Early Access Release and New Features

I'm very happy to announce that Hero Team is releasing today in Early Access.

New Features

There are some major new features in this version compared with the last public demo version that you might have played during Steam Next Fest:

• Double Jumping: Who doesn't love double jumping?? It makes getting around feel much faster and nicer

• Auto Healing: Now, if you've taken damage but can escape and avoid damage for 5 seconds your health will start to automatically recover. This might sound like a small thing, but it actually makes fights much more interesting. Previously, once you were low on health there wasn't much you could do except make a last-ditch attack and hope for the best. Now you can weigh up whether you can escape for long enough to recover (perhaps throwing out some covering fire to make your enemy retreat while they reload.)

• Speedrun Practice Mode: The practice map now has a timer, and you can earn Bronze, Silver, and Gold stars depending on how fast you can destroy all the target dummies. I think I set the target times to be pretty tough, and I'll be curious to see if you agree. (Please post your score screenshots/videos here on the Steam Community or on the Discord!)

and there are also the boring-but-necessary quality of life features that you'd expect from a quality indie PC game:

• AddedGraphics SettingsGaming on a potato? You're now covered with Low, Medium, High, and Epic graphics quality presets, and a "Rendering Resolution Scale" option that renders fewer pixels and upscales to get more frames per second while keeping the UI looking perfectly sharp at your monitor's native resolution. If you're interested in graphics tech give this option a try even if you don't need it. The upscaling is done with Epic's new "Temporal Super Resolution" technology, which gives shockingly good results imho.
• AddedInput RemappingYou don't wanna know how much time and effort it took me to make this part of the game, but the important thing is it exists now, and you can set up the controls however you'd like. Keyboard and mouse, and Xbox controllers work natively, of course, and you can use PS4, PS5, and Switch controllers through Steam's great support for them. It's enabled by default for a seamless experience.

• Ultrawide Monitor Support: The game now takes advantage of every pixel on your monitor, while the UI stays neatly in the central part. I don't actually even have an ultrawide myself, but I tested this out using the NVIDIA Surround feature to make a pretend ultrawide out of my side-by-side monitors and even that looked sick, so I'm very jealous of everyone who gets to play the game on a real ultrawide beauty (send me pics!)

More Content Coming Soon!

Obviously this is day one of the Hero Team Early Access era. I know that you need more content to play, and I can't wait to get started on it. I've got a zillion ideas, but this post is too long already so I'll make another post laying out the roadmap.

Thank You

Thank you so much for your interest in the game, and for your patience waiting for today. I hope you enjoy playing it, and I hope you'll stick around as it develops more! Please don't be shy about sharing your feedback, because I truly want this to be a game that you love.

• Jon