Heroes of Newerth Game Development 10-26

What S2 Is Working On 10/26 Update for Heroes of Newerth

Citizens of Newerth!

I wanted to throw out another update of things we're currently working on:

Clan Management & Tools
We've developed several advanced Clan Management tools and features (including a Clan Activity Index that you can use to compare your clan's activity to others).

Automated Tournament System
This is still a work in progress, and to those who didn't catch our last update on this, it's a system that allows users to create tournaments on the website and seamlessly integrates into our other systems, notifying players of upcoming games, automatically submitting match results, and automatically updating the brackets. Participating in competitive HoN and organizing competitive events will be a breeze!

Once the ground work for the Tournament System is in place, we'll have most of what we need to very quickly get our League system operational, with a similar level of integration and support. As previously announced, we plan on having a $10,000 initial beta tournament for this upon completion (with more details down the road).

Match Making!
Many of you are aware that the initial testing and development of our match making system is already well underway. We're making good progress, and are excited to share the details of how this functions later. For now we're testing solo-match making, but once that is complete and functional we'll be able to pretty quickly introduce arranged team-style match making, as well as potentially a team finder tool so that groups of 2 or 3 can more easily find other groups of 2 and participate in the 5v5 match making system.

Spectator Interface / Replays

Part of our replays system has been revealed with the latest feature addition, the Match Stats tool. This tool already allows players to look up past games, but we'll be adding features and functionality to it. When replays are available, this tool will be capable of downloading and watching replays.

The rest of the spectator & replays interface is still being worked on. This is an interface specific to spectating or watching a replay. It will have more information and options to expand & collapse lots of detailed information panels. This also includes full functionality of replays with planned full backwards compatability.

The interface has been designed with competitive play in mind, with lots of little features and nuances that should make it easier for spectators or shout casters to catch the action and make detailed assessments of the gameplay based on the stats we provide.

We've got some code hook-ups to tie in here to get this all functional and then the spectator interface should be done. This isn't our highest priority, so it's getting done as the programmers are able. Expect to see it soon!

New Heroes
We've got several heroes planned and several still being designed. Expect to see two more hero ports and a few new HoN-original heroes too.

Misc optimizations / fixes
As always, we'll be continuing to work on improving and polishing existing functionality, balance fixes, hero/item reworks, and pathfinding tweaks are still planned.