Hey, it’s almost spring! We haven’t talked about Battleheart 2 since last year, so here’s a quick update on where we’re at.

The majority of what we’ve been working on since our announcement of the game is enemies and heroes. This mostly involves art/animation, since our core systems are already pretty robust. Occasionally some new code is required to support an entirely new mechanic (like, say, summoning a temporary ally) but most of that kind of stuff is already in the bag. By the end of this month, we will already have as many heroes and items finished as the original Battleheart. The final hero count we’ll ship with is undecided, but we currently have a nice split so far between returning classes/abilities along with totally new ones. We’ll ship with at least 12, but I’d like to get to 16, so there would be 4 of each major archetype (tank, support, melee and ranged dps).

When it comes to enemies, we also have a bunch of those done as well, with most of our usual suspects making a return from prior games. We’ve got a half dozen or so that we still want to add, but we already have about as many enemy types as the original Battleheart completed, excluding bosses. Boss encounters are still to come, we have a list of boss concepts designed but haven’t started building them yet.

So, between now and release – the rest of the bad guys and heroes, a bunch of background art (we’re working with at least one contractor, maybe another if we can find a good freelance painter) and our menu systems are the main chunks of work remaining. I still can’t put a release date on it, only that we’re aiming for this year.