Create Your Own Hero From Hand-Drawn Art

HeroMachine lets you design custom characters using thousands of mix-and-match art components. Pick a body, add costumes, weapons, backgrounds, and more — no drawing skills required.

Latest Posts

HeroMachine 2 is back!

Thanks to a program called Ruffle, Flash content can now be shown in browsers again! Head on over to the HeroMachine 2 page and start creating your own character portraits like you did back in the day!

Make Your Own HM2 Character!

Posted in Meta | 1 Comment

How to Use HeroMachine Locally

Hi all, with big thanks to HeroMachiner Eric Bowling, here’s how you can use HeroMachine outside of your browser. Adobe has said they’re going to be force uninstalling the Flash Player (the standalone player basically) but I don’t know that applies to this particular version.

Basically you download a local Flash Player application, then put in the URL for a .swf file (a compiled Flash object, which is what HeroMachine uses) and it plays. I’ve tried it on my Mac with HM3 and HM2 and it seems to work like a champ. You’ll still need an Internet connection but if this goes well I may bundle up the files and make them available online so you could truly run it all locally. We’ll just have to see, I don’t want to sell people something and then BAM Adobe force uninstalls the Flash Players and it no longer works.

Anyway, the article explaining how to get the Standalone Flash Player Debugger is at https://www.howtogeek.com/438141/how-to-play-adobe-flash-swf-files-outside-your-web-browser/ – install the one relevant to your Operating System.

Once the Flash Player Debugger is installed per the instructions in that article, launch the Flash Player Debugger and go to “File -> Open Location”. This is where you type in the URL to a .swf file. Do not download the .swf file to run from your hard drive, that will not work, you must use “Open Location” and put in one of the URLs below! Here are the ones for HeroMachine so you can just copy and paste:

For fun, here are the URLs for some of the hardly-ever-used versions:

CAVEATS: The “Export as an image” function in HM3 will NOT work. Saving as a text file will. 

I think that’s pretty much it. Let me know if you run into issues with this, though honestly, there’s not a lot I can do since I can’t edit the source files any more and I can’t control what Adobe does with their players.

Posted in HeroMachine 3, Meta, News & Updates, Tips & Tricks | 39 Comments

All roads lead to … new items?

I’m not sayin’. I’m just sayin’ …

Posted in HeroMachine 3, Meta | 1 Comment

The Return of HeroMachine 3?

After way too many years, I can hardly believe that the return of HeroMachine 3 as a non-Flash, fully-functional character creator is not just very real, but quite imminent. Here’s a proof-of-life screenshot:

Continue reading “The Return of HeroMachine 3?”
Posted in HeroMachine 3, Meta | 6 Comments

Requesting your characters’ XML saves (also hello again!)

::testing, testing … is this thing still on?::

Hey all, it’s been a long long time since there was any HeroMachine news of note, and I honestly don’t know if anyone is still around or interested. But I might have some pretty huge news to share in the very near future about getting HM3 working again. I will share that I have a working prototype built in native CSS, HTML, and JavaScript that will run natively in your browser without needing anything in particular extra. And definitely no Flash!
To help with testing, though, I am hoping some of you fine folks are willing to send me your saved character XML files from the past so I can test things further. My email address is afdstudios at gmail dot com.

If you are still here, THANK YOU! And if you can send me some saved character files that would be fantastic, so DOUBLE thank you!

I appreciate you all more than I can say.

– Prodigal Jeff

Posted in Meta | 2 Comments

The Death of the CDCs

Interest in the CDCs has fallen to a point hat we can only rely on one entry per week. As such the CDCs are being retired effective today.

The Facebook page seems to garner more interest, so perhaps they can find a home there.

I gave it my best shot, but the lack of entries is too disheartening for me to continue

Cheers Machiners

DJuby

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments