HeroMachine Character Portrait Creator

A quick but important update today: HeroMachine 3 now includes backup reminders to help you keep your characters safe.

Why This Matters

When you click “Save” in HeroMachine 3, your character is stored in your browser’s local storage. This is convenient — your characters are right there the next time you visit — but it’s also fragile. Clearing your browsing data, using private/incognito mode, or even just not visiting the site for a while can cause your browser to silently wipe that data. Safari is particularly aggressive about this, automatically purging site data after as few as seven days of inactivity.

If this sounds familiar, it should, because the old Flash version worked the same way. Flash used “Shared Objects” (basically Flash cookies) that lived in your browser and could vanish just as easily. Many of you learned that lesson the hard way back then, and unfortunately the web version has the same fundamental limitation. Your browser’s storage is temporary by nature, no matter what technology is behind it.

What’s New

To help prevent heartbreak, the Save Data tab now includes three things:

• A permanent warning reminding you that browser saves can be lost, displayed right above the Export/Import buttons.
• A highlighted Export All button in amber, so it’s easy to spot.
• A periodic reminder banner that appears if you haven’t exported a backup in five or more days. You can dismiss it and it’ll come back in another five days, or turn it off entirely in Preferences under “Backup Reminders.”

The Short Version

Please, please use Export All regularly. It downloads a single JSON file containing every character you’ve saved. If anything ever happens to your browser data, you can restore them all with Import All. Keep that file somewhere safe — your desktop, a cloud drive, wherever — and you’ll never lose your work.

I know it’s an extra step, but a few seconds of backup beats hours of recreating a lost character. Trust me, I’ve gotten enough emails over the years to know how much that hurts.

You can also save individual characters to disk using the “download” button in the Save panel.

Happy creating, and back up your stuff!

You can now move a layer directly to any position by typing a number into the new input field in the Layer panel toolbar. No more clicking the up or down arrows dozens of times to move an item from the bottom of the stack to the top!

Select an item, and you’ll see its current layer number displayed between the arrow buttons and the Reset button. Just type in the position you want and hit Enter — the item moves there instantly.

As a reminder, you can also drag and drop items in the expanded layer list to reorder them. Click the ▲ toggle to expand the list, then drag any row to a new position. Between drag-and-drop and the new position input, you should be able to get your layers exactly where you want them quickly and easily.

This feature was suggested by long-time All Star community member MadJack — thanks for the great idea! If you have suggestions for improvements, leave a comment or use the contact form.

Happy creating!