Monthly Archives: November 2008

I'm finally releasing the early Beta of the HeroMachine Warrior Mini for you all to play around with. You can find the page here; I hope you'll let me know what you think of it, preferably in the comments to this post, but the site's Contact Us form and my email are also fine.

It's going to be buggy, so don't be shy about letting me know what you find broken or what you'd like to see work better. Let me know if something is confusing, or doesn't work how you'd expect it to, or if something strikes you as counter-intuitive, or pretty much anything else you think about it.

Hope you all like it!

In the last two days I've made a ton of progress on adding more items to the upcoming Warrior Mini, including the Backplane, FacialHair, Shoulders, and Legwear slots. Here's a quick character I whipped up just to try out some of the new Backplane items:

Things to note:

• The Backplane slot has a muscle-posed arm with no hand on it, which seems weird at first glance. I added it to the stage four times, flipping and rotating it, to get the extra limbs on this guy. I matched their color to the basic uniform to make it all look the same using the new Paintbrush tool. I added extra hands in the same way, rotating and moving them to fit on the ends of the arms. Doing it this way instead of how it is in the HM2 Expansion Pack lets you fit different hands on the arms for cooler effects. And, the hands themselves still have masks built into them, so you can stick extra weapons in them and they fit.
• The belt buckle is actually an Insignia, scaled down and moved lower.
• The robotic/mech Legwear item is Capri-pant length, ending at the calf. They weren't quite long enough, and skin showed over the top of the Boots. So I just scaled the boots up until they matched, which you couldn't do in previous HeroMachine versions.
• The vest Top turned out neat, using a light blue as the Line Color so the interior black showed through.
• The stubble beard's color area was overlapping the line of the chin, making it look blobby and weird. So I Masked the stubble with the Head, and the lines now overwrite the color area of the stubble. That'll make it possible for the stubble to fit on any of the Heads, no matter the shape of the jaw or chin.
• I was careful with the sunglasses (and the Headgear that has a glass front) to make the glass parts only affected by transparency. So in this case, you get the lenses see-through, but not the (admittedly very small) frames. This is important on helmets, because you might want to see through the colored glass but not the similarly-colored bits of the head cover part.
• I am having way more fun building this than ought to be legal.

Hope you like it! I am cranking along on this; I hope to have a testable version up this weekend, so be sure to check back for any announcement.