Hero Creator

Inspiration

The HERO System is a tabletop role-playing game, which is essentially a form of collaborative storytelling that starts with a group of players making characters to explore a world as designed by their game master, or GM. However, its character creation's possibilities and point-buy balancing system lead it to be incredibly complex, and many players cannot effectively create a character on their own. This means the game master must assist them individually, and character creation is a process that takes place over several hours.

What it does

This program allows players to more easily build characters by giving them easy access lists of the available powers, skills, a characteristics their character may possess what advantages or limitations those abilities might have. It computes the rather lengthy arithmetic for the player, and gives them a running total of how many points they have spent, and how many they have remaining to spend. Additionally, this program allows the game master to easily influence the character creation of all their players by creating script files that can be passed in as inputs when making a character. This way they can ban certain abilities, adjust the cost of specific powers, or any one of many other possible ways a game master might seek to personalize their player's experience. All of this would be available from download links on a website, and members of the HERO community could even send in their creations to be hosted on said site.

How we built it

The programs themselves were built in java. A back end program records a vast library of rules from the source book to tell it everything it needs to know to aid in the character creation library. Descriptions of the powers, skills, and such forth will not be included, as we do not want to encourage the idea that this program can be used as a way to avoid purchasing the source book. The player interacts with a GUI that lists all their characteristics, and prompts them to create any skills, talents, perks, powers, or disadvantages they want their character to possess. This may lead them through several popups or additional frames as the program gets answers to every question it needs to ask to complete the build of the attribute in question. The website was made with Domain.com, and the visual aesthetic was based off of the source book, itself.

Challenges we ran into

The source book is 400 pages of dense information, so it would never have been possible to transfer all of the information in the time allotted. This meant we had to narrow our focus to a smaller portion that we could make. However, it quickly became clear that even a "cross-section" that demonstrated some functionality for every option was a daunting task. Further, we lacked experience with website creation. That didn't pose as much of a problem as we had worried, as Domain.com was fairly intuitive, but it did mean that we had difficulty understanding what could and could not be done with the system. Finally, the GUI required needed to be very complex, and required a much fuller understanding of java's various GUI options that we had to complete.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The visual aesthetic of both the hosting site and the program are pleasing to the eye and reminiscent to the book that inspired their creation. The program is easy to operate and should prove useful to newcomers and veteran players alike. Many parts of this project were either daunting in scale or required knowledge that we did not possess, but we innovated on old methods and learned entirely new ones in order to pull it all together. There is still a lot of work ahead, but this has been an excellent first step.

What we learned

We learned a great deal about the formation of graphical user interfaces, as well as efficient ways to use enumerated types. We gained experience in coordinating a team when dealing with large work loads, and proper ways to break down daunting problems into smaller, more manageable pieces that can be divided in a group. We learned about when it is best to divide and conquer to speed up your programming, and when it is best to work collaboratively on a single method to solve a difficult problem.

What's next for Hero Creator

Many powers and skills have yet to be properly implemented, so there is still much to be done. Past that, we still have yet to do anything involving the GM's ability to make a script. That is a part of the project we are really excited about, because it can mean that players will have a full understanding of exactly what a game master wants out of a campaign as they make their character, and prevents accidental contradictions. As we share this program with more people, we hope to build it into a community where people can post their creations for others to use or appreciate. As people continue to contact us with ideas or complaints, we can continue to add greater functionality to the program to fit all sorts of home rules. As functionality improves, we hope to reach a point where any player can make exactly the character they want, regardless of ability or experience; we hope to eliminate the intimidating entry barrier into tabletop gaming so that more people can enjoy it.