April 10, 2023 In case you missed the last update, here’s the Heroes Official Developer Update #2! This is the first update since we launched our latest pre-alpha build to the public! We've received a fantastic response from the community. Thank you to everyone who participated; we couldn't do this without you! We've had nearly 50 participants play the latest build with very positive feedback, but only 11 Heroes were able to slay Apollyon and claim his medallion. And we have two new top Heroes! Check out the leaderboard: Champions

March 1, 2023 In case you missed the last update, here's the Heroes Official Developer Update #1! Hello Heroes! We are excited to bring you the second official developer update. This update will cover the team's progress over the last month. Let's dive in! What are we building towards? Before we get into the update we wanted to share what we are building towards and what you can expect in the coming weeks and months. Next pre-alpha launch to Heroes community

The Heroes NFTs launched in February 2022 by Deployer. Inspired by Loot, Heroes provide on-chain traits and stats for anyone to use to build new and engaging experiences with. The Hero art is CC0, stored on IPFS, and referenced directly from the Heroes smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. 3,333 Heroes were summoned. There are further plans to store the Hero art directly on the Ethereum blockchain instead of IPFS. The Heroes launch was a stealth mint which was promoted only by one pseudonymous Twitter account run by a Wizard named Merlin the Blue. Merlin spoke of a prophecy that told of an abhorrent evil about to be unleashed on Earth. The Heroes were humankinds only hope. Website: https://www.heroes.fun OpenSea: https://opensea.io/collection/the-heroes-nft-collection Twitter: https://twitter.com/MerlinTheBlue1 The initial roadmap consisted of CC0 art and sprite sheets to be used in games and a free Ghoul mint for all Hero holders. Ghouls are the enemies of the Heroes. The Ghouls have not yet been minted.

Happy birthday Heroes! It was a year ago that 3,333 Heroes were summoned on the Ethereum blockchain. Heroes was founded by me, Deployer. As a child I got lost in the world of Zelda: A Link to the Past. In a way this game shaped my imagination. This was my inspiration for the Hero characters. I was also inspired by the Loot project. I've bet my career on NFTs and have building in the space since 2018. I launched and early NFT minting tool and marketplace and authored ERC-2309. At the time Heroes launched there was something happening in the NFT market that I didn't like (things like this often spur me to do things differently). New NFT projects were constantly overhyped and potential collectors had to grid to get whitelist spots. Overhyped projects would launch, the price would rise rapidly - sometimes to rediculous levels - and then crash and burn. I created a Twitter account for Merlin the Blue, the benevolent wizard who came to spread the word of the summoning of the Heroes. There was no Discord, no whitelists, no grinding. Only the whispers of a wizard telling of a prophecy. With Heroes I wanted to capture that joy I felt as a child while battling to save the princess from an evil wizard. In addition to that I am a believer in what has become a movement in its own right, CC0 licensed assets stored on the Ethereum blockchain that can be used as building blocks to create new worlds. Heroes were built in this spirit. The art assets are licensed under CC0 and the stats and traits of the Heroes are stored on the blockchain for anyone to use. When the project first launched this was all there was - CC0 assets and a future release of Ghouls, enemies of the Heroes. Each Hero would receive a free Ghoul. I had imagined that the community could take these assets and create games and experiences. But then I had another thought. Through talking with the community I realized that I had a vision for Heroes and if I wanted that vision to come to fruition then it would fall on me to build it, not the community. It was then that I pulled together a small team and we began to talk with various game studios about a partnership to help build out the vision I had for Heroes. During this time we also launched the Heroes marketplace and the Heart token, the premium in-game currency used in the marketplace. I also discovered Crypts and Caverns. The core Heroes team had been discussing building a single player dungeon game prior to building a multiplayer experience and we couldn't ignore the synergy between Heroes and Crypts and Caverns. C&C are a set of 9000 NFTs that store dungeon maps on chain for anyone to use. I decided that we would use C&C and create our own dungeons in the Hero universe. From there you'd be able to play your Hero in your dungeon, slay enemies, find treasure and earn resources to craft items. The Hero artist created several tilesets for the various dungeon environments found in C&C and we added a special environment for the Heroes universe, the Ghoul underworld. The founder of C&C collaborated with me on the smart contract and friend of the Heroes team collaborated with me the write the code that would generate C&C dungeon configurations into static images for the Hero universe. You can read more about this here. I then turned these into playable games levels that will be playable in the upcoming Merlin's Dungeons game and our weekly Dungeon events! Read more about our latest progress here. Our discussions with the game studios had fizzled out. We had found a potential partner and we were planning game mechanics and timelines and then came the bear market. Raising additional funds to pay a studio now became much harder and giving away a large portion of company equity didn't sound appealing either. We came to the conclusion that we could build a fun and engaging experience on our own. Besides I've found that the longer you can bootstrap and stay scrappy the better. It's always served me well.

Feb 1, 2023 Hello Heroes! This is the first official developer update from the Heroes team. While we have had informal updates since the beginning of the project we've decided it would be more beneficial to deliver official updates on a regular basis. We are still determining the best interval for official updates. We are excited to share our progress on the Dungeon game which we are now officially calling Merlin's Dungeons! We had an amazing pre-alpha launch with the community and got really valuable feedback. Everyone who participated earned Merlin's Medallion - our first in-game item minted on Arbitrum! The medallion will come in handy later on ;) The medallion was minted directly to the player's wallet without any transaction needed! This is how all blockchain functionality will function within Merlin's Dungeons. You'll connect your wallet once and no transactions will be required after that. All transactions are faciliated on your behalf. <img style="width: 100%; max-width: 250px" src="https://i.imgur.com/YjXKGwA.png" /> <p style="font-size: 14px; margin: 0">Merlin's Medallion</p> Merlin's Dungeons Progress

Heroes are a set of 3,333 character NFTs stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Their stats were generated as they were minted and are stored on the blockchain thus enabling anyone to build on top of the Heroes. Heroes isn't the first project to add to the library of on-chain assets that can be used for open world building. Another such project is called Crypts and Caverns, described as another "generative, on-chain, Lootverse ‘lego’." These are set of 9,000 generative dungeon maps stored on the Etheruem blockchain which include a matrix configuration representing floors, walls, doors, and points of interest. The Heroes team repurposed the Crypts and Caverns NFTs for the Hero universe, created custom tile sets, generated images from base configurations, and programatically turned these simple configurations into playable Unity game levels in the Merlin's Dungeons game. Base configuration example which is stored on chain: ['X', 'X', 'X', 'X', 'X'], ['X', ' ', ' ', 'X', ' '], ['X', ' ', 'X', 'd', ' '], ['X', 'd', ' ', ' ', 'X'],