Welcome to this State of the Game post! As we look forward to the end of the year and out into 2022, we’re reflective on what we’ve accomplished in Disney Heroes and examining how we can polish and improve the game in the future. There have been a lot of changes on the DH team, and we want to take this opportunity to share a little look into how our game studio is structured and to assure you Disney Heroes is a very high priority for the company and will remain so long term. We also want to give you a small look at some of the exciting things we’re working on for 2022! There will be a Dev Q&A session at the end of the month where you’ll get to meet a whole new part of the DH Team.
Around the world, there’s a large number of people changing jobs as more companies embrace remote work and people really examine what they want in work and life. We’ve had a number of employees leave PerBlue to pursue exciting opportunities at other game studios, study at law school, or to spend more time with their families. We’re always sad to see coworkers leave, but we’re excited about the opportunity this brings to us. It’s allowed people to change roles at the company and grow in new directions. It’s also given us the opportunity to hire new talented people. They bring new experiences and ideas that help us keep things fresh and always growing forward. The Disney Heroes team is smaller right now due to this, but we are actively looking to fill those positions and get the team back up to full capacity!
There are other, exciting projects currently in the works here at PerBlue. I want to assure you that these projects are not taking away from Disney Heroes. Those projects you’ve discovered through your sleuthing are currently in limited release or beta testing and have their own dedicated teams. Our company is growing to allow us to explore more areas of the gaming space and experiment with new ideas and concepts. This isn’t a State of the Company post though, so back to Disney Heroes!
Since the last State of the Game post in May we’ve released Red Skill improvements including Epic City Watch raiding, the Red Skill slider and max skill button. We improved Power Crafting and Power Promote to help save time and allow you to focus on what you find fun in Disney Heroes. To make it easier for you to find just the right heroes for combat, we added Hero Filters to all the hero chooser screens. We’ve recently introduced the Prize Wall as a fun way to collect new heroes and resources to get them leveled up. We know that some of the event exclusive heroes have been in their slots for a long time, and we’re starting a new rotation system that will keep heroes moving and keep reward systems fresh. We’re doing polish on some of our screens, starting with the Diamonds and IAP screen, and coming soon the Crates screen.
We have a great lineup of characters planned for the rest of the year that will introduce new IPs into the game , and expand some existing groups . We’ve heard your feedback on hero refreshes so we’re planning to do some smaller stat buffs. We had moved away from those to allow design to focus on a single hero and do a more complete refresh, but those sometimes take as much time as designing a new hero, and they’ve been delayed recently. We have a full refresh in the works for 3.4.10, and we’ll look to make a balance between in-depth refreshes and stat buffs going forward.
We’re currently putting the final polish on Trial Events. We talked a bit about that in the last State of the Game, and we’re working to have it ready in the 3.4.10 update. We’re leveraging the filter system to allow us to create team rules. For example: You must use Baymax, You can’t use Blue Heroes, At least 1 Support hero must be used. Then you’ll progress through waves of enemies to collect rewards. This system will give us the flexibility to make fun and unique events focused on heroes, which are the core of the game. We’ll have more details and screenshots as we get closer to release!
We’re starting some deeper analysis of our game system and economies to ensure they’re healthy and we keep them growing at a balanced rate. We’re in early brainstorming for expanding cosmetics in a new direction and a possible scavenger hunt system. As we plan for the long term, we’ll be asking again for your feedback and areas where we can make quality of life improvements.
I know you probably have a lot of questions, so keep an eye out for the Dev Q&A section opening up in the next week. We’ll have some questions for you, and also give you the space to ask questions of the team.
Thanks again for playing Disney Heroes and being part of this amazing community!