Hero

Somewhere in between the trail blaze of Runescape, PokeMMO, Mirage Realms, Wurm Online (- the RPG part) and Minecraft, Zomboid, Necesse (+ the MMO part) there is a place for unrestricted creative suspense.

Hero is a Action 2D MMO with a custom engine, think Zelda1; but multiplayer.

It's both a game and in-game level/story editor, and unlike previous examples; an engine you can modify for your own game/story and host/sell.

In Hero you modify the world and not your character!

We are also going for positional audio for that out-of-view tension. It will be from the 1st person which is awkward at first (in a fixed top-view 3rd person game) but you'll get used to it eventually I hope.

Test - June 2025:

    So "early it's broken" technical demo; with random characters and wipes.

Missing from Tech. Demo: Character select, Items (will be mostly fruit/vegetable "energy" as currency for powerups); Damage, death and battle mechanics. Audio, both variety (only one sfx for testing) and surrounding room tech.

Live - Jan 2026:

• Free to play as rat, spider. (no chat, random respawn)
• $10 yearly subscription which allows 120 hours of play time for persistent characters: spear, axe, sword in one of 3 factions.

Roadmap: We need mobs with path finding. Then stairs, torches (just animation now, light maybe later), doors (wooden and maybe portcullis) and spike traps with lever control and sensor tiles. The release version of the game will be massively coop players vs server; later 2, then 3 player factions all vs eachother and the server. Experiment with Spelunky style random dungeons.

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Install & Run

For Windows the hero.bat in hero.zip should do all the downloading / unzipping / updating, but you can also download things manually:

https://tinspin.itch.io/java

Mac & Linux

> curl -o hero.jar -z hero.jar http://hero.binarytask.com/hero.jar (HTTP which is uncapped)
OR
> curl -o hero.jar -z hero.jar https://multiplayeronlinestandard.com/patch/hero.jar (HTTPS which has a capped transfer amount per month)
> jdk-24-lite/bin/java -jar hero.jar

Windows

download hero.jar manually (remember to re-download now and then)
> jdk-24-lite\bin\java -jar hero.jar

On Mac the OS will flag java as insecure and the only way to run the game will be to say "Run Anyway". You have to click the question mark in the top right corner to do so.

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Feedback

After you register with your itch email in the game you will get a mail with a link to the discord for feedback, and validation code to link your account for paid features later. 

Only the provided JVMs above (or 1.8+ 64-bit JDK if you test the bug works on 24) will be considered as we don't have time to support other setups. Comments are disabled here because we only plan to use itch as a payment provider, but you can comment on the devlogs at the bottom of the page.

Later Developments

Hopefully you will be able to buy more $10 subs. the same year for +120h and "price = character + feature":

• $20/year = archers + arrows (2026)
• $30/year = goblin, orc, troll + build dungeon. (2027)
• $40/year = hero + build over-world. (2028)

Eventually depending on interest from enthusiasts:

• $50/year = slime + dedicated server (req. MySQL/MariaDB 2026)
• $100/year = bat + flies, source access for modding (req. NDA 2026)

Then if you want to become a potential commercial license reseller:

    Commercial License on Gumroad

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Important: hero.jar below does not autoupdate, if you are on Windows and want the client to patch get hero.zip! On other platforms use: