporation.

With those established, I think my approach for increasing monetization would come in these reasonable forms:

Increase usage and marketing of Cosmetic Content
Increase value and allure of Single Player Content
Increase number of purchase opportunitie

Increase Cosmetic Content

One of the newest additions was Hero Skin cosmetics to pair up with the Crystal cosmetics. It was a gold variant for every hero. This was a good step toward cosmetics, but needed to be pushed further to maximize its ability.

My plan would be two fold: First establish 3 tiers of skins so we can define value using the same tiering system we used for our cards.

Grey (Common): Basic skins with no larger scale visual changes.
- Mostly unchanged crystals. Crystals with small add-ons like hats or trinkets that are just attached to the crystal or floating around them.
- The Hero Palette swaps would fit in here, just basic color changes.
Blue (Epic): Average skins that provide more visually distinct changes.
- Crystals that incorporate things into their form or silhouette, such as the Dark elf and Warden crystals (wrapped in vines and the spikey black lattice).
- Hero skin changes would be more substantial, like changing textures or more complex visual aesthetic changes. The gold texture skins would fit in here or a thematic reskin like a Rusted Council skin or Scorched Warden skin.
Yellow (Legendary): Detailed skins that provide a major visual change.
- The Cheese Crystals is a great example. Complete texture and or model change of the Crystal. In addition, it’s exclusive and only attainable by a special accomplishment.
- Hero Skins would be a substantial change. For example, changing Terminus to a “Beast Master” Terminus where he had a tiger pelt and katars instead of his axes.

I would plan out themes for each faction to keep the design varied but consistent. Primary factions would get more than others, but we would also use global themes with no restrictions.

Global	Council	Warden	Dark Elf	Viking	Gladiator
Disco Christmas Halloween	Rusted Black Steel Cybernetic	Withered Fruiting Scorched	Rave Cute/Kawaii Runic	Rockstar	Beastmaster

The second step would be incorporating these skins into normal gameplay rewards. Traditionally, these cosmetics were: bought using ink or given at the end of a campaign’s Hardmode. This needed a push to increase visibility and accessibility for players. I would take 3 primary steps with addressing this:

Reward Common Skins on Level Up. Normally, you’d get some resources and a new profile picture, but I say that’s not enough. Giving a new common Hero skin or Crystal Skin every few levels, is way more rewarding and encourages continued leveling up.
Offer Epic and Legendary Skins in IAP packs. DLC character skins packs have been around for a long time in games and I think would be a great way to beef up IAP pack options and allure.

Offer Epic and Common Skins for Challenges. Challenges traditionally gave ink or coins, both useful but not very encouraging to complete or purchase. This serves as a little something more to those packs and drives you to want to collect more.

Refine Single Player Content

Statement: Creating more narrative Single Player content will increase player interaction.

Single Player content is plentiful in HA2: Faction Campaigns, side campaigns, level up challenges, faction challenges, generic challenges, and so on. However, they are not equal: campaigns are much more customized than normal challenges.

My change would be to pull an element from the high work cost to raise the value of low work cost, specifically rewards and narrative theming. I’ve covered rewards already: increasing their variety to make them more worthwhile to complete because coins and ink can be earned elsewhere. But narrative theming is something I’ve always thought was great but lacking in other parts of the content. This would be done by giving heroes or the player voice bubbles while in challenges.

My suggestion would be to use narrative theming to make challenges more engaging than a basic puzzle. For example: a collection of puzzles could be based around healing and poison. That’s fine, but a more interesting narrative hook of that would be: Cleric of the Spire has been wrangled from the Council to heal the Glade Sentinel, but things don’t go as expected when Alchemist Toxx kidnaps him for revenge.

This explains the frequent healing and poison mechanics that are involved while also giving the players a plot to follow through and a reason to want to reach the end. For further specialization, these narrative challenges could be separated from generic ones by offering one of those new cosmetic rewards for completion.

Increase purchase opportunities

Statement: Increasing variety of IAP offers will increase IAP offers performed.

HA2 provides a shop where the user can purchase things:

Bundle Pack
Gem IAP (Typical price points $2/$5/$10/$20/$50/$100)
Coin Purchase (Cost Gems)
Card Packs (Cost Coins or Gems)

However, the bundles were rarely offered. There was a starter pack and a special pack for Steam users, but that was it I believe that was it. I think making use of bundles would be a great way to encourage IAPs outside of the typical card grind.

These periodic IAP packs would offer currency along with a cosmetic item and or a campaign. Cosmetics would be exclusive or offered in certain batches to increase their perceived value.

Solar Pack ($6) - SuperNova Crystal Skin + 500 Gems + 500 Coins.
Morning Glory ($2) - 3 Topaz Skins + 50 Gems. (Guaranteed unacquired skins, unless all are owned in which skins become inks).
Glitz and Glamor ($10) - Bling Crystal Skin + Bling Magister Alberic + 800 Gems.

That’s the end of my reasonable approaches, but what designer would I be if I didn’t have an unreasonable suggestion: the inclusion of a whole new mode that makes use of all of the elements I’ve discussed so far and adds in a new method of play: The Gauntlet.

New Gamemode: The Gauntlet

What is the Gauntlet?

The Gauntlet is a single player, 1 week event where the Player will face off against a series of thematic Ai in a row to earn a Gauntlet Key. These keys can be used to redeem special chests that offer exclusive new cards and cosmetics.

How does it work?

While active, each day a Gauntlet challenge becomes available. This challenge consists of 3 opponents who must be beaten in a row to complete that day’s challenge. This challenge can be attempted with no limit and on success rewards 3 Gauntlet Keys. After completion it cannot be reattempted. After the day goes by, the current challenge is re-locked and the next day’s challenge is unlocked. If a Gauntlet Key was not earned, it cannot be recovered.

What are Gauntlet Keys used for?

The Gauntlet Keys are used as a currency to open themed chests. Each chest offers different rewards and requires different amounts of keys.

Legendary Chest

Requires 15 Keys
Guaranteed Theme Rewards. Chance for Legendary or Epic cards or a lump sum of a resource (Gem, Coin, or Ink).

Epic Chest

Requires 12 Keys
Chance for the special themed cards, but also acts as a normal premium chest.

Rare Chest

Requires 9 keys
Acts as a normal chest.

Uncommon Chest

Requires 6 keys
Provides a random range of Gold and Ink. Rarely will give Gems.

Common Chest

Requires 3 keys
Provides a random range of Gold and Ink. Rarely will give Gems.

Themes

Every Gauntlet will have a theme that it is based around which will define what types of cards and cosmetics will be offered. These cards and cosmetics will be exclusive to these events and not offered in any other place. Only 4 or 5 different cards will be offered along with 3 or 4 unique skins. All Cards awarded from Gauntlet events belong to a minor faction by the same name of the Gauntlet. Below are some examples:

Outdoorsy Gauntlet

A theme composed of camping elements.

Cards
- (Epic Hero) Ranger Honey - 1A/3HP - Bow. Heals adjacent ally Heroes on summon
- (Uncommon Hero) Woodsman - 2A/3HP - Melee Swipe.
- (Uncommon Spell) Inconspicuous Bramble - Deal 1 Damage and Roots Target.
- (Epic Spell) Furry Friend - Summon a Random Animal Hero on an Ally Hero.
Cosmetics
- (Epic Hero Skin) Lumberjack Sir Baldric
- (Epic Hero Skin) Park Ranger Ursa Knight
- (Epic Crystal Skin) Camo Crystal (Crystal poorly hidden in a bush)
- (Common Crystal Skin) Roasted Crystal (Crystal floats over a campfire)

Marble Labyrinth Gauntlet

This Gauntlet centered around Roman theme and the Gladiator faction

Cards
- (Epic Hero) Ballistarius - 2A/2HP - Ranged - Attack Range of 4.
- (Uncommon Hero) Minotaur - 2A/3HP - Hammer Melee Animal.
- (Epic Spell) Statueification - Turn a 2HP or lower hero into a statue with 2HP.
- (Legendary Spell) Et Tu Hero - Damage Target equal to number of Ally Heroes.
Cosmetics
- (Legendary Hero) Gorgon Empress Ventrici
- (Uncommon Hero) Night Stalker Pit Mauler
- (Uncommon Crystal) Armored Crystal (Has a little helmet and pauldrons)
- (Epic Crystal) Emperor Crystal (Crystal with robes and a laurel crown)

Big Top Gauntlet

This Gauntlet is themed around circus and stage magic.

Cards
- (Rare Spell) Summoned Assistant - Summon a Magic Hand on an Ally Hero.
  - Magic Hand - 1A/1HP. Melee. Pierce.
- (Common Spell) Prestidigitation - Stun a Target.
- (Epic Hero) Miss Magician - 1A/3HP - Ranged. Stuns a Target when summoned.
- (Legendary Hero) Juggler Lucian - 1A/5HP - Sword. Can perform ranged attacks.
Cosmetics
- (Epic Hero) Magician and Assistant Bunny Patrol
- (Legendary) Dark Magician Magister Alberic
- (Legendary) Balance Ball Crystal (A Crystal seal balancing 3 balls on its nose)
- (Uncommon) Clown Crystal (rubber nose and funny hair)

Ai Opponents

Opponents for each Gauntlet would also follow the themes. As this would be a substantial number of unique decks, we would use a combination of unique and generic decks. In order to obfuscate this, we will use random thematic names for generic decks and specific names for our unique sets to ingrain them as specific personalities.

Generic Opponents

These Opponents would be similar to the normal multiplayer fallback system. They would use mostly standard decks and would typically be the Normal difficulty, but Hard difficulty would be used in the later days. The Decks would be similarly generic, with some occasional edits to add more of certain factions or characters: more animal heroes, Gladiator faction, etc. The Generic Gauntlet Opponents would have a list of names that are not included in the normal opponent list and would be specific to their Gauntlet.

Unique Opponents

Unique Opponents would appear as the 3rd opponent of each Gauntlet day. These Opponents have custom decks and specific names. Some would be designed to fit with a specific theme while others would be more generic to provide variety and familiarity. Ideally, they would also utilize special cards unique to only these opponents. For Example:

The Stage Master - The devious trickster with more than cards up his sleeve.
- (Building) Magic Hat - 2H - Building. Turn Start: Summons a Random Hero, Gives +1 Attack to a Random Hero, or Heals a Random Hero.
- (Spell) Transformation - Target Ally Hero is transformed into a Random Hero.
- (Hero) Card Caster - 1A/2H - Ranged.
Erudite Aficionado - The self-proclaimed master of all these strategic and card shaped.
- (Spell) Um Actually - Spell - Returns the last KO’d hero to the hand at 0 Cost.
- (Hero) Multiclasser - 1A/4H - Melee Hero. Can wield Bow, Sword, Hammer, Staff.
- (Building) Card Forge. - 3H - Building. Give a card to get a Random card.

Gauntlet IAP

On the last 2 days of the Gauntlet, two special IAP offers will appear:

Keys for Gems (Ex. 2 Keys for 300 Gems)
IAP for Gems and Keys (Ex. $2.99 for 3 Keys and 100 Gems or $4.99 for 6 Keys)

This IAP offers a chance for players who have not played enough or didn’t acquire enough keys to still open chests. It also maintains that the rewards of a Gauntlet are exclusive to participating in it by opening chests.

HA2 Now

So to end this off, I’d like to talk about HA2 now. When the sunset initiative started for Hero Academy 2 all players were given a huge amount of resources as a send off. Personally, based on this I doubt we would see the return of the game in its original state.

But, maybe a reboot of some sort. We’ve seen a few of those come out in the past few years, so never say never. However, I think for this to happen, some things would need to be addressed.

Server Costs

This was implied by the blog post, but HA2 wasn’t paying for its own server upkeep. On its return, it would need a game plan to address that.

Partnering with Stadia: OMD 3 on Stadia has been pretty great from a player perspective, or at least my perspective. An always-online game like Hero Academy 2 with Google’s fancy servers would be helpful especially with all the calculations going on on the back end. Stadia currently has 2 free titles (Destiny 2 and Super Bomberman R Online) so a free game like Hero Academy 2 would fit in and probably be welcome. This paired with Stadia requiring a google email to sign up fixes a user ID issue since everyone would have to start off fresh as the previous resource dump would make their old accounts pretty invalid.

Using Player’s Device as the “Server”: Removing servers hosted by Robot Entertainment entirely would address this pretty well. However, this has some elements that I’m unsure about currently: Would this allow cheating to occur easier? Would this affect calculation time of Ai opponents negatively? Wouldn’t this only be feasible for PC users?

Paid Game instead of Free: This is definitely an option to recoup costs up front and may work in conjunction with some of the suggested IAP offers. However, to validate the cost to more than just die-hard fans, the game would need to be reintroduced with a substantial increase in content, but I’ll pin that thought for later.

Possibly ditching the Mobile Market

The Mobile game sphere is a rough environment to keep a game active and alive in. Let alone the game design itself, there's player retention, monetization, dealing with Apple and Google, managing what phones to cater to, and keeping it up-to-date on SDK and module updates across 4 OS platforms. These are all unspoken time, money, and effort sinks. With a sufficiently bulked Ai opponent system, the smaller player base should be fine without relying on mobile players to fill out the ranks. I will say though, I’m a little biased in this case as I preferred playing Hero Academy 2 on a computer over my phone.