HeroMachine 3 Phoenix Edition is LIVE now!

Design custom characters using thousands of mix-and-match art components all hand-drawn in classic comic-book style! Pick a body, add costumes, weapons, backgrounds, and more — no drawing skills required. No Flash required, it all works in your browser and is 100% backwards compatible for any creations you’ve made in the past.

Latest Posts

HeroMachine 2 is back!

Thanks to a program called Ruffle, Flash content can now be shown in browsers again! Head on over to the HeroMachine 2 page and start creating your own character portraits like you did back in the day!

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How to Use HeroMachine Locally

Hi all, with big thanks to HeroMachiner Eric Bowling, here’s how you can use HeroMachine outside of your browser. Adobe has said they’re going to be force uninstalling the Flash Player (the standalone player basically) but I don’t know that applies to this particular version.

Basically you download a local Flash Player application, then put in the URL for a .swf file (a compiled Flash object, which is what HeroMachine uses) and it plays. I’ve tried it on my Mac with HM3 and HM2 and it seems to work like a champ. You’ll still need an Internet connection but if this goes well I may bundle up the files and make them available online so you could truly run it all locally. We’ll just have to see, I don’t want to sell people something and then BAM Adobe force uninstalls the Flash Players and it no longer works.

Anyway, the article explaining how to get the Standalone Flash Player Debugger is at https://www.howtogeek.com/438141/how-to-play-adobe-flash-swf-files-outside-your-web-browser/ – install the one relevant to your Operating System.

Once the Flash Player Debugger is installed per the instructions in that article, launch the Flash Player Debugger and go to “File -> Open Location”. This is where you type in the URL to a .swf file. Do not download the .swf file to run from your hard drive, that will not work, you must use “Open Location” and put in one of the URLs below! Here are the ones for HeroMachine so you can just copy and paste:

For fun, here are the URLs for some of the hardly-ever-used versions:

CAVEATS: The “Export as an image” function in HM3 will NOT work. Saving as a text file will. 

I think that’s pretty much it. Let me know if you run into issues with this, though honestly, there’s not a lot I can do since I can’t edit the source files any more and I can’t control what Adobe does with their players.

Posted in HeroMachine 3, Meta, News & Updates, Tips & Tricks | 39 Comments

“It Was Me, Barry! I Zoomed Your Canvas!”

With apologies to Reverse Flash, and with thanks to Ian Thomas Healy (check out his super-hero novels!) for poking me, I’ve just released a new “Zoom” feature for HeroMachine 3. I’ve long been frustrated on how hard it can be to get a close-up view of a particular part of an illustration to fine-tune it. Now you can:

  • Ctrl + scroll wheel — zoom in/out, centered on cursor position
  • Trackpad pinch — smooth zoom in/out
  • Right-click canvas — context menu with Zoom In, Zoom Out, and Reset options
  • Drag empty canvas while zoomed — pan around the artwork
  • Zoom indicator pill (bottom-right) — shows current zoom %, click to reset to 100%
  • Touch pinch — two-finger pinch to zoom on touch devices (when no item selected)

Enjoy, and let me know what you think of the new feature!

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“A beard is a gift you give your face.” And also a gift I give to you.

I’ve just released a set of 34 new Facial Hair – Sketched items for your character creation needs. I hope you like them! They’re in the same sort of antique illustration / printed style as the last set, I’m curious what y’all think about this, if it fits with the other items, etc. Anyway, enjoy!

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MORE new items?!

To celebrate the launch of HeroMachine 3 Phoenix Edition, which went way better than I even hoped it would, I’m launching another set of new items. They’re in a classic old-time lineart style that I wasn’t sure would work but I think they’re pretty cool. Give some of the planets a try, changing the lineart color in particular, it gives some wild effects. Let me know what you think of this approach.

Background Cityscapes

First up are some background items to help set the stage. The new wider viewport makes for a good way to test these mostly long and narrow items. And of course a whole new set, Companions Farm Animals, because why not!

Random Stuff I thought Looked Cool

We had a couple of skulls but the lineart style on these gives them a whole new dimension. Bows and crowns have also been shortchanged so I put in a couple of those.

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The New Hotness

Just a heads-up that while I’ll be out of town for the next two days I won’t be posting or responding much, but I’ve updated the HeroMachine 3 page with information about the Phoenix Edition, check it out if you get a chance. And thanks for being here!

Posted in HeroMachine 3, Meta | 3 Comments

HeroMachine 3 Preferences

The Flash version didn’t allow you to customize the interface in any meaningful way, but the new version will:

Here’s a list of all the preferences you can set to tailor your HM3 experience how you like:

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