u/firsthomm

To preserve the original game for the purists, I made a mod menu and tucked it away in the control panel. You can:

• Toggle spellcasting on or off during autobattle
• Toggle the ability to split creature stacks within a garrison or a hero's army (2 stacks side by side vs forced into a single stack - some people think this is an unfair advantage)
• Toggle alternate structure art for the hydra (from the 1994/95 CES DEMO)
• Toggle an indicator on the castle that visualizes if you have already built a structure that turn
• Toggle the battlefield hex grid view

I always find bugs when I make demonstration videos, I need to fix the Hydra art in the actual buy dialog window too!

I am currently working on a headless battle resolver - similar to what was done in fheroes2, and that will be another option, as well as some kind of trading post / marketplace - both will be toggles so that purists can turn them off.

So I'm nearly done with my remake of HOMM1 and working on quality of life options menu (autobattle spellcasting toggle, troop splitting toggle) and I was ready to start building a few campaigns to include, and I realized I needed a new map editor, as the old one didn't work either on Windows 10/11.

I've also been thinking about adding some cut scenes between scenarios.

I sat down to build a map editor today, and my reverse engineering of the map format was clean enough that the map loaded on the first try! A lot more polish needs to go into it, but I wanted to ask if anyone had any gripes with the original windows 95 map editor or suggestions for quality of life improvements to it?

I am adding support for different ending conditions (capture specific town, find ultimate artifact, capture dragon city, which already exist in the original campaign game), and I was thinking about some other victory conditions like flagging all mines, clearing out all graveyards and shipwrecks and ghosts, defeating all monster stacks, etc.

Let me know if you have any ideas. I'm fixing very tiny UI bugs and getting close to having something to release (single player game anyway, haven't started work on multiplayer). I'm posting a lot less frequently here, but my updates are pretty regular on https://www.youtube.com/@firsthomm

Feel free to DM me on Reddit, I try to respond to everyone, even the haters.

I was on vacation for a few weeks and only had my Macbook (M1 Pro ARM processor) with me, so I got it working on MacOS so I could build a little bit and do some playtesting while I was on vacation. I wasn't that productive...

In addition to getting it working on MacOS, I fixed a few more bugs, added a basic scoring function for the end of the game, and just today I added a resolution toggle - should make future videos more watchable.

I have to have a few legal conversations before I can release this on the MacOS app store in Test Flight, but I'll be having those soon, and if all goes well, I can have something for testing in TestFlight in August. I think I can have up to 100 internal testers, and 10,000 external testers in the TestFlight version, so that is probably the easiest way to manage a beta test for now.

Many updates:

I have the campaign game working- but only through the first 3 campaign maps, and I haven't yet tested the victory condition in the third scenario (finding the "Eye of Goros" ultimate artifact). What's cool is I understand what it would take to build additional campaigns - and add in additional victory conditions for standard maps.

I'm about halfway through building out the AI. It takes neutral towns and fights the occasional monster and picks up items and fights other AI opponents.

The ultimate artifact is not shown in this video, but I did get the map working. I was convinced from day 1 that possible locations for the artifact were encoded in the maps, but now after writing a script to randomly place them on the map, I now see that the conditions for limiting where it could be reduce it down to a fixed set of possibilities per map, so it wasn't that big of a deal to just let it be randomly generated.

Added in more of the initial game menus allowing campaign game vs standard game, loading games, displaying credits and hi-scores (though the scores are empty and I haven't figured out how the game is scored yet).

Built the control panel, volume control for music and sound effects, ability to save and load, and many of the confirmation menus (are you sure you want to end your turn, dismiss this creature/hero, restart the scenario).

Added in palette cycling animation to the castle screen, the ocean, the battlefield background (and overdid it a little bit, I have to dial back some of the color spectrums).

Cleaned up a number of bugs with the ghost hero if you dismissed a hero in the castle entrance, routing bugs (routing is still imperfect), spellbook bugs.

Still having fun, and getting close to something actually playable. Building out the rest of the AI, finishing the rest of the campaign games, and fixing the worst of the battle screen bugs are the main things I'd like to fix before I consider it playable.

My long and verbose videos about the process are here: https://www.youtube.com/@firsthomm

Finished all the adventure spells (including summon boat).
Made the hero seaworthy - now we can build boats and sail away, warp through whirlpools, etc.

I also built out the puzzle map and the ultimate artifact. I could not for the life of me find anything in the map that decides where an ultimate artifact can be located, so I made up a random generation mechanism and it seems to be working ok. I did encounter the same bug the developers originally had where sometimes the puzzle map would reveal a tiny piece of the X for the ultimate artifact location, but I believe that is now fixed.

The castle battles are quite buggy still. Sometimes the turn order is lost and the catapult goes nuts and rapid fires. It's funny and hard to reproduce the edge case that create it. However, when they do work correctly, we are able to take over castles.

But now I've completed most of the major game features (except programming the AI opponents and saving/loading games).
Next I'm going to work on the campaign game (which will require special map ending conditions like capturing a town, or finding the ultimate artifact to end the scenario) and fixing the many many bugs - everything from minor things like dialog box layouts, animation timing, screen transition effects, map routes and rendering, making sure dismissed heroes are placed back into the hero pool properly - much less glamorous stuff ahead - but I have nearly completed most of the major game mechanics and events, and just need a lot of polishing.

During the last 69 days I took about 4-5 days completely off from coding, but this is what is possible with 2 solid months of AI development. I probably could have built it even faster if I didn't record along the way, but I enjoyed documenting it here.

It will probably be a few months yet before anything like a release happens, but I could see a beta test happening.

It's getting easier. Definitely way past the halfway mark to having a playable game. Spending more time coding than making videos, so apologies for the lack of updates.

I've added the proper hero swap screen and hero vs hero battles.

I spent some time adding lots of event tiles: oasis, campfire, graveyard, mill, teleporter, dragon city, skeleton, angel statue, and genie lamp. (lighthouse, rogue encampment, nomad tent, daemon cave, shipwreck not shown in video).

I massively improved the battle animation and have 2 space breath attacks working, morale and luck, ranged attacks. I forgot to mention it in the video, but I added shadows for sprites in battle (and I have updated homm1extract to extract shadows).

Refactored some big game files, cleaned up lots of bugs (and introduced a few new ones especially in adventure map animation). I go into way too much detail on my youtube channel.

It is starting to become playable. Next major features are going to be castle battles with walls and the catapult, and boating around the map.

Day 47. I feel like I'm over halfway done to something playable. Adding in new things seems faster now - maybe I've learned how to build faster through this process.

• Finally adding some magic to our heroes of might, the spell book is starting to work: I got creature enchantments working, plus damage spells: lightning bolt, fireball, meteor shower, storm, Armageddon, and other stuff like teleport, cure, resurrect.
• Ranged attacks work.
• Recruiting of heroes works really well, and I can now capture a neutral town.
• Artifacts now pick up and are evaluated by the game correctly for stats, morale, luck, gold, movement. Only thing not working yet is the Ballista artifact.
• Many other small changes and improvements. All animation details and timing need some work, even though I improved the sprite decoding.
• Randomly I went on a side quest and also updated my extraction script ( https://github.com/agstevens/homm1extract ) to work with the KB.AGG file in the HOMM1 early 1995 CES demo - so you can extract the warlock castle sprites (different hydra swamp and minotaur maze sprites!), which I may make an option in the game, just for fun.
• Daily Dev Diary Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@firsthomm

So this might be well known (or not) but I just discovered (or re-discovered) it while reverse engineering the Heroes of Might and Magic campaign game.

In version 1.2 on DOS (default GoG version), if you load a campaign game and then exit to load a standard game, the scenario selection box appears blank, and the game drops you into the most recently loaded campaign map with a randomly assigned castle.

Did everyone know about this but me?

In other news, the reverse engineering of the campaign game maps is going well. The Campaign map format is the same as the DOS format with a much much shorter header.

Lots of progress in the last week.

Recruiting creatures, building structures, and cycling the new day — all working. Added a quality-of-life upgrade the original never had (which was suggested by a member of this reddit): split creature stacks instead of being forced to merge them - it was pretty easy to do. The Well, Mage Guild, and spell book purchasing are all functional, plus heroes can now flag structures. Progress is real.

I'm just posting weekly updates on this reddit - as I've been getting good feedback and quality of life ideas from people.
I'm posting daily super detailed updates here: https://www.youtube.com/@firsthomm