herotome

Official blog of a heroine otome game. Shall we save the day together? 

[herotome]

Herotome Super Demo

SHE's OUT. She is HERE.

FINALLY

I've been working on this damned update since march 2021 I really hope yall like it 😭

Herotome (hero-otome) is a superhero dating sim: romance optional, ✨aroace-friendly.✨

You can now meet ALL five love interests in this first official 'episode' of the game and there's

50,000+  words. (It. is. massive.)

180+ dialogue choice trees.

Animated CGs.

You can even get achievements for petting your cat.

Do you want to save the day and impress everyone with your might and wit and skill? Or do you prefer being an absolute menace who fist fights their mentor in his office and sets fire to fan mail? Why not both?

I been solo funding this project out of pocket for half a decade and I'm not going anywhere until its DONE; if you like the game, pls consider sharing with your friends, hyping it up on social media, or supporting me on Ko-Fi~

Herotome is completely free to play. It comes with a walkthrough if you tip (or have ever spent) 2.99$ or more on the itch.io page, but you shouldn't need a walkthrough to beat the game.

Have fun!!!

Proper link to the demo will be in a reblog so tumblr doesnt nuke this post from search engines XOXO

[herotome]

Welcome to Herotome's tumblr page! Sending an ask is the best way to reach its core developer: Wudge. Please feel free to say hi!

HEROTOME [Super Demo] by Wudgeous

😳 Wh- What if we save the day together in the superhero dating sim

★Play the Super Demo on itch.io!★

-

MOBILE-FRIENDLY NAVIGATION

★ Donate via Ko-Fi to help support the game

★ Watch Animated CG Dubs on Youtube

★ Read Latest Weekly Update right here on Tumblr

★ Taglist & FAQ

★ Ask me something!

★ Linktr.ee

shorter pinned post: https://herotome.tumblr.com/post/735520536295260160/temporary-new-pinned-post

old pinned post: https://herotome.tumblr.com/post/664725041513168896/herotome-an-interactive-urban-fantasy-visual

[herotome]

Devlog #213

Hi-ho, Wudge here. Idk if devlogs are back in an official capacity just yet, but I have some stuff I can talk about.

I finished plugging in approval and disapproval points for Warden and Griffin.

They each have short special scenes which can unlock if you have at least 50% affection (medium) or 70% (high).

The scoring should be pretty generous because it's 50%-70% of the points you could've gotten on day one; you can collect even more points on day two, which means you could technically get over 100% affection.

I've been debating how I wanted to set up the point system for a while now - and I think I'm happiest with this. I want you guys to have the ability to fail and get organic game overs, but it also shouldn't be too difficult to succeed.

Speaking of the ability to fail, I also plugged in some "bad points" for doing things like... telling Griffin he doesn't actually love his mom, and full body tackling a teen hooligan.

I've fixed several typos/syntax errors related to the pronoun code.

Special thanks to @cauldroncatgames for helping me catch the brunt of them!!

I alsoooo wrote some code to put "characters who like you" into a list, but <_< After doing all the work to write it, I don't think I actually have any use for it.. it was good code practice tho I guess.

Life update; kitties have largely recovered! One ended up having an unrelated issue and still has to wear a cone, but he's okay.

As for me... I'm not sure what's going on with me, but I've had a lot more trouble getting out of bed recently. Idk. It should pass.

Stay safe and keep warm,

Wudge.

[herotome]

Hi-ho, Wudge here. Devlogs will be postponed indefinitely errr probably a week or two, as I have four.. cats... and they're picking up the flu from each other. :'( Nothing too serious, because they are all vaccinated and symptoms are mild.

So they're fine. But I'm going through it, getting bit and scratched while feeding them each their medicine. 😭

[herotome]

Hi Wudge! From a fellow artist going through a funk rn, your devlogs are always so human and encouraging. <3

I’m also curious… maybe it’s been asked before, but have the characters changed much since you started on Herotome? I feel like there would be evolution or a temptation to change/grow them when working on a project for this long. In what ways do you feel they’ve changed, if at all, and/or how do you keep their characterization consistent?

I know you’ve mentioned needing to be aware and intentional about scope creep for dialogue choices lol, so I’m curious if this is something you’ve experienced also, and what previous versions of the ROs may have looked like!

Loll it's because if I don't talk about my struggles people start assuming that I'm neurotypical and everything is easy for me all the time!!!

Have the characters changed over time - errr, hmm. I would say yes, usually in small, gradual ways that aren't necessarily conscious decisions on my part. As I work on the game, there's definitely times where I go "oh that character trait doesn't make sense" or "that part of them is not very compelling if I present it too soon and too bluntly."

In terms of consistency, their core, very basic archetypes are largely the same as when I started:

Warden - the "face" of the workplace, leader, lowkey girl failure.. boy failure?

Griffin - girlboss, girlboyboss, disabled, charismatic

Mia - the jealous insecure one who tries really hard to hate you

Dart - the aloof bishounen one who comes off as judgmental and makes you want to prove yourself

Jade - the mysterious ~senpai~ type you're meant to look up to who secretly hates her life

...but my main method of keeping them consistent is to actually read my previous writing lol. Like if I'm gonna write a new Mia scene, I go back and read my older Mia scenes for reference.

Sometimes I might write a new scene without reading an old one for reference; but I will edit the new scene to better gel with the older one afterwards.

And the changes that happen along the way tend to be like....

Originally Mia had a big, obvious crush on Warden (based off those female 'rival' characters in anime) - but now she's just kinda easily flustered by others in general, especially if they have some authority over her.

Dart got redesigned to have natural curls instead of straight white anime hair.

Warden used to have a loud obnoxious laugh; I've since decided he's not actually confident enough to pull that off.

Griffin used to have yellow eyes - I've changed them to green.

....I'm not sure I have any changes for Jade, I guess she has changed the least. Maybe her an affinity for birds wasn't always there??

Herotome is a lot more inspired by anime tropes than I readily admit, as it turns out. A big goal in my writing is to subvert expectations whenever I can though, so those anime tropes are rarely played straight.

Scope creep for dialogue choices-- I don't remember talking about this, but I imagine it had something to do with like... letting the player completely derail the game by doing something exceptionally out of left field LOL. Because I love putting in unexpected and weird choices, but I do have to keep in mind that I can't just let the players ditch the main storyline and run off into some kind of wildly different spinoff experience.. because then I'm the one who has to write that, too...

I still have several of these 'left field' dialogue choices hidden in the game files. It's important for me to keep them for my own reference so I can be like "Hey... don't try any stunts like this, u will be giving urself more work"

[herotome]

Devlog #212

Hi-ho, Wudge here.

Allergies have been eliminated for about a week; it was my pillow. Today, I had a lot of trouble getting out of bed for some reason. It's kinda cloudy today, so maybe a weather-based sadness? Anyway.

I exported a private build of the game so a couple my friends could help playtest, shoutout to them. <3 So far they have found:

>The special Griffin scene was completely inaccessible cuz I set the affinity check too high. Whoops!

>Jade's face disappears at the beginning of her flying scene.

>Katie's purring sfx goes on too long- persisting even when MC has exited the apartment.

>The save screen fully crashed the game bc I deleted an image file with the word "_delete" in the file name. Turns out that was the trash can icon; ren'py did not like being unable to find that icon. I have renamed the file so it should no longer be deleted accidentally.

>Warden's 1x1 scene doesn't link properly to the subsequent scene.

>Dart shows up to be heroic... in casual clothes!

I think I have fixed all of these mistakes, none of them have been too difficult to handle. They're akin to typos in writing rather than actual bugs, really.

I'm thankful for my friends' diligence, patience, and honesty so far!

Other than that - I finished rendering Mia's helmet and put in the glitchy MASK animation over her face. Generally I just do sketches and will delegate rendering to someone else, but since the helmet image is fairly small I decided to take a stab at it. I think it turned out well!

Stay safe and keep warm,

Wudge.

[remnantation]

It's been awhile!

It's been a hot minute, but I decided to dust off this account. I've never been a huge poster, but I've recently decided to learn more about game dev by... making a game, and I wanted somewhere to put my progress just to see it as it comes along. So that's what you'll likely see in the near future! I'm still very new to it, but I've been diving into Unity and C#. I also made my first animated sprite! I don't yet know if I really need all directions, but I made it to practice and learn, so meet Cake:

For a first try without much of an animation background, I thought it wasn't too bad! The bottom two were the first I did and are the most awkward. There's room for improvement overall (and I was frustrated I liked the sketch versions better, haaaaa). I spent some time reading about some animation basics and the concept of 2s and 3s - this was animated in 2s - and I'm wondering if I can mimic pixel art with fewer frames without actually doing pixel art, which isn't my jam to make.

[herotome]

Devlog #212

Hi-ho, Wudge here.

My allergy symptoms persist... It might be caused by my pillow, actually?? Like I've tried changing the pillow cases, but it might be the pillow itself... I have removed the pillow from my room, we will see if that changes anything. <_<

Anyway. This week involved a lot of playtesting.

Some screencaps.

Things I done did while playtesting:

-exported a cropped version of Mia's hair that can fits neatly under her helmet, so you can see her bangs

-adjusted the code for Mia's hair/helmet.

-filled in some writing blanks - particularly when you message Myster from the orion training room, and one of Warden's dialogue choices I'd previously left blank (unintentionally making him ditch MC rly abruptly and rudely lmao)

-added a couple of sfx

-I skipped testing some of Warden's dialogue options, but Griffin's and Mia's should be fully tested. I particularly spent time in Griffin's bc I had to plug in some 'removechoice' code blocks to make a looping choice menu.

-coded in matrixcolor a 'night time' filter for MC's bedroom background

Stay safe and keep warm,

Wudge.

[herotome]

Devlog #211

Hi-ho, Wudge here. I had a runny nose and trouble breathing this week. :( It should just be a dust allergy, as I'm feeling better after deep cleaning my bedroom; I'll keep yall updated.

That aside, I managed to write a bit for a Dart scene this week, and I've got some commissions in the works.

Stay safe and keep warm,

Wudge.

[herotome]

Hii!! Herotome isn’t even fully out yet, so maybe this is reaching too far into the future, but besides Herotome, do you have any other projects you want to complete? Or is Herotome all that’s on yur mind right now? I love your storytelling and characters!

Ha, yeah, Herotome is definitely the only visual novel on my mind. There was a while where I considered making a sequel with another set of love interests, but I didn't have a compelling enough story to go with it.

I do occasionally accept commissions to write or edit for other visual novels and I'm always very dedicated to completing those! But those projects aren't my sole responsibility, so to speak.

I have considered writing a book alongside Herotome, and an interactive fiction story (so I don't have to do any art <_<) that would come out after Herotome is done, if at all.

The book is about a woman whose dead husband one day comes shambling back home. It's uh, a romance between her and the entity now possessing her husband, rather than a horror, so it's been difficult to make that work and I've only written a chapter or two.

The IF is about a gender selectable heir who is married off to another kingdom, in sort of a Final Fantasy XV era setting, so there's magic and cars and guns.

[herotome]

Devlog #210

Hi-ho, Wudge here. Hoo, devlog time.

I added checkpoints to Griffin's and Warden's 1x1 scenes.

I wrote new lines for Dart's scene.

I backed up my files.

I coded in a special ~textbox portrait~ screen.

I'm gonna talk more about that last bullet point. So! The final PSD file I commissioned from @cauldroncatgames looks like this:

Gorgeous UI work. I exported this file into the following layers:

The black backmost shape, a copy of that shape for sprite masking, the horizontal lines, and the topmost yellow outline.

(I'm pretty sure I can delete the "Copy" of the yellow outline, but I gotta double check my code first.)

I heavily referenced Fenik's code here! https://feniksdev.com/how-to-mask-images-in-renpy/

But uh... I need this portrait to display several different sprites, thus my work continues.

I begin with Gemini, who is the easiest to work with bc she is a flat image with no layers.

It took me a minute to mask her in properly (you can see the rest of her torso sticking out of the bottom), and I also needed to adjust the actual dialogue text to move over to the right whenever she speaks. (You can see it cuts off "The" and just says "pleasure's all mine." in the screenshot here.)

This takes some trial and error, but ultimately is not too difficult.

Then comes Daeng, the first actual layered image sprite I'm working with for the textbox portrait. And ohhh my gosh. He gave me a hard time!

Do you see him?

Right there! That! Look at that!!! What is he doing?!?! Why is he hiding behind the textbox??????

It took me a loooong time to notice a pivotal clue... the slant of the line where he's "cut off" is perfectly parallel to the shape of the textbox portrait.

...which means Daeng's shape is not properly aligned with the textbox portrait. He's not hiding really, he's just been pushed way to the left.

So yeah, I was ultimately able to get him to show up properly and I added a lil shadow to his face, but it took several hours to reposition him and troubleshoot wth was going on lol.

After clearing things up with Daeng though, plugging in other sprites was fairly straightforward.

...And I think that about covers it for now. I'll be reblogging this post with some more images of visual goofs that I screenshotted while coding, so keep an eye out for that.

Stay safe and keep warm,

Wudge.

[herotome]

Here's the goofs I promised:

[herotome]

Devlog #210

Hi-ho, Wudge here. Hoo, devlog time.

I added checkpoints to Griffin's and Warden's 1x1 scenes.

I wrote new lines for Dart's scene.

I backed up my files.

I coded in a special ~textbox portrait~ screen.

I'm gonna talk more about that last bullet point. So! The final PSD file I commissioned from @cauldroncatgames looks like this:

Gorgeous UI work. I exported this file into the following layers:

The black backmost shape, a copy of that shape for sprite masking, the horizontal lines, and the topmost yellow outline.

(I'm pretty sure I can delete the "Copy" of the yellow outline, but I gotta double check my code first.)

I heavily referenced Fenik's code here! https://feniksdev.com/how-to-mask-images-in-renpy/

But uh... I need this portrait to display several different sprites, thus my work continues.

I begin with Gemini, who is the easiest to work with bc she is a flat image with no layers.

It took me a minute to mask her in properly (you can see the rest of her torso sticking out of the bottom), and I also needed to adjust the actual dialogue text to move over to the right whenever she speaks. (You can see it cuts off "The" and just says "pleasure's all mine." in the screenshot here.)

This takes some trial and error, but ultimately is not too difficult.

Then comes Daeng, the first actual layered image sprite I'm working with for the textbox portrait. And ohhh my gosh. He gave me a hard time!

Do you see him?

Right there! That! Look at that!!! What is he doing?!?! Why is he hiding behind the textbox??????

It took me a loooong time to notice a pivotal clue... the slant of the line where he's "cut off" is perfectly parallel to the shape of the textbox portrait.

...which means Daeng's shape is not properly aligned with the textbox portrait. He's not hiding really, he's just been pushed way to the left.

So yeah, I was ultimately able to get him to show up properly and I added a lil shadow to his face, but it took several hours to reposition him and troubleshoot wth was going on lol.

After clearing things up with Daeng though, plugging in other sprites was fairly straightforward.

...And I think that about covers it for now. I'll be reblogging this post with some more images of visual goofs that I screenshotted while coding, so keep an eye out for that.

Stay safe and keep warm,

Wudge.

[herotome]

wanted to check to see if the game is still being worked on (especially with how much work you no doubt have to put into in based on just how impressive the demo is) and it's amazing that it is!! i absolutely love your characters, and have since the first demo! hope you're still getting lots of rest though!!

lol yes I am married to Herotome; in sickness and in health till death do us part and all that. Its my old ball and chain... (It's not sexist when it's inanimate right--)

I'm getting a decent amount of rest, I think? It can be a struggle sometimes. Thank you for the well wishes!

On that note, this is actually a great opportunity for me to say that I'd like to take a rest (ha) from writing the devlog this week, because I worked on so much and don't feel up to listing it all out 😂 Here is a preview though:

~The Textbox Portrait!~

The actual yellow portrait box UI is drawn by my friend @cauldroncatgames , who you may know by their previous name of qkayoo!

This is a mechanic I have been pecking at for a longgggg time-- and I think I mentioned it and showed off concepts in previous devlogs-- but it is finally here! ...After I spent all day coding and troubleshooting, plus using some code I already had written from over a year ago.

When you get a phone call or video call from a character, or if a character is speaking from offscreen (eg, from the backseat of a car while you are facing forwards), you can still see their face in a lil textbox window. <3

This portrait can blink and change expressions and outfits, just like a regular standing sprite.

More on this later. Thank you for the sweet message anon, I wish you well!

[herotome]

I feel like Dart would be very hard to fluster. He gives me nonchalant deadpan dude vibes. So how does mc fluster him?? Even if its just internally!

lol... vulnerability... honesty...

Dart has developed a thick skin when it comes to flirting bc he has worked with Griffin for a long time; he is much more easily flustered by someone who is unexpectedly genuine and kind to him.

[parkchanwoohoo]

Something about the random direction this conversation took tickled me

[parkchanwoohoo]

The contrast in the comments interest me here too

[herotome]

Devlog #209

Hi-ho, Wudge here.

I redrew the yellow outline behind the phone chatroom UI. You can see the original version (left) had more jagged n pixellated linework.

I made a, uh... "bald" version of Warden so our new video editor can have an easier time animating his hair.

That's right, video editor. I'm commissioning a teaser trailer to put on steam!

Last night I also went through and touched up the code for Griffin and Warden's 1x1 scenes - they're not done yet, but they're looking a bit better. In doing that, I noticed my code for Griffin's sunglasses was kinda dumb so I spent some time rewriting it... Thinking about if there's a way I can improve Griffin's outfit code too, but ah well, that'll be another day.

That's all I can think of for now.

Stay safe and keep warm,

Wudge.

[herotome]

The way I start salivating upon even just seeing the top half of Dart's face is so concerning. What drugs did you put in these characters

Most recently? morphine

[herotome]

this looks really good honestly, the design and presentation feel really polished. I’m curious, what was your experience like commissioning that outfit?

Lol Warden's tank top specifically? Rem and I had pretty good rapport by that point so my emails tend to be rather informal.

What I would've included in the email was...

Warden's base PSD file (important for Rem to have the dimensions of the canvas, and align the outfit somewhat precisely onto the body).

Reference image/s of what I wanted.

Written instructions of what I wanted; whether there was something in the reference I particularly wanted, or if there's a detail I specifically didn't want. (eg, if the best reference had the exact color and cut of tank top, but huge stains on the pits - do I want Rem to draw the pit stains y/n)

Payment lmao - sometimes I asked for a quote on how much it'll be (every commission I get from Rem is a little different in level of detail and effort), other times I just went "idc how much it is, I trust u, just go ahead and send me an invoice" bc I was 99% certain I could afford it.

...That all sounds pretty formal but that's just the contents of every commission email from me 😭😭😭 The informal parts are from me going "hi me again!!!!!!" and "WOOOO i think thats everythign thank god ok let me know if u got questions"