After about a year and a half, with some time spent working on a few other things with along with a small break I’ve reappeared.
I’ve learnt so much since I started developing Arena Hero, and have developed so many other things over the past year that everything feels so different to look back on. I learnt to cut back on certain things and how to develop certain aspects so much better, and ended up getting Arena Hero to a state that I’m happy with.
I intend to continue working on it and adding more items and arenas, but throwing it online has given me a surge of motivation to get more done on other projects that I’ve had in mind and additions. I changed so many things over the last two years, I still remember when Enhancers were just a concept I had for modifying arenas, now they’re a reality in the game.
I ended up with a huge grid of items in the end, each with archetypes that developed more and more over the course of two years, the primary ones such as high health, the high damage risk reward, to the luck sets, to the specialized speed and boss hunter sets. It feels satisfying to unlock and try out new combinations now, and unlocking unique ability crystals and the souls of past hero’s to gain specific benefits in that arena to make choices meaningful as you progress throughout. I hope to eventually re add co op play as it once had early on, along with a few other features originally planned.
Although its nice seeing a lot of ideas become a reality, I feel that I’ve moved beyond the novelty feeling of it which I think really helps with properly scoping out new ideas, along with managing feature creep as you can better hold back from letting emotions get in the way of project management.
Arena Hero ended up turning into more of a long term learning experience in feature creep, changing plans and learning better techniques on planning out scope, along with coding techniques in general. It’s also been really good for self discipline in setting target dates, and seeing that doing so is a must. I do want to do a proper breakdown on what I learnt from just a development and self discipline side along with starting up with updates on other projects, but that can be saved for another time.
