“Heroes Rise” Is the First Text Adventure on Steam; We Need Your Help!

Announcements
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We’re proud to announce that both games in our bestselling “Heroes Rise” series of interactive novels are now available on Steam. These are the first text-only games ever to be released on Valve’s platform.

“Heroes Rise” is an epic interactive novel series by Zachary Sergi, where your choices control the story. The games are entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination. (There are some gorgeous visual novels on Steam, but there has never been a game on Steam without graphics or sound effects.)

Today’s release includes both Heroes Rise: The Prodigy and Heroes Rise: The Hero Project, clocking in at 100,000 words and 177,000 words respectively. In a single playthrough of each game, players will typically read more than 50,000 words, the size of a 200-page manuscript.

A Huge Discount at Launch

During the first week of launch, each “Heroes Rise” game can be purchased standalone for $1.99, a 33% discount off the full $2.99 price. In addition, Steam buyers can purchase one $0.99 upgrade for “Heroes Rise: The Prodigy” and two $0.99 upgrades for “Heroes Rise: The Hero Project,” or buy both games plus all of the in-app upgrades for just $3.99, 55% off the full price.

Heroes Rise Bundle http://store.steampowered.com/sub/46050
Heroes Rise: The Prodigy standalone http://store.steampowered.com/app/299540
Heroes Rise: The Hero Project standalone http://store.steampowered.com/app/304290

We Need Your Help!

If we’re going to bring any more interactive fiction to Steam, we need “Heroes Rise” to do well. The third game in the “Heroes Rise” trilogy, “Heroes Rise: Herofall,” will be finished and released later this summer, and we’ve committed to making it available on Steam, allowing Steam players to finish the trilogy on the platform of your choice.

After that, we’d love to bring our entire catalog to Steam, But much of that depends on Valve, and how many copies of ‘Heroes Rise’ we can sell this summer. If “Heroes Rise” flops, we might be the first and last interactive fiction we can get on Steam.

We’re asking all of our fans to buy Heroes Rise on Steam today, even if they already own the game on other platforms, to show their support for Choice of Games and interactive fiction on Steam.

We’re also asking you to spread the word as far as you can. Post about it on Facebook, on Twitter, on Reddit, or wherever you can find people who enjoy Steam games.

EDIT: You can also participate in the Steam forums for our games.


Together, we can bring a new genre of games to Steam, and making it possible for a new generation of interactive-fiction authors to make a living.

How high will we rise?

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On Twitter, please retweet: https://twitter.com/choiceofgames/status/478981946840604672

On Facebook, please Like and reshare: https://www.facebook.com/choiceofgames/posts/10152476487708756

On G+, please +1 and reshare:
https://plus.google.com/+ChoiceOfGames/posts/PLTTM7SfTNb

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Alright fine. You convinced me. But only cause you have Steam Achievements in there. :wink: Just kidding. I’ll put up a good review for you guys too.

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Going to get this, but Steam keeps crashing on me.

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Please upvote us on Reddit:

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Is this game still basically a simulation of what it’s like to be a butt monkey to fate and your antagonist’s inexplicable ability to control your every action despite never having been stated to have any such ability?

It really showed potential, but that butt money of the script factor just ruined it for me.

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@Shoelip The the game hasn’t changed since launch, so if you didn’t like it then, you probably still won’t like it, though I think “Hero Rise: The Hero Project” adds significantly to the interactivity.

But, in this case, I’d like to ask you to buy it on Steam anyway, even if you didn’t like it, just to support interactive fiction and CoG on Steam. “Heroes Rise” is far and away our bestselling game, which is why we picked it for Steam; if we can make this game succeed, that will go a long way toward getting our other games on Steam as well.

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I’ll buy the bundle later today. If HR does well on Steam, will HGs be published on that platform as well, or just CoGs?

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@Samuel_H_Young I can’t make any promises, even about CoGs, but I know that if HR doesn’t do well on Steam, it will be hard to get any more IF on Steam at all.

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Oh, okay. Well I went ahead and shared and liked the post on Facebook.

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To be quite honest, I think it would have been smarter to wait for the sequel to HR2 before doing this… “Rollout” if you will.

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Off to Steam we go…

Fans of any of the WiPs, please do buy HR if you can – the move to Steam could be huge for all of us. The bigger the market gets, the likelier it is that we’ll be able to take some dedicated time to write, living off the income for at least a stretch.

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@Malebranche I didn’t want to miss the chance to be the first text adventure on Steam! If all goes well, we’ll launch a lot of games on Steam in the future, including HR3.

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@dfabulich
Something I meant to mention during testing this (I had no idea you’d finished, let alone you’d be releasing it so soon; so sorry about not mentioning it earlier!):
I know you guys are all very no graphics and sound effects, which I can 100% appreciate, as it is interactive fiction. But I do think on a platform such as Steam some small additional visual options might have (and still could) go a long way.
I’m just talking simple things here, like the ability to choose or customize text/background colour and/or font-size - these would have added a lot, I think.

Still, I wish you guys the best with this, I’ll spread the word and buy copies for someone (as I still “own” it from the beta test?). Best of luck!

Edit: Bought the 1st game for two friends with recommendations to buy the second if they liked it.

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Congratulations for bringing the game to Steam, I wish you luck.

But out of curiosity and I wouldn’t mind if you don’t answer:

  • how much buyers would satisfy the “need [for] “Heroes Rise” to do well”?
  • have you defined the summer deadline with Steam? It is a short notice.
  • “If we’re going to bring any more interactive fiction to Steam, we need “Heroes Rise” to do well”, is it really mandatory?
  • and “I can’t make any promises, even about CoGs, but I know that if HR doesn’t do well on Steam, it will be hard to get any more IF on Steam at all”. Sounds pessimistic (so much negative terms!). I hope you have carefully reviewed your potential buyers before trying the “Steam adventure”. If so, you should be more confident about the game and put less pressure in your posts. Or it will make me think that maybe you should have delayed all of this for another game.

But still, it’s great. The first-week offer is interesting. And you are lauching the game just for the Steam discounts of this season (they always bring a lot of customers). Well done!

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I just got the game and its not working. I just get this error .http://i1284.photobucket.com/albums/a568/xPoisonThornx/hero_zps0811a9e0.png It told me give this to developers sooo i hope this is the right place.

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I got it working and i can’t wait to see what happen in this :smiley:

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Hey, I don’t like to much heroes rise due lack of real choices are all fake. But i want support you, but…i haven’t pc. Could i make a steam account.?

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@poison_ mara
There is an app for steam.

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Sadly app its only for news and chat I couldn’t use for games