HeroMachine 3: A New Beginning

Since I launched the full version of HeroMachine 2 June of 2004 I haven't wanted to touch the core program at all. I was just exhausted with it mentally and creatively. Yes, I've worked on custom versions for various people, but the program itself has lain fallow for the last two and a half years. I couldn't bear the thought of dealing with it again, and had zero interest in a completely new version.

Finally, two weeks ago I felt the creative fires start to smolder once more.

I emailed the HeroMachine Yahoo Discussion Group about what they'd like to see in a next generation product, and as usual they came through with some stellar ideas that have really gotten me pumped up. For someone who fancies himself a self-sufficient hermit, I'm constantly humbled by how truly creative and innovative people out there can be.

Overwhelmingly, people want more poses and more body styles. It's hard to create a team when all of the characters stand in exactly the same way and have the same build. You're stuck with just the stock bodies I provide, so if you wanted to create a teen or youthful hero, for instance, or a fat or short one, you were out of luck. The constraint on creating more of that has always simply been time -- it takes forever to hand draw each item for each new figure, and it's boring to boot. The fun part is drawing it the first time, the necessity of re-drawing it five times over to get it on all the other body styles is dreadful, mind-numbing stuff. I hate it.

But I think there might be a way around that -- pawn off the body design and posting on the user! I love making other people do my work for me, it's one of the great pleasures in life, and I think I've figured out how to do that with HeroMachine.

I've posted the first test of that concept here (feel free to play around with it, but be warned -- it's very rudimentary), and I'm pretty excited by the possibilities I can see even in this very crude, slapdash effort. I think I'm going to be able to create just one basic body, allowing the user to swap discrete sections of that body in and out to get male or female base figures, humans or robots, that kind of thing. Plus you'll be able to mix and match, so you might have a human torso with robot arms and dinosaur legs or somesuch, each with fitted clothing and items to go on it. I'll still have to redraw items multiple times, at least each one will be different -- a glove on a robot arm looks different than one on a human one.

Add in to that the ability for the user to scale and position body sections, and the possibilities should be pretty amazing. You can suddenly create more realistic dwarf figures, for instance, because you can squash the torso while leaving the arms disproportionately long and beefy, with smaller, stouter legs and a large head.

I created the HeroMachine so that anyone could bring their imagination to life in a character drawing that looked like it was custom-commissioned from a professional illustrator. The constraints of having to fit all of the items into the right place on the figure really cut into that freedom, substituting my judgment and layout for the user's. Finally I can see a way to reduce those limits to almost nil, giving the user virtually complete freedom to pose and construct their illustrations however they want.

I'm getting really, really excited about the prospects for this next generation of HeroMachine. After almost three years, it's nice to have that feeling back again.